Kristopher W. Kersey researches the history and theory of art, with a primary focus on Japanese art, design, and aesthetics. His first book Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity (Penn State, 2024) models a new paradigm for the study of art history, one that moves beyond reductive West/rest and modern/pre-modern frameworks. The book was awarded the Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research (Medieval Academy of America), was the runner-up for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize, and a finalist for the Modern Japan History Association Book Prize. Recently he completed the draft of a second monograph, “Art as Metabolism,” which proposes a new theoretical framework for addressing creativity, ecocriticism, and preservation. He is currently at work on two additional book projects. The first, “How Art Lives,” explores biological metaphors in the history of art with a focus on trans-cultural contexts; the second, “The Lens of Language and the Diversity of Sight,” interrogates image theory, linguistic imperialism, and the ways in which language inflects trans-cultural aesthetic experiences. Shorter essays address an array of topics: media theory, Japan’s encounter with Europe ca. 1600 CE, the trope of impermanence, historiography, death and Buddhist manuscript culture, history of the book, and the archival anxieties of the Anthropocene.
In summer semester 2025, he was Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Professor of Japanese Art History at Universität Heidelberg (Germany). For academic year 2025-2026 he is in residence as a fellow with the Centre for Advanced Study “inherit. heritage in transformation” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2023–24, he held the William Andrews Clark Professorship at the Clark Memorial Library, where he organized the core program Open Edo: Diverse, Ecological, and Global Perspectives on Japanese Art, 1603–1868. The program entailed three conferences, which respectively addressed intercultural exchange in early modern Japan, environmental and eco-critical art history, and Ryukyuan and Ainu art. An edited volume is forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press.
Major past awards include a Getty Scholar fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, a postdoctoral fellowship from the European Research Council (with Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art at the University of Bern), an Anne van Biema Fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art (Washington, DC), and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, DC).
He is a member of the First-Generation Faculty Initiative and is on the advisory boards for the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Center for 17th-and-18th-Century Studies, and the Center for Buddhist Studies. He is also an affiliated faculty member with Global Antiquity.
Prospective Graduate Students:
I am open to advising innovative and dynamic doctoral students working in all periods (ancient to contemporary) of Japanese art history, very broadly conceived. If interested in the program, feel free to email me directly.
Education
Ph.D. History of Art, University of California, Berkeley
A.B. Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Books
-
- Facing Images
- Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity
- Penn State University Press, 2024
Courses
Seminars
- Design in Modern Japan (graduate)
- Alterity, Media, and Ecology in Japanese Art, 1603–1868 (graduate)
- Modern Graphic Japan: Print and Photography, 1910–1945 (graduate)
- Time and Narrative (graduate)
- Fragmentation, Reuse, and Decay in the Arts of Japan, 1100–1650 (graduate, CMRS research seminar)
- Tea and Japan: Art, Environment, and Material Culture (Fiat Lux First-Year Seminar)
- Emaki: The Story and the Scroll in the Arts of Japan (undergraduate)
- Art Historical Theories and Methodologies (undergraduate)
Recurring Lectures
- Modern and Contemporary Art in Japan, ca. 1850–present
- Graphic Arts of Japan
- The Arts of Japan (GE)
Recent Publications
- “Codex Aesthetics in Japan and the Phenomenology of Art History,” Source: Notes in the History of Art [forthcoming]
- “Materiality, Visuality, and Phenomenology: Strategies of Reproduction in Modern Japanese Books,” Japan Review 41 (Summer 2026). [forthcoming]
- “Binding Rhythms: Materiality, Poetics, and Periodicity in Medieval Japanese Books,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 120, no. 1 (March 2026): 108–115.
- “Specimens in Hand: Natural History and tekagami in Early Modern Japan,” Representations (Summer 2025) 171 (1): 65–95.
- Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity. Penn State University Press, 2024. Awards: Winner, Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research (Medieval Academy of America); Runner-up, Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize; Finalist, Modern Japan History Association Book Prize
- “The ‘Renaissance,’ the Revenant: A Hauntology of Art History,” in Stephen Campbell and Stephanie Porras, eds., The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art. London: Routledge, 2024.
- “The Early Modern Fold: Pleated Media in Japan’s Encounter with Europe,” in Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period, edited by Bronwen Wilson and Angela Vanhaelen, 25–57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022.
- “Impermanence, Futurity, and Loss in Twelfth-Century Japan,” in Destroyed – Disappeared – Lost – Never Were, edited by Beate Fricke and Aden Kumler, 87–99. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022.
- “The Classical as Critique in Japanese Art History.” In 造形のポエティカ：日本美術史を巡る新たな地平 The Poetics of Form: New Horizons in Japanese Art History, 1005–1027. Tokyo: Seikansha, 2021.
- “The Afterlife of the Western Canon: Archive and Eschatology in Contemporary Japan.” The Art Bulletin 102, no. 4 (December 2020): 121–145.
- “The Mediation of Death and the Temporality of the Scroll (Japan, c.1200 CE).” In The Continuous Page: Scrolls and Scrolling from Papyrus to Hypertext, edited by Jack Hartnell, 123–139. London: Courtauld Books Online, 2020.
- “Dynamism, Liquidity, and Crystallization in the Discourse of Japanese Art History.” In Einfluss, Strömung, Quelle: Aquatische Metaphern der Kunstgeschichte, edited by Ulrich Pfisterer and Christine Tauber, 287–310. Image 138. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018.
