Yurika Wakamatsu, Ph.D. 2016

Wakamatsu pursues cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research and teaching in East Asian art history by engaging with the disciplines of art history, literature, history, and gender studies. In particular, her work focuses on the intersections of gender and premodernity in nineteenth-century Japanese art. She is currently preparing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Painting in Between: Gender and Modernity in the Japanese Literati Art of Okuhara Seiko (1837–1913), which investigates the aesthetic and conceptual transformations of literati art during the turbulent period of Japan’s modernization. Examining the complex interactions between changing perceptions of Sinitic culture and women’s place therein, her study seeks to reconceptualize the relationship between gender and literati art. Simultaneously, she is working on a project that examines the feminization of art and modern conceptions of Japanese womanhood; an earlier version of this essay was awarded the 2015 Chino Kaori Memorial Essay Prize from the Japan Art History Forum.