Speakers

Ryō Akama specializes in Japanese theater, ukiyo-e, and the study of digital archives. At Ritsumeikan University, where he is Professor in the College of Letters Japanese Literature Program, he leads the ARC Database project and is active in promoting digital humanities approaches to the study and conservation of Edo-period illustrated books. His work internationally with various collections has helped create new possibilities for research.

Alessandro Bianchi is the manager of the Bodleian Japanese Library and curator of the Bodleian collection of Japanese rare books and manuscripts. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, he worked at the British Library, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and taught at Haverford College. Alessandro is also a Visiting Researcher (2022/23) at the Art Research Center of Ritsumeikan University.

Julie Nelson Davis is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in the arts and material culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan, with a focus on prints, paintings, and illustrated books. Author of Picturing the Floating World: Ukiyo-e in Context (Hawaii, 2021), she is working on a new project about imitation, homage, and fabrication in ukiyo-e painting as well as a second project on artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and illustrated books.

Michael Emmerich is Professor of Japanese Literature at UCLA. His book The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (Columbia, 2013) examines the role that translations of Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) have played in creating images of the tale. He is currently working on a project that explores the concept of “translation” as it relates to Japan and to various forms of the Japanese language.

Amaury A. GARCÍA RODRÍGUEZ, Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from El Colegio de México (2007), has taught courses and given talks on Japanese Art History at several universities from Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Spain, Perú, Guatemala, United States, Colombia, and Japan. His research topics center on the historiography of Japanese Art, and its material and visual culture, as well as popular culture and prints production during the early modern period, in particular the relationships between power structures and the erotic prints and books during the Edo period. He has also been researching trade and collecting of Asian art in Latin America. 

Andrew Gerstle, Professor Emeritus of SOAS University of London, has led international research projects in Australia and the UK, resulting in many edited/joint publications. He is author of Chikamatsu: Five Late Plays (2001), the co-author of Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage 1780-1830 (2005) and Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art (2013). He is currently in discussion with British Museum colleagues on the project, ‘The Role of Art Salons in 18th-19th Century Japan’.

Jeannie Kenmotsu is the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art at the Portland Art Museum. Kenmotsu has organized exhibitions including Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, 1956–1965: Japan’s Women Printmakers and Objects of Contact: Encounters between Japan and the West (both 2020-21), and is a specialist in Japanese art of the Edo period. She holds a doctorate in art history from Penn and is a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. 

Kyoko Kinoshita has been serving as a curator of Japanese Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 2000, and a professor of Japanese Art History at Tama Art University since 2013. She co-organised exhibitions connecting Japan and the United States, such as GENJI: A Japanese Classic Illuminated (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019).

Peter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese from the University of Cambridge. Most of his work has been on the cultural history of Japan, but since 2005 he has also been working on Korea and Vietnam and in 2018 completed a major study of the impact of Chinese textual culture on East Asia. Also in 2018 he published in Japanese a study of the export of Japanese books to Europe up to the 19th century. Currently he is editor in chief of the journal East Asian Publishing and Society. Kornicki is the author of The Book in Japan: a Cultural History (1998) and the editor of The History of the Book in East Asia (2013) and has just completed a study of a collection of Japanese manuscripts in the National Museum of Denmark.

Ryoko Matsuba is a specialist on Edo period printed culture. She is Lecturer in Japanese Digital Arts and Humanities at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, University of East Anglia. She received her Ph.D. from Ritsumeikan University (2008). She is a curator of the Citi Exhibition Manga at the British Museum and co-author of the exhibition catalogue.

Laura Nüffer is an assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Colby College whose work focuses on the use of animal characters and the adaptation of folkloric elements in the literature of medieval and early modern Japan. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Shigeru Oikawa is Emeritus Professor at Japan Women’s University (Nihon Joshi Daigaku) in Tokyo. He has written extensively on the artist Kawanabe Kyōsai and about the engagement of nineteenth-century European artists with Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), including Saigo no ukiyo-eshi, Kawanabe Kyōsai (1998) and contributions to Japanese Prints: The Collection of Vincent Van Gogh (2018).

Amaury A. García Rodríguez has taught courses and given lectures on Japanese Art History at universities in Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Spain, Japan, and the United States. His research topics center on Japanese popular-urban culture and its visual production, in particular the relationships between power structures and the production of erotic prints and books during the Edo period.

Ann Sherif is Professor of Japanese at Oberlin College. Her publications include Japan’s Cold War: Literature, Media, and the Law (Columbia University Press). Sherif’s current book project focuses on independent and regional publishers and literature in Japan, 1917-1990, with a particular focus on the print and visual cultures of Hiroshima.

Satoko Shimazaki is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Theater at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (Columbia University Press, 2016). She has a joint appointment as Associate Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Ellis Tinios is a Research Associate of the Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University and Special Assistant to the Japanese Section at the British Museum. He is author of Understanding Japanese woodblock-printed illustrated books with Prof Suzuki Jun (Brill, 2013) and Japanese Prints: Ukiyo-e in Edo, 1700-1900 (British Museum Press, reprint 2014). 

Arthur Tress is a renowned contemporary art photographer who uses photography to tell stories. He first gained recognition with his hauntingly beautiful book of images, Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector (1972), which challenged the photographic ethos of its time. His photographs call to mind aspects of surrealism and magical realism, juxtaposing elements of real life and staged fantasy. His work is in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House, Centre Georges Pompidou, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Art Institute of Chicago. Among his other books are Shadow: A Novel in Photographs, Theatre of the Mind, Reeves, and Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000.