Renée Ater, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Ph.D. University of Maryland
American Art

Anthony Colantuono, Associate Professor and Associate Chair
Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins University
Seventeenth-Century Italian, French, and Spanish Art

Meredith J. Gill, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. Princeton University
Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italian Renaissance Art

June Hargrove, Professor
Ph.D. New York University
Nineteenth-Century European Painting and Sculpture

Shannen Hill, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
African Art

Jason Kuo, Professor
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Chinese Art

Steven A. Mansbach, Professor
Ph.D. Cornell University
Twentieth-Century Art

William L. Pressly, Professor
Ph.D. New York University
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Art

Joshua A. Shannon, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Contemporary Art History & Theory

Yui Suzuki, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles
Japanese Art

Marjorie S. Venit, Professor and Chair and Scheduling Officer
Ph.D. New York University
Ancient Mediterranean Art History & Archaeology

Alicia Volk, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Yale University
Japanese Art

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Professor
Ph.D. Harvard University
Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Art

Distinguished Affiliates

Franklin Kelly
Ph.D. University of Delaware
American Art

Richard Spear
Ph.D. Princeton University
Italian Baroque Art

Emeriti and Adjunct Faculty

Yui Suzuki
Japanese Art

Office: 4212 Art-Sociology Building

Email: ysuzuki@umd.edu

Telephone: 301-405-1488

Yui Suzuki is a historian of premodern Japanese Art whose research examines issues of Japanese religiosity and its manifestations in visual/material culture. She is particularly interested in Buddhist icons, their production, dissemination, and ritual functions. Her most recent publication, “ Temple as Museum, Buddha as Art: Horyuji's Kudara Kannon and its Great Treasure Repository,” RES , vol. 52 (2007), explored the contested identity of Buddhist artifacts exhibited in temple treasure museums.

In both her research and her teaching, Professor Suzuki emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Japanese Buddhist visual culture. Some of the themes explored in both her work and courses include topics on sacred space, pilgrimage, ritual, iconography, and the multivalent nature of sacred objects. She is currently completing her book, Th e Standing Icon: The Rise of Medicine Buddha Worship in Heian Japan (794-1185) which explores the primacy of icons in disseminating the devotional cult of the Medicine Buddha.

Professor Suzuki is also a participating fellow for the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University. The initiative is a three-year collaborative project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation which brings together scholars from various disciplines to explore the subject of religion and the politics of vision in multiple religious traditions and times.