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.

