Alicia Volk
Japanese Art
Office: 4210 Art-Sociology Building
Email: volk@umd.edu
Telephone:
(301) 405-1482
Alicia Volk's research spans a range of mediums and critical issues in modern and contemporary Japanese art from the nineteenth century to the present. Her In Pursuit of Universalism—Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2009) places early twentieth-century Japanese painting in the framework of global modernism. This book was awarded the inaugural Phillips Book Prize of the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art. She is now working on a manuscript titled Democratizing Japanese Art 1945-1960, in which she examines the rebuilding and restructuring of the Japanese art world in the context of defeat and occupation following World War II. For this project Professor Volk was awarded a Japan Research Award in 2006 by the Center for Historical Studies at the University of Maryland; during the 2009-2010 academic year she is working on it full-time as a Fulbright Research Scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo. She also has a strong interest in museum collaboration and curating. Her activities in this area include the exhibition Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement, which she curated for the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2005.
At the undergraduate level Professor Volk teaches introductory courses in Asian visual cultures from the earliest times to the present. Her graduate seminars generally focus on topics in early modern and modern Japanese art. Frequently course topics coincide with major exhibitions held at nearby museums in the Washington, DC and Baltimore area. Some offerings include Japan and the West in Japanese Art which investigates the history of cultural and artistic exchanges between Japan and Euroamerica and considers theoretical approaches to influence, intertextuality, reception, and difference. Japonisme examines the Japonisme phenomenon from European and American as well as Japanese perspectives, and in relation to parallel theories of primitivism and Orientalism. Other recent courses are Japanese Prints; The Visual Cultures of Edo Japan; From Edo to Meiji: Rethinking the 19th Century in Japanese Visual Culture; Modern Art in Japan; and Japanese Art since 1945 .
In addition to writing on Japanese photography and contemporary art, Professor Volk's recent and forthcoming publications include In Pursuit of Universalism—Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art (University of California, 2009); “Projections: Modern and Contemporary Byôbu ” in Janice Katz, ed., Beyond Golden Clouds: Japanese Screens from the Art Institute of Chicago and the St. Louis Art Museum (Yale University, 2009); Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (University of Washington, 2005); Japan and Paris: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the Modern Era (co-authored with Christine Guth and Yamanashi Emiko, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2004); “Yorozu Tetsugorô and Taishô-period Creative Prints: When the Japanese Print Became Avant-garde” (Impressions no. 26, 2004); “Katsura Yuki and the Japanese Avant-garde” (Woman's Art Journal 24, no. 2, 2003); and “Authority, Autonomy and the Early Taishô ‘Avant-garde'” (forthcoming).
Professor Volk received her PhD in Japanese art history from Yale University in 2005 and joined the University of Maryland faculty in 2006. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from such organizations as the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, the Blakemore Foundation , and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.