Alicia Volk
Assistant Professor
Modern Japanese Art

Art History & Archaeology
4210 Art/Sociology Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1335
(301) 405-1482
volk@umd.edu

Professor Volk's research speciality is modern and contemporary Japanese art across a range of media, including painting, prints, photography and mixed media. After completing her degree at Yale she has continued to pursue a variety of research projects, first as a Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, where she was also affiliated with the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. She then received a Getty Fellowship to work on her book  In Pursuit of Universalism--Japanese Modernism 1910-1935. She also has a strong interest in museum collaboration and curating. Her work in this area includes 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. During the 2007-8 school year she is offering a course called "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.  Another seminar, "Japonisme," examines the Japonisme  phenomenon from Western as well as Japanese perspectives, and its relation to parallel theories of primitivism and Orientalism. Other course topics include printmaking; the Japanese interior (with an emphasis on shohekiga, screens and sliding door panels); and the democratization of art in twentieth-century Japan. 

Recently Professor Volk has been conducting research travel in Japan as well as in Europe, where she has had the opportunity to study Japonisme in the fine and decorative arts. She is currently writing articles on early twentieth-century artists' groups in Japan (for Positions)  and on modern and contemporary Japanese folding screens (for an Art Institute of Chicago exhibition catalog). She has also begun work on a new book tentatively titled Democratizing Japanese Art, 1945-60, which will examine the rebuilding and restructuring of the Japanese art world in the context of defeat and occupation. For this project she will use archival materials in the University of Maryland's Prange Collection, for which she was awarded a  Japan Research Award by the Center for Historical Studies in 2006. In addition to writing on Japanese photography and contemporary artists, her publications include 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 Tetsugoro and Taisho-period Creative Prints: When the Japanese Print Became Avant-garde" (Impressions no. 26, 2004); and "Katsura Yuki and the Japanese Avant-garde" (Woman's Art Journal 24, no. 2, 2003).