Alicia Volk

Alicia Volk's scholarship addresses a range of mediums and critical issues in Japanese art from the nineteenth century to the present, including its relationship to the arts of Europe, the United States, and Asia. Deeply committed to the creation of more expansive and inclusive art histories, in her fundamentally transnational research Professor Volk analyzes Japanese art on its own terms and challenges the assumptions and biases undergirding an art historical canon that places it at the margins.

Her award-winning book In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2010) places early twentieth-century Japanese painting in the framework of global modernism; it received the inaugural Phillips Book Prize of the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art. An exhibition and catalog Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (Milwaukee Art Museum and University of Washington Press, 2005) tells the story of the transformation of the print as a medium of cultural identity and exchange in the context of Japan's post-World War II rehabilitation and reentry into the world community of nations. Japan and Paris: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the Modern Era (Honolulu Academy of Arts and University of Washington Press, 2004), co-authored with Christine Guth and Emiko Yamanashi, examines late 19th century and early 20th century Japanese collections of modern European art and the modern Japanese painting practices that flourished in this transnational moment of artistic cross-fertilization.

Professor Volk’s latest book, In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025) brings a novel critical perspective concerning empire to the study of Japanese art under the American occupation of Japan (1945-1952). Through the analysis of charismatic artworks in a range of mediums and political commitments, the book shows how the forgotten art of a country in the shadows of American empire variously accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II.

Other publications have treated such mediums as Japanese prints, screens (byôbu), sculpture, and illustrated books, and such topics as the avant-garde, race and gender, artistic activism, the art world, the geopolitical dimensions of Japanese self-representations at world's fairs, and contemporary art.

Professor Volk received her PhD in Japanese art history from Yale University. As a Fulbright Research Scholar she was affiliated with Waseda University in Tokyo. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from such organizations as the J. Paul Getty Foundation, Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, Blakemore Foundation, Japan Foundation, Ishibashi Foundation, Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, Fulbright Program of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, Suntory Foundation, Center for Historical Studies at the University of Maryland, Graduate Research Board of the University of Maryland, Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and College Art Association.

Students who wish to apply for the graduate program in Japanese art history are strongly advised to submit results from the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) with their applications.