Julie Nelson Davis, Senior Consulting Curator, is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Professor Davis received her BA from Reed College, studied in Japan as a Monbushō fellow at the Osaka University of Foreign Languages and at Gakushūin University, and completed her PhD at the University of Washington. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them, the Abe Yoshishige Fellowship at Gakushūin University, the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellowship, and the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women’s 25th Anniversary Award for Excellence in Advising. Her research focuses on ukiyo-e and the arts of the Tokugawa period. Dr. Davis’s most recent books include Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (2007), Partners in Print: Artistic Collaboration and the Ukiyo-e Market (2015) and Ukiyo-e in Context (forthcoming).
Alessandro Bianchi, Project Researcher and Cataloguer, has served as a postdoctoral museum research fellow at the Freer and Sackler Galleries since spring 2015. He received a doctorate degree from the University of Cambridge (2015) as well as master and bachelor degrees in Languages and Civilizations of East Asia (Japanese) from the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia in his native Italy. Dr. Bianchi has studied extensively in Japan and as a librarian has catalogued several collections of Tokugawa-period printed books and manuscripts.
Amy Reigle Newland, Project Editor, is an independent art historian and specialist editor based in Australia. Working as editor and writer in the field of Japanese woodblock prints, Dr. Newland’s recent publications include Printed to Perfection: Twentieth-century Japanese Prints from the Robert O. Muller Collection (2004); The Beauty of Silence: Japanese Nō and Nature Prints by Tsukioka Kōgyo 1869–1927 (2010); Yoshitoshi: Masterpieces from the Ed Fries Collection (2011); Kuniyoshi: Japanese Master of Imagined Worlds (2013); Takehisa Yumeji (2015); and Waves of Renewal: Modern Japanese Prints 1900 to 1960 (2016). She received her PhD from the University of Auckland.
Sayumi Takahashi Harb, Project Translator, is an independent scholar with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, with a specialization in Women’s Studies. Her areas of focus and interest include gender studies, premodern Japanese poetics and literati culture, multimedia and word/image studies, history of the book, materiality, modern Japanese literature, Japanese film, and visual culture in transnational contexts, as well as Asian-American literature.
Matt Alt has been working as a Japanese translator and writer since the early 1990s. For four of those years he was employed as a technical translator for the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He currently lives in Tokyo, where he cofounded AltJapan Co., Ltd., a company that specializes in the localization of video games, manga, anime, and other Japanese entertainment for foreign markets. He is the coauthor of numerous books about Japan, including Yokai Attack! The Japanese Monster Survival Guide and Yurei Attack! The Japanese Ghost Survival Guide.
Asano Shūgō is a graduate of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. He has worked as a curator and curatorial head at the Chiba City Museum of Art. He has been the director of the Yamato Bunkakan in Nara from 2008, and from 2013 he has also been the director of the Abeno Harukas Art Museum in Osaka. Since 2014 he has served as the Chairperson of the Board of the International Ukiyo-e Society. His main publications as author and editor include Hishikawa Moronobu to ukiyo-e no reimei (2008), Ukiyo-e wa kataru (2010), Bessatsu Taiyō Hokusai ketteiban (2010), Bessatsu Taiyō Utamaro ketteiban (2016), and Ukiyo-e saiken (2017). His specialist area is the history of pre-modern art (painting), with a focus on printed illustrated books and ukiyo-e.
Giovanni Bottero is a PhD candidate in Japanese art history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A native of Rome, he earned a BA in Japanese studies from Rome’s “La Sapienza” University in 2007 with a thesis on traditional Japanese tattooing. After graduation he moved to Holland, where he pursued an MA in Japanese studies at Leiden University. As part of the master's program he lived in Japan for one year, where he studied at Sophia University and Gakushūin University in Tokyo. In 2009 he began his PhD studies. In Madison he collaborated with the Chazen Museum of Art on several projects, including curating displays of Satsuma ceramics and an Edo period suit of armor, and he has catalogued the museum’s collection of netsuke carvings.
William Fleming is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard University and has spent time as a visiting researcher at Kyoto University, Waseda University, and the National Institute of Japanese Literature in Tokyo. He has also taught in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Theater Studies Program at Yale University. His articles have appeared in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Sino-Japanese Studies, and he is the co-author of Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace (2015). He is currently completing a book manuscript on the reception of Chinese fiction in early modern Japan.
Matthi Forrer is an art historian specializing in Japanese art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially prints, illustrated books, paintings, and drawings. Dr. Forrer studied Japanese language and literature at the University of Leiden and art of East Asia at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD from Leiden University in 1985. He has published several monographs on Hokusai, including Hokusai: Prints and Drawings (Munich: Prestel, 1991), Hokusai: Bridging East and West (Toky Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1998), and Hokusai: Mountains and Water, Flowers and Birds (New York: Prestel, 2004), and on various related themes, such as kyōka surimono, kyōkabon, and Eirakuya Tōshirō, the publisher of numerous books designed by Hokusai.
Sherry D. Fowler is Professor of Art History at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. She received her PhD in Japanese art history from UCLA. Her scholarly interests range from ninth-century Buddhist sculpture and medieval bronze bells to nineteenth-century Japanese prints. Her publications include Murōji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple (2005) and Accounts and Images of Six Kannon in Japan (forthcoming), and her passion for printed material is evident in the article “Views of Japanese Temples and Shrines from Near and Far: Precinct Prints of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” in Artibus Asiae (2008) and the essay “Kannon Imagery in the Life of the Seventeenth-Century Manual Butsuzō zui” in Moving Signs and Shifting Discourses: Text Image Relations in East Asian Art (forthcoming). Her current research focus is on the relationship between Japanese prints and pilgrimage practices.
Hinohara Kenji is chief curator at the Ōta Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo. He completed his PhD at Tokyo’s Keio University. He has organized a number of exhibitions at the Ōta Memorial Museum of Art, including Utagawa Kuniyoshi (2011), Utagawa Yoshitsuya (2011), Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (2012), Hokusai to Kyōsai: kisō no manga (2013), and Mizuno Toshikata (2016). His publications include Yōkoso ukiyo-e no sekai e (2015), Sensō to ukiyo-e (2016) and Utagawa Kunisada korezo Edo no iki (2016).
Ishigamai Aki received her BA (2002) and PhD (2008) from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Since 2015 she has been a specially appointed Assistant Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. Her research focuses on early modern cultural history, and her principal publications include Henteko na shunga (2016) and Nihon no shunga ehon kenkyū (2015). Her databases include Nishikawa Sukenobu sakuhin sōgō deetabeesu (http://sukenobu.net/). She also holds regular seminars for the study of Shōtoku hinagata, a kimono pattern book by Sukenobu, to examine patterns, designs, weaves, and dyeing methods.
Itō Shiori is Associate Professor at Shobi University (Shobi Gakuen Daigaku) in Saitama. She received her PhD in Literature from Tokyo University. In her role as curator at the Chiba City Museum of Art, she assisted with special exhibitions on the Edo-period artists Soga Shōhaku, Nagasawa Rosetsu, Itō Jakuchū, Nakamura Hōchū, and others. Her research areas include Chinese and Western styles in early modern Japanese art. Her publications include Kōrin wo shitau—Nakamura Hōchū (exh. cat. Chiba City Museum of Art; 2014) and the articles on Japanese illustrated books “Mori Ransai ni tsuite—shijisha to no kakawari wo chūshin ni—,” Bijutsushi 156 (2004), and “Nakamura Hōchū Kōrin gafu wo meguru shomondai,”Bijutsu fōramu 21, vol. 29 (2012).
Iwakiri Yuriko is an independent scholar of Japanese woodblock prints. She has worked as a curator at the Riccar Art Museum, Tokyo, and Hiraki Ukiyo-e Museum, Yokohama. In 2006 she won the Uchiyama Memorial Prize of the International Ukiyo-e Society. Her most recent publications include Edo no ehon: gazō to tekisuto no ayanaseru sekai / Ehon in the Edo Period: A Splendid World of Interwoven Image and Text (co-author, 2010), Kuniyoshi (2013), Yoshitoshi (2014), and Kuniyoshi, le démon de l'estampe (2015).
Kaguraoka Yōko received her PhD in literature from Kansai University in 2001, and she is currently a professor in the Department of Law and Letters at Ehime University. Her publications include Kabuki bunka no kyōju to tenkai—kankyaku to gekijo no naigai— (2002) and “Sandaime Utaemon to Dōtonbori,” Kabuki: kenkyū to hihyō 52 (2014).
Kaneko Takaaki is Associate Professor at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, where he is affiliated with the Art Research Center (ARC). After receiving his MA in literature from Ritsumeikan University in 2001, he worked on the digitization project of Japanese rare books at ARC, and in 2010 received his PhD in literature from Ritsumeikan University. His publication Kinsei shuppan no hangi kenkyū (2013) demonstrates his recent research interest in the digital archiving of printing blocks and its use for Japanese bibliographical studies and research into the history of Japanese publishing from the seventeenth century onwards.
Kitagawa Hiroko is a specialist in pre-modern Japanese culture, including literature, theater, and ukiyo-e. She received a BA degree from Osaka Women’s University, completed a MA degree in literature at the same university, and received her doctorate from the Osaka Prefecture University (in language and cultural studies). She has worked as a researcher at the Hankyū Culture Foundation, Ikeda Bunko Library, and as a senior researcher at the Abeno Harukas Art Museum in Osaka. Her publications include Kamigata kabuki to ukiyo-e (2011) and in an editorial role, Kamigata yakusha-e shūsei (vols. 1–5, 1997–2005).
Edward Koren has long been associated with the New Yorker magazine, where he has published numerous covers, illustrations, and more than a thousand cartoons. He has also contributed to several other magazines (Newsweek, Time, GQ, Esquire, Vogue) and has illustrated books by Delia Ephron, Peter Mayle, George Plimpton, and Roger Berkowitz and Jane Doerfer. Koren’s cartoons, drawings, and prints have been widely exhibited across the United States and Europe. A major retrospective of his work was shown at Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery (2010) and at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum (2011). He lives with his family in Vermont, where he was named the state’s Cartoonist Laureate in 2014.
Kurahashi Masae completed her PhD in literature at Ritsumeikan University in 2003, and she is currently a project researcher with the Kinugasa Research Organization at that institute. From April 2003 to March 2006, she was also a special (postdoctoral) researcher at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Her research focus is on Edo-period kabuki prints and the kabuki industry.Her publications include “Hachidaime Ichikawa Danjūrō no shi to Chūshingura,” Ronkyū Nihon bungaku 93 (December 2010); “Fūshiga no naka no yakusha hyōban-e,” in Fūzoku kaiga nobungaku III: shunji o utsusu firosofii / Cultural Studies of Genre Painting III: Philosophy of Capturing the Moment(co-author, 2014); and Mikan Edo kabuki nendaiki shūsei, Shintensha kenkyū sōsho 291 (co-author, 2017).
A native of Kyoto, Tamaki Maeda received her PhD from the University of Washington, and has taught at Wellesley College, the University of British Columbia, and Heidelberg University. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, including the Japan Foundation, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, and Freeman fellowships. She has published a number of articles on Sino-Japanese interchanges in English, Japanese, and Chinese, and her monograph on the image of Kusunoki Masashige from the seventeenth to twentieth century appeared in Artibus Asiae (2012). She is currently completing the book Japan’s Visual Dialogue with China, 1900s–1930s (working title) and is also collaborating with Joshua Fogel on an anthology project, Modern Japanese Art and China, funded by the Ishibashi Foundation.
Mutō Junko received her PhD in literature from Gakushuin University, Tokyo. Her areas of specialization are pre-modern literature and culture, and she is currently a lecturer at Seisen University, Tokyo. Among her publications are Shoki ukiyo-e to kabuki (2005), and her awards include the (17th) Kokka prize (Asahi Shinbunsha/Kokkasha) and the (4th) Tokugawa prize (Tokugawa Kinen Zaidan [Tokugawa Memorial Foundation]).
Oikawa Shigeru is Emeritus Professor at Japan Women’s University (Nihon Joshi Daigaku) in Tokyo. He has written extensively on the artist Kawanabe Kyōsai and about the engagement of nineteenth-century European artists with Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e). He has written and coauthored a number of articles and books relating to these topics, including Saigo no ukiyo-eshi, Kawanabe Kyōsai (1998); “Edo Ukiyo-e Prints in European Artists’ Works” (Daruma, 2003); A Japanese Menagerie: Animal Pictures by Kawanabe Kyōsai (British Museum, 2006); Georges Bigot (exh. cat., Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2009); Efficacité de la caricature: Georges Bigot et le salon des beaux-arts à l'exposition intérieure de Kyoto en 1895, in Efficacité-Efficacy: How to do things with words and images (2011); and Le Japonisme de Hiroshige à Van Gogh (exh. cat., Pinacothèque de Paris, 2012).
Gerhard Pulverer, a medical doctor and microbiologist educated in Vienna, Austria, was a leading biomedical research scientist in Germany. He was appointed director of the Institute of Hygiene at the University of Cologne, the position he held until his retirement in 1999. Beginning in the 1970s, Dr. Pulverer and his wife, Rosemarie, focused on collecting Japanese illustrated books. They were encouraged by English art expert Jack Hillier, the American scholar Roger Keyes, and Matthi Forrer, a professor at the University of Leiden. Years later the Pulverers acquired a substantial part of the Japanese book collection assembled by Berlin art dealer Felix Tikotin. Dr. Pulverer's wish to have his renowned collection acquired by a museum where it would be conserved, researched, and exhibited was realized when the books arrived at their new permanent home, the Freer Gallery of Art.
Erin Schoneveld is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary Japanese art, literature, film, and visual culture. Dr. Schoneveld received her BA in East Asian Studies from Brown University and completed her MA and PhD in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research project on the Taishō-period art and literary journal Shirakaba (White birch; 1910–23) has received support from the Japan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation.
Keiji Shinohara was born and raised in Osaka, Japan. After ten years as an apprentice to the renowned Keiichiro Uesugi in Kyoto, he became a master printmaker and moved to the United States. Shinohara's natural abstractions are printed on rice paper with water-based inks from woodblocks in the ukiyo-e style. He has received grants from the Japan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. A visiting artist at more than a hundred venues, Shinohara’s work is in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and the Library of Congress.
Tomoko Sakomura is Associate Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Sakomura received a BA in Art History and Aesthetics from Keiō University, Tokyo, and a MA and PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, New York. Her work explores the relationships between text and image in Japanese art and design. Her publications include Poetry as Image: The Visual Culture of Waka in Sixteenth-Century Japan (2016).
Suzuki Jun is Honorary Professor of the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL), Tokyo, having served as its deputy director. Dr. Suzuki completed his PhD at the University of Kyushu in 1997. His scholarly focus is early modern Japanese literature, and he has researched collections in Japan, the United States, and Europe. He co-edited Edo no ehon gazō to tekisuto no ayanaseru sekai/Ehon in the Edo Period: A Splendid World of Interwoven Image and Text(with Asano Shūgō, 2010) and has authored or co-authored numerous articles and publications on Edo-period literary and illustrated books, includingTachibana Chikage no kenkyū (2006) and Understanding Japanese Woodblock-Printed Illustrated Books: A Short Introduction to Their History, Bibliography and Format (with Ellis Tinios, 2013). He is also acting as a special consultant to the Pulverer project.
Tashiro Kazuha received her PhD from the Japan Women's University in 2009, and from 2012 to 2015 she was the recipient of a fellowship from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS Fellows). Since 2016 she has been a Senior Researcher in Japanese literature at the Mount Fuji World Heritage Centre in Shizuoka. Her current research focuses on literature dealing with Japanese poetry (waka) in the modern period and literature relating to Mount Fuji. Her publications include Kinsei waka gasan no kenkyū (2013) and Ōtagaki Rengetsu no gasankan (Nihon shiika no shiten) (2017).
Ellis Tinios has long been engaged in the study of book and print production in early modern Japan. He received his PhD in history (ancient China) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1988. In addition, he received his M.Phil. in Chinese studies (modern China) from the University of Leeds (UK) in 1972 and a BA in history from Harvard University in 1969. His publications include Japanese Prints: Ukiyo-e in Edo (British Museum Press, 2011), Understanding Japanese Illustrated Books in collaboration with Professor Suzuki Jun (Brill, 2013), and “Japanese Illustrated Erotic Books in the Context of Commercial Publishing, 1660–1868,” published in 2013 in the Japan Review: Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Dr. Tinios has taught courses on the book in Japan at the Freer and Sackler Galleries under the auspices of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is an Honorary Lecturer in History, University of Leeds, and a Visiting Researcher, Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University.
James Ulak is Senior Curator of Japanese Art at the Freer and Sackler Galleries. After joining the Freer|Sackler staff as curator of Japanese art in 1995, he served as deputy director (2003–2010) and head of collections and research and chief curator (2002–2003). A specialist in the history of narrative painting production in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Japan, Ulak received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1994. He was a researcher at the Cleveland Museum of Art, associate curator of Asian art at the Yale University Art Gallery, and associate curator of Japanese art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has produced more than twenty exhibitions, including Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes: Edo Masters from the Price Collection (2008), Masters of Mercy: Buddha's Amazing Disciples (2012), and Kiyochika: Master of the Night (2014) at the Freer and Sackler Galleries. Ulak has also published widely on Japanese art, from medieval Japanese narrative painting and eighteenth-century “eccentric” painters to Japan’s artistic encounters with modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2010 he was inducted into the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun, an honor accorded by the Japanese government, for his outstanding contribution to the field of Japanese art.
Alicia Volk teaches Japanese art from the earliest times to the present at the University of Maryland. Professor Volk received her PhD from Yale University; her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, among others. Her scholarship focuses on Japanese art of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries in a variety of mediums and often in relation to the arts of Europe, the United States, and Asia. Her books include Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (2005); In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art (2010), winner of the inaugural Phillips Book Prize; and Democratizing Japanese Art 1945–1960 (forthcoming).
Yamamoto Yukari received a doctorate degree from the Department of Humanities at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, and she has lectured at Tama Art University, Wakō University, and Chūō University. Her area of expertise is Japanese art history, in particular, the history of pre-modern Japanese painting; her publications include Kamigata fūzokuga no kenkyū (2010) and Shunga o tabisuru (2015).
Ann Yonemura, Senior Associate Curator of Japanese Art at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College and her graduate training from Princeton University in the history of Japanese art. Since arriving at the museums, she has organized numerous exhibitions, including Ancient Japan (1992), Freer: A Taste for Japan (2006), and the major international loan exhibition Hokusai (2006). Her most recent exhibitions include Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (2012) and Hand-Held: Gerhard Pulverer’s Japanese Illustrated Books (2013) for the Sackler Gallery. In addition, Yonemura coordinated the digital photography and contributed to the research for this online scholarly catalogue. Her publications on Japanese painting, lacquer, calligraphy, and prints include Masterful Illusions: Japanese Prints in the Anne van Biema Collection (2002) and the two-volume work Hokusai (2006).