THIRD THURSDAY LECTURE - SAINSBURY INSTITUTE

Alicia Volk (University of Maryland)

About the Talk

This talk unearths an immensely creative yet almost entirely overlooked body of Japanese art. Drawn from Volk’s recently published In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan,and introducing charismatic but little-known paintings, prints, and sculpture made during the Allied occupation (1945-1952), it will show how the forgotten art of a country in the shadows of American, Soviet, and Japanese empire both accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II. Volk will reveal the transnational dimensions of early postwar Japanese artistic practices and show how they hold the potential for rethinking our histories of Japanese and global postwar art alike.

About the Speaker

Professor Alicia Volk is Professor of Japanese Art, Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. 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 across many institutions, including as a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute in 2005-2006. Her publications include the award-winning book In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2010), which 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. 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). Her full staff profile is available here. This event is organised by the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in collaboration with the SOAS Japan Research Centre. To attend in person, please email sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org or call +44 (0) 1603 597507 to book your place. Zoom booking is available at the bottom of this page.