Thursday, August 28
1:00–3:00 p.m. PT
Speaker: Alison Miller, PhD, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at the University of the South (Sewanee)
Virtual Event
Join the Asian Arts Council on an exploration of the public images of Japanese empresses during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Based on research completed for her book, Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868-1952, Alison Miller, PhD, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at the University of the South (Sewanee), will introduce and analyze the public images of the modern Japanese empresses, discussing how visual culture elevated the women as celebrity role models. As imperial images were a completely new invention in the second half of the 19th century, this talk will discuss the varied influences on the woodblock prints, lithographs, and photographs of the empresses, and how they worked to establish the women as individuals, but also timeless in the public eye.
Speaker Bio: Alison J. Miller, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at the University of the South (Sewanee), is a specialist in modern and contemporary Japanese art history, focusing on two-dimensional media, gender, and the imperial family. She has published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, TransAsia Photography Review, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), and various public humanities projects and museum catalogues. She is co-editor and contributing author for The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity (Routledge, 2021) and Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia (Brill, 2024). Her book, Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868-1952 (Routledge, 2025) analyzes the social impact of the images of the modern Japanese empresses. Miller received her PhD from the University of Kansas and has taught at Bowdoin College and the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work has been funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellowship, Appalachian College Association Faculty Fellowship, and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, among others.
Please note, this session will be conducted virtually via Zoom.
Save your spot by clicking on this link. All participants will be sent the Zoom link via confirmation email with instructions once you secure your place.
Save my spot!
Sponsored by the Asian Arts Council.
Featured at top right: Utagawa Kunitoshi, Illustration of the imperial carriage, (Gohōren no zu) (detail), 1889. One sheet of a triptych of woodblock prints; ink and color on paper. Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1959, Metropolitan Museum of Art, JP3230.
