Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow 2022 - 2023
PhD, University of Kansas, 2016
Alison J Miller is an art historian whose work focuses on the two-dimensional visual culture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan, appointed as Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee (USA).
At the Sainsbury Institute, she will be working on a new project on industry and infrastructure in woodblock prints of the 1870s and 1880s. A topical study of the urban built environment as represented in prints, her project shows how these objects were part of larger social understandings of work, urban life, and governance in the early Meiji period. During her year in Norwich, she will conduct initial investigations on the subject, visiting print collections and industrial museums across the UK, aiming to complete a journal article as well as preparatory work on a book and digital humanities project based on her research.
Dr. Miller’s publications examine gender and images of women across media, including prints, photographs, and paintings, and can be found in the Journal of Japanese Studies, TransAsia Photography Review, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), as well as 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 is currently finalizing her book manuscript, Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Royal Women, 1868-1952.