Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow 2024 - 2025
Ph.D., Stanford University, 2007
Pauline Ayumi Ota is an art historian whose research examines late eighteenth and early nineteenth century cityscapes/views of Kyoto, early modern Japanese maps, and the supernatural in Japanese art. She holds an appointment in the Department of Art and Art History as Associate Professor of Art and Art History (History of Japanese Art), as well as serves as a member of the Asian Studies Program Steering Committee and the Global Studies Fellows Program Steering Committee, at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana (USA).
At the Sainsbury Institute, she will complete a journal article on the famed print triptych by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861), Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre of 1843-47. Preliminary findings on this work were presented previously as part of a keynote address titled “Of Myths and Monsters: Magical Thinking in Later Premodern Japanese Art” for the Indiana University Art History Association 33rd Annual Graduate Student Symposium (theme: Essays in the Esoteric: Magical Thinking in the Humanities) in April 2023. Further research during her six months in Norwich will concentrate on three key areas: the literary work(s) that inspired the print, women of the later Tokugawa era (1750-1868), especially early nineteenth century Japanese conceptualizations of witches/sorceresses, and Kuniyoshi’s prints featuring magical or supernatural subjects.
Dr. Ota’s recent publications include “Mapping the Yodo River and its Banks” in Artibus Asiae from 2020 and the December 2021 Andon article, “The Poetry of Play: Hybridity in Amusements of the Four Seasons of Kyoto.” She is also finalizing her book manuscript, Seeing the City Anew: Maruyama Ōkyo’s Cityscapes of Kyoto, 1758-1790 and Their Afterimages.