The Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures together with the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia launches a new initiative in digital Japanese arts. Building on the successes of our previous Ishibashi Foundation Summer Fellowships and Online Summer Programmes in Japanese Arts and Cultures, this initiative will engage students and early career researchers with curators and established specialists in their respective fields through the development of new digital platforms, connecting them with Japanese art collections across Europe, the United States and Japan.
In 2022-23, we will undertake a series of pilot projects through which participants will gain unprecedented experience researching Japanese arts and cultures in a resilient manner adapted to the post Covid-19 world, both contributing to and engaging with the full range of digital technologies.
The Ishibashi Foundation Digital Futures initiative comprises a series of four components coordinated through the Centre for Japanese Studies and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. One of these four components is led by Dr Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, and is dedicated to Collecting and Archiving Postwar Japanese art in Europe.
The purpose of this research strand is to access and connect archiving and collecting practices of modern and contemporary art in Europe, from a range of private and public institutions, and to investigate the possibilities of linking and coordinating archiving and collecting efforts using digital tools. Together with students, we plan to visit and analyse archives in three European centres: London, Paris and Amsterdam/Leiden, and in a series of conversations with curators, digital and archive specialists, and art historians, explore best practices to create and preserve histories of modern and contemporary Japanese art that has been exhibited, collected or created in Europe since the second half of the 20th century.
We would like to issue a call for Ishibashi Foundation Digital Futures Scholars to participate in the activities associated with this research strand and to contribute to surveying, analysing and integrating archives of postwar Japanese art situated in Europe. We are looking for six early-career scholars to participate in this project.
If you are working in the field of postwar Japanese art, and are a current or a recent PhD student at any university worldwide, by participating in this project, you can:
- Gain insight and first-hand experience working in the archives of postwar Japanese art in major European collections
- Join an international network of scholars and peers in the field of postwar Japanese art
- Receive training in digital art history and archiving
- Receive travel and accommodation costs to travel to one of the archive sites in Europe to participate in the joint and individual archive work, and to the joint workshop in Norwich/London
- Learn more about theoretical approaches to archiving practices and creative practices (theoretical work)
- Receive further input and mentoring for your individual research projects
We would expect that our fellows:
- Participate in at least one archival workshop in-person during the year
- Participate in monthly online meetings for the project
- Participate online or in-person in the initial and final workshops of the programme
- Contribute to a timeline of the integrated archival findings of this project
- Conduct individual archival research
- Write a final report of 2 pages about the project
How to apply:
- Your CV, which includes your language skills and research interests
- 1-page dissertation outline
- Letter of motivation to include your experience working in archives for your research, which resources and archives would you like to use in this project, and which area or topic of postwar Japanese art would you like to explore
The timeline of the project will include an initial coordination workshop in October 2022, an archival trip in London (2-3 days) in early December 2022, an archival trip to Paris in April 2023, an archival trip to Amsterdam in June 2023, and a final workshop to be held in July 2023.
For more information and questions, please contact Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, e.bogdanova-kummer@uea.ac.uk, or sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org. Please submit your application per email to sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org by September 10, 2022.
