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McCormick Named Professor of Japanese Art and Culture
Cambridge, Mass. - July 24, 2009 - Melissa McCormick, a scholar whose broad study of medieval Japanese art draws upon literary, gender, religious, and cultural studies, has been named professor of Japanese art and culture in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1, 2009.
McCormick was previously John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2005.
"Professor McCormick's theoretical acumen allows her to develop topics specific to medieval Japan with her rich interdisciplinary lens," says Diana Sorensen, dean for the arts and humanities in FAS. "Her multifaceted approach has reinforced ties between art history, religious culture, and literary theory. As importantly, she has received warm praise from her students as a skilled and engaging lecturer. I am pleased that her scholarship and teaching will continue to enrich our Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations as well as other disciplines in the Arts and Humanities."
McCormick's scholarship has included numerous studies on courtly painting; a special interest in the reception history of The Tale of Genji, Japan's most celebrated narrative; and a reconsideration of medieval women's contributions to Japanese art and literary traditions. Her analysis of the "picto-literary" genre of emaki, or narrative picture scrolls, has been defined by its seamless integration of the art historical analysis of materiality and style with careful parsing of their underlying narratives, including rhetoric and the poetics of texts.
McCormick's book Tosa Mistunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan (University of Washington Press, 2009), is the first book-length study to focus exclusively on picture scrolls in three decades, taking up the poorly understood genre of 15th-century small scrolls, or ko-e. She argues that these diminutive artworks represent a condensation, rather than an abbreviation, of traditional narrative scroll painting. As such, she maintains, they play a formative role in the emergence of a new and radically intimate mode of reading.
In her second book project, Monochroma: Female Authorship in Medieval Japanese Illustrated Narratives, McCormick aims to reframe the historical significance of another picto-literary mode of artistic representation, that of a type of austere monochrome ink drawing known as hakubyô. This mode she associates closely with educated court women and nuns of the 16th century, who not only viewed and owned works of this type but painted and authored them. Upon close analysis, their purposefully undercrafted nature and interpretive renderings of classical culture reveal a great deal about otherwise poorly documented cultures of women during Japan's premodern era.
McCormick earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Japanese art and archaeology from Princeton University in 2000. She has received fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art and the J. Paul Getty Center.
McCormick was the Itsuko and Takeo Atsumi Assistant Professor of Japanese Art at Columbia University from 2000 to 2005, when she joined Harvard as associate professor of Japanese art and culture.
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