Tuesday, November 4, 2025 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET REGISTER FOR ZOOM
In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Presenter: Alicia Volk, Professor of Japanese Art, University of Maryland
Discussant: Franziska Seraphim, Associate Professor of History, Boston College
Moderator: Emer O'Dwyer, Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Oberlin College
The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Alicia Volk, who will be speaking about her new book In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In the Shadow of Empire brings to light a significant body of postwar Japanese art, exploring how it accommodated and resisted the workings of the American empire during the early Cold War. Volk’s groundbreaking account presents the points of view of Japanese artists and their audiences under American occupation and amid the ruins of war. Each chapter reveals how artists embraced new roles for art in the public sphere—at times by enacting radical critiques of established institutions, values, and practices—and situates a range of compelling art objects in their intersecting artistic and political worlds. Centering on the diverse and divisive terrain of Japanese art between 1945 and 1952, In the Shadow of Empire creates a fluid map of relationality that brings multiple Cold War spheres into dialogue, stretching beyond US-occupied Japan to art from China, Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and demonstrates the rich potential of this transnational site of artmaking for rethinking the history of Japanese and global postwar art. Franziska Seraphim (Boston College) will serve as interlocutor.
The Modern Japan History Association is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit organization supported by member contributions.
