Faculty Host
Julie Nelson Davis
Julie Nelson Davis specializes in the arts and material cultures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan, with a focus on prints, paintings, and illustrated books. One of the leaders in the field of ukiyo-e (images of the floating world), Davis takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding these works in context, exploring issues related to artistic practice, authorship, gender, and censorship, among others. Selected as a Guggenheim Fellow for 2021, Davis is working on a new project about imitation, homage, and fabrication in ukiyo-e painting as well as second project on artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and illustrated books.
At Penn, Davis teaches a wide range of courses on East Asian art, with a focus on the period 1600 to the present. Her research interests are often explored in collaboration with students as well as through curatorial projects, object-based courses on the history of the book in East Asia, Japanese prints and illustrated books, as well as site seminars on modern and contemporary art. Davis and her students recently organized an exhibition of the Arthur Tress Collection of Japanese Illustrated books, that opened at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in August 2022. She has served as primary advisor for dissertations on a wide array of subjects, such as the nineteenth-century exchange between Tokyo and Paris, the Shirakaba group of early twentieth-century modernists, the color revolution in ukiyo-e, the representation of imagined worlds in eighteenth-century Japan, and nineteenth-century Yokohama photography, as well as been secondary advisor for many others. She has also been a visiting professor at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (2014), the Ishibashi Visiting Professor at Heidelberg University (2019), and is on the faculty of the Rare Book School (2019 to present). Davis received the 25th Anniversary Award for Excellence in Advising from the Trustees' Council of Penn Women in 2012.