In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan

Alicia VOLK

Date: Oct 17, 2025

Time: 18:30-20:00

Venue: Room 301, Building 10, Sophia University

Format: In person only

No registration required

Alicia Volk’s In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan unearths an immensely creative yet almost entirely overlooked body of Japanese art. Introducing charismatic but little-known paintings, prints, and sculpture made during the US occupation (1945-1952), her talk will show how the forgotten art of a country in the shadows of American empire variously accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II. Volk will reveal the transnational dimensions of early postwar Japanese artistic practices and show how they hold the potential for rethinking our histories of Japanese and global postwar art alike.

Alicia Volk is Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (2005) and curator of the exhibition of the same name. Her award-winning book In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art (2010) received the Phillips Book Prize. In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is her latest book. Volk has been a Japan Foundation-Ishibashi Foundation Fellow, a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the School of African and Asian Studies of the University of London, and a Fulbright Research Fellow at Waseda University.

This talk is organized by Bettina Gramlich-Oka (Professor, FLA, Sophia University).