Alice Y. Tseng

Biography

"Professor Tseng specializes in the art and architecture of Japan, with particular focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. Specific topics of research interest are the history of institutional buildings, collections, exhibitions; transnational and transcultural connections between Japan and Euro-America; and the role of the visual arts in cultural transformation, invention, and revival. She offers lecture courses on the arts of Asia; the arts of Japan; and modern Japanese architecture; and seminar courses on Japanese print culture; the Edo-Meiji transition; Kyoto architecture and urbanism; and Tokyo as concept and form. Professor Tseng has received fellowships from numerous institutions and foundations, including the Fulbright Foundation, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art), J. Paul Getty Foundation, Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, American Council of Learned Societies, and Boston University Center for the Humanities. She was the recipient of the 2006 Founder’s Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for her article “Styling Japan: The Case of Josiah Conder and the Museum at Ueno, Tokyo.” Professor Tseng is the author of The Imperial Museums of Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation (University of Washington Press, 2008), and she is the co-editor of Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods: The Arts of Reinvention (Routledge, 2016). Her book Modern Kyoto: Building for Ceremony and Commemoration, 1868-1940 is forthcoming from the University of Hawai`i Press in 2018. Current projects include an online unit on Japanese architecture at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and essays on the visual and spatial representations of Emperor Taishō."

Research Interest

History of institutional buildings, collections, exhibitions; transnational and transcultural connections between Japan and Euro-America; and the role of the visual arts in cultural transformation, invention, and revival