Ota, Pauline A., Ph.D.
Art and Art History
Associate Professor of Art and Art History
Ph.D. Stanford University (History of Art)
M.A. University of California, Riverside (History of Art)
B.S. University of California, Irvine (Information & Computer Science)
Teaching Interests
Early modern Japanese art, the supernatural in Japan & China, artistic exchange between East Asia and the Euro-American West, dialog between popular culture and "fine art," museum studies
Courses Regularly Taught:
ARTH 133 East Asian Art, Bronze to Mongols
ARTH 135 Developments in East Asian Art, Modernity
ARTH 231 Prints & Print Culture of Early Modern & Modern Japan
ARTH 232 Warrior Art of Japan & the Ryukyus
ARTH 234 East West Encounters
ARTH 333 Supernatural in Japanese Art
ARTH 334 Women & East Asian Art
MSST 110 Contemporary Issues in Museum Studies
Research Interests:
I am engaged with the study of eighteenth-century Japanese visual culture, particularly the two-dimensional arts exploring new modes of representation, as well as the pictorial expression of the supernatural. How did these new techniques formulate a visual "revolution" and how did this revolution impact the rendering of traditional subject matter such as cityscapes? For supernatural themes, I investigate how the seen, the known, and the unknown intersect to produce imagery linked to literature, religion, and lived experience.
Awards:
2016-2017 ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship
2010 Japan Foundation Short-term Fellowship
Selected Publications & Special Projects
"The Poetry of Play: Hybridity in Amusements of the Four Seasons of Kyoto," Andon 112 (December, 2021)
"Mapping the Yodo River and Its Banks," Artibus Asiae 80, no. 1 (2020)
"Japanese Postwar Prints -- Repurposing the Past, Innovation in the Present," in Abstract Traditions: Postwar Japanese Prints from the DePauw University Permanent Art Collection, 2016
Student-Faculty Curated Exhibition Project: "(Mis)Perceptions," Upper Gallery, Richard E. Peeler Art Center, Fall, 2021
Book Project (in progress): "Seeing the City Anew: Maruyama Okyo's Representations of Kyoto, 1758-1790"
Back to Faculty