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faculty
miriam wattles, assistant professor
curriculum vitae
specialization
Early Modern and Modern Japanese Visual Culture: Painting, Calligraphy, Ukiyo-e woodblock prints,
and Illustrated books
office
Arts 2316
phone
805 893 7593
B.A. Earlham College
Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Before her graduate study, Miriam Wattles lived
for ten years in Japan immersed in the practice of calligraphy. Her present
research mainly focuses on the rise of the artist as celebrity during
the early modern era, particularly as impacted by the growth of cultural
institutions, the rise of a market economy, and the spread of print culture.
She is motivated by the attempt to understand how art and art history
were constructed in Japan before the strong Western influence of the late
19C. Her dissertation, entitled “The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa
Itchô (1652-1724),” will be the basis of her first book. Her
current projects include a study of how various genres were articulated
by and through publishing and the art market and a case-study of a 19C
shunga (erotica) album. Her range of interest extends to modern and contemporary
Japanese visual culture; most recently, to the anime-influenced “creepy
cute” sensibility.
Wattles’s previous publications include a study of Itchô’s
daimyo patronage: “Hanabusa Itchô’s Bugaku Dancers:
Profligate Waste or Ennobling Taste” (Transactions of the International
Conference of Eastern Studies XLVII, 2002) and the impact of his later
school’s monographs on woodblock prints: “Ukiyo-e’s
Debt to the Hanabusa Gafu” Ukiyo-e Society Bulletin (Spring 2001).
An earlier study of hers focuses on a Pan-Asian aesthetic that arose within
nihonga (Japanese-style painting) as Japan arose as a nation: “The
1909 Ryûtô and the Aesthetics of Affectivity” Art Journal
55:3 (Fall, 1996).
undergraduate courses
Arts of Japan
Figuring Celebrity: Actors, Courtesans and Ordinary Types
Ukiyo-e: Pictures of the Floating World
Japanese Painting: the Gitter Collection
Twentieth-century Japanese Visual Culture: High and Low
undergraduate and graduate seminars
Undergraduate/Graduate Seminars: Miriam Wattles gives seminars that combine research with practical “hands-on” museum experience. She and students regularly organize ukiyo-e exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In 2004-05 they did two shows: “Birds and Flowers: Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Seymour and Shirley Lehrer Collection” and “Edo: The City and its Diversions.” An exhibition that reexamines geisha is planned for 2006.
