miriam wattles, assistant professor
curriculum vitae

specialization
Early Modern and Modern Japanese Visual Culture: illustrated books and print culture, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, painting, calligraphy

email
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office
Arts 2316

phone (message)
805 893 8710

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 book project traces the production and migration of individual copies of six books on "manga," "Toba-e," and "giga" originally published from 1720 to 1928, complicating the history of Japanese comic visuality. Her dissertation, entitled "The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itchô (1652-1724)," will be the basis of her next book. Her current ongoing projects include a study of how various artistic genres were articulated by and through publishing and the art market. Her range of interest extends to modern and contemporary Japanese visual culture; most recently, to the anime-influenced "creepy cute" sensibility. Wattles was the recipient of a Getty Postdoctoral Research Grant for 2007-08 and she is the Primary Organizer of the UC multi-campus research group, "Japanese Arts & Globalizations "

Wattles's recent publications include a study of Santô Kyôden's Kimyô zui, "The Longevity of a Dirty Little Dictionary" (Impressions, 30, 2009); and "From Adverb to Noun: Some Thoughts on Hanabusa Itchô and the Instability of the 'Giga' Genre" (Ehon, Edehon shinpojiumu hôkokusho, 2007). 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 and Korea
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
Representations of Geisha: East and West

undergraduate and 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: "Birds and Flowers: Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Seymour and Shirley Lehrer Collection" (2004) and "Edo: The City and its Diversions" (2005) "From Geisha to Ghosts: Leading Ladies of Japanese Woodblock Prints" (2006-07)

graduate seminar
Art in Print: Read, Quoted and Transformed (2007)