Articles by Gennifer Weisenfeld

Gennifer Weisenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. Her second book Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan's worst national disaster of the twentieth century. And her most recent book Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023) explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense in the 1930s and 40s. In addition to co-editing the volume Crossing the Sea: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu, with Gregory Levine and Andrew Watsky (Princeton University Press, 2012), she has written a core essay on MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido company’s advertising design. She is currently completing a new book on the history of Japanese advertising and commercial design titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan (forthcoming Duke University Press).