Kari Shepherdson-Scott

Kari Shepherdson-Scott is an art historian specializing in the visual culture of modern Japan. Her research examines the relationship between visual media, empire, and war, with particular attention to how exhibitions, photography, film, and immersive media shaped public engagement with Japan’s imperial project during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945).

Her current research investigates how wartime media brought the war in China into the everyday lives of Japanese civilians. Addressing the newsreel film The Unburnable City (Moenai toshi,燃えない都市, or “the Unburnable City”) and expositions including the 1938 China Incident Holy War Exposition (Shina jihen seisen hakurankai, 支那事変聖戦博覧会) and the 1939 Great Building East Asia Exposition (Dai Tōa kensetsu hakurankai, 大東亜建設博覧会), she examines how Japanese ministries, military, and private commercial entities blurred the boundaries between education, entertainment, and state messaging to transform distant military campaigns into experiences that could be seen, felt, and understood at home. This research builds on her earlier scholarship on media representations of Japanese-occupied Manchuria and the visual culture of expanding empire. Together, her publications have explored an array of practices, from the Japanese deployment of art photography as soft-power diplomacy at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 to urban civil-defense campaigns that drew upon memories of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake to prepare civilians for aerial bombardment. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

While her research focuses on modern practices in Japan, she teaches more broadly in visual culture and all periods of Japanese and Chinese art.

Course offerings include:

• Introduction to Visual Culture
• Introduction to the Art of China (formerly Art of the East I: China)
• Introduction to the Art of Japan (formerly Art of the East II: Japan)
• Making Sacred: Religious Images and Spaces in Asia
• Japan and the (Inter)National Modern
• The Body and Identity in Later Chinese Art
• Art, Trade, and Treasure of the “Silk Road”

Publications:

“Entertaining War: Spectacle and the Great ‘Capture of Wuhan’ Battle Panorama of 1939,” The Art Bulletin 100, No. 4 (December 2018): 81-105.

“Art Photography, Industry, and Empire: Japanese Soft Power in America, 1933-34,” Art History 41, No. 4 (September 2018): 710-741.

“Race behind the Walls: Contact and Containment in Japanese Images of Urban Manchuria.” Christopher Hanscom and Dennis Washburn, eds. The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empires. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016: 180-206.

“Toward an ‘Unburnable City’: Reimagining the Urban Landscape in 1930s Japanese Media,” Journal of Urban History Vol. 42, no.3 (Theme issue: Japanese Cities in Global Context) (May 2016): 582-603.

“Conflicting Politics and Contesting Borders: Exhibiting (Japanese) Manchuria at the Chicago World Fair, 1933-34.”Journal of Asian Studies 74, No. 03 (August 2015): 539-564.

“A Legacy of Persuasion: Japanese Photography and the Artful Politics of Remembering Manchuria,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Issue 27 (Theme issue: Souvenirs and Objects of Remembrance) (2015): 124-147.

“Fuchikami Hakuyō’s Evening Sun: Manchuria, Memory, and the Aesthetic Abstraction of War.” Ming Tiampo, Louisa McDonald, Asato Ikeda, eds. Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931-1960. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013: 275-291.