Fri, Sept 16, 2005 Noon, IMU University Club Room Webcast of this talk coming soon. Julia Adeney Thomas (History Department, University of Notre Dame) "Landscape's Mediation between History and Memory: A Visual Turn in Japan's Approach to its Wartime Past"

Julia Adeney Thomas

Julia Adeney Thomas received her Ph.D. in 1993 from the Department of History at the University of Chicago. Her professional interests comprise intellectual history and the history of modern Japan. Her current research, supported by the Japan Foundation, NEH, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Mellon Foundation, deals with photography and democracy during the American Occupation of Japan. Her 2002 publication, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology in the series Twentieth-Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power, won the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association in 2003. Professor Thomas is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon "New Directions" Fellowship 2004-2006.

This talk is an exploration of current tensions between history and memory with a look at the successful way that the Yokohama Museum of Art circumnavigated them in a recent exhibition of paintings and photographs.

Co-sponsored by the departments of History, Art History, Studio Arts, and East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Final presentation of the EASC workshop: "The Japanese Empire: Gone, But Not Forgotten" held in the University Club room in the IMU.