Professor
Art History
B.A, University of California, Berkeley
M.A., Ph.D, Harvard University
Email: nmurai[at]sophia.ac.jp
Tel: 03-3238-4064
Office: 10-657
I am interested in visual creativity that crosses and challenges established boundaries, such as between different cultures, different media, or between art and nature. One of my research interests is the presentation, reception, and interpretation of Japanese art and aesthetics in the US around the turn of the 20th century. More recently I have also been working on modern ikebana (Japanese floral art). I teach courses in modern Japanese art, Japonisme, and gender and visual representation.
Book
・Japan and Japonisme: The Self and the Other in Representations of Japanese Culture (editor). Abingdon (UK) & New York: Routledge; first published by Amsterdam University Press, 2025.
・『ジャポニスムを考える─日本文化表象をめぐる他者と自己』(ジャポニスム学会編)思文閣出版、2022年。
・Japan in the Heisei Era (1989-2019): Multidisciplinary Perspectives (co-edited with Jeff Kingston and Tina Burrett). Abingdon (UK) and New York: Routlegde, 2022.
・『日本文学の翻訳と流通─近代世界のネットワークへ』(河野至恩・村井則子編)勉誠出版、2017年。
・Inventing Asia: American Perceptions around 1900 (co-edited with Alan Chong). Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, distributed by the University of Hawai’i Press, 2014.
・Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia (co-authored with Alan Chong, et al). Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2009.
Book chapter
・“The Paradox of Nihonga in the Art of Mirikitani”In Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, edited by Maki Kaneko and Kris Ercums, 174-85. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2026.
・“Celebration or Condemnation? Appropriating Claude Monet’s La Japonaise in Contemporary Japan and the United States.” In Japan and Japonisme: The Self and the Other in Representations of Japanese Culture, edited by Noriko Murai, 277-301. Abingdon, Oxon & New York: Routledge; first published by Amsterdam University Press, 2025.
・“Commentary.” In Japanese Art—Transcultural Perspectives, edited by Melanie Trede, Christine Guth, and Mio Wakita, 449-54. Leiden: Brill, 2025.
・“The Genealogy of Kawaii.” In Japan in the Heisei Era (1989-2019): Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Noriko Murai, Jeff Kingston, and Tina Burrett, 245-258. Abingdon (UK) and New York: Routlegde, 2022.
・“Composing in Groups: Individual Expressions and Collective Output in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” In Group Dynamics: Collectives of the Modernist Period, edited by Matthias Muhling, 372-77. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022.
・「翻訳により生まれた作家─昭和10年代の日本における「岡倉天心」の創出と受容」 『日本文学の翻訳と流通─近代世界のネットワークへ』河野至恩・村井則子編、164-86、勉誠出版、2017年。
Journal Articles
・“Reading “Okakura Tenshin” in Wartime Japan: Genealogical Imagination and the Birth of an Author in Translation.” Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2024): 381-415.
・Beyond Tenshin: Okakura Kakuzō’s Multiple Legacies (guest co-edited with Yukio Lippit). Review of Japanese Culture and Society 24 (2012).
Faculty of Liberal Arts
Graduate Program in Global Studies