Kevin G. Carr

Kevin Carr teaches all aspects of the history of Japanese art and archaeology, but his research focuses on the visual cultures of religious movements in medieval Japan (especially the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries). His work engages issues of visual narrative, hagiography, and the construction of history and proto-national consciousness through art. He has also worked on cultural exchanges between Japan and Europe in the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, the epistemological foundations of medieval art, and the interpretation of material culture in the absence of textual evidence. His current project focuses on notions of sacred place manifest in texts and images of temple origin stories (engi-e) in medieval Japan.

Kevin is also a founding member of the Decentering Japanese Art History team, which is dedicated to producing scholarly and pedagogical resources to support the study of marginalized art and cultures from the Japanese archipelago. Initially, the project focuses on the visual and material cultures of the Ainu and the Ryūkyū Islands/Okinawa.

Affiliations:

• Center for Japanese Studies
• History of Art

Fields of Study:

• East Asian religious art
• Visual and material cultures of the Japanese archipelago
• Calligraphy in East Asia
• Ainu and Ryūkyūan religious cultures