Melissa McCormick

Melissa McCormick

Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Art and Culture
Harvard College Professor
On leave 2023-24
Melissa McCormick

Melissa McCormick earned a dual B.A. in art history and Japanese language and literature from the University of Michigan (1990), her Ph.D. in Japanese Art History from Princeton University (2000), and studied at Gakushūin University (1996-98) while conducting her dissertation research. After a year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), she served as Atsumi Assistant Professor of Japanese Art at Columbia University (2000-05), before moving to Harvard in 2005.

As an art historian with an interdisciplinary approach, McCormick investigates the relationship of pictorial form to social history and contexts of artistic production, focusing in particular on the interrelationship of text and image. Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan (Washington, 2009) studies the relationship of scale and format to pictorial representation and literary genre, while combining analyses of texts and images with historical research into hypothetical readers and viewers in the late fifteenth-century. Several articles have examined the tradition of ink-line (hakubyō) narrative painting and communities of female readers, writers, and amateur artists, and a book on this tradition of monochrome narrative painting is in progress. McCormick’s ongoing interest in The Tale of Genji has led to publications on the culture of the tale in medieval Japan, warrior patronage, female readership, and the Genji as lived experience. Her research on the Genji Album in the collection of the Harvard University Art Museums, which dated the work to 1509 and identified its patron, was featured on an NHK documentary (2008) and is the subject of a forthcoming book on Genji painting. Another current project includes articles in English and Japanese on the meaning and function of Murasaki Shikibu portraits. Professor McCormick offers courses ranging from the Introduction to Japanese Art and Architecture, to a freshman seminar on pictorial narrative covering manga and anime, to seminars on Gender and Japanese Art, and advanced graduate seminars on reading and translating medieval emaki.

 

Contact Information

2 Divinity Ave. #219
p: (617) 496-2276
Office Hours: Spring 2023: Tuesdays 12:30pm-2:30pm by appointment. To schedule a fifteen-minute slot, visit https://calendly.com/mccorm.

People

Faculty Area