Gennifer Weisenfeld

Gennifer Weisenfeld serves as the Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, where she has established herself as a preeminent scholar of modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. After receiving her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Japanese Art History, she has produced groundbreaking research examining the intersection of art, politics, and society in modern Japan. Her scholarly contributions include several influential books: "Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931," which explores the relationship between high art and mass culture in 1920s Japan; "Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923," which analyzes visual representations of Japan's worst twentieth-century natural disaster; and her most recent work "Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan" (2023). Her research spans various aspects of Japanese visual culture, from commercial design and advertising to avant-garde movements and disaster representation. She has also co-edited "Crossing the Sea: Essays on East Asian Art in Honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu" and contributed significant articles on Japanese design history, including studies of Kaō Soap's commercial design and Shiseido's advertising. Her forthcoming book "The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan," scheduled for release in March 2025, examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic design from the early 1900s through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, exploring how commercial art helped shape national and imperial ideologies