Walter Davis, PhD History of Art, The Ohio State University

Email

wdavis1@ualberta.ca

Email

wdavis1@ualberta.ca

I am an historian of China and Japan’s early modern and modern visual arts who is particularly interested in their historical intertwining and mutual development. After studying classical languages and philosophy as an undergraduate, I completed an MA in East Asian Art History at the University of Kansas under the supervision of Marsha Haufler and a PhD in History of Art at the Ohio State University under the supervision of Julia F. Andrews. My graduate training focused on premodern and 20th-century Chinese painting and calligraphy, premodern Japanese painting, and the Buddhist art of South, Inner, and East Asia. Before I began teaching at the University of Alberta in 2007, I studied at Nanjing University in China, taught English in Kobe, Japan, conducted dissertation research under Hiromitsu Kobayashi at Sophia University in Tokyo, and taught at Ohio University and Lewis & Clark College in the United States. 

My current research focuses on traditionalist painting and calligraphy of modern China and Japan, Sino-Japanese visual culture of the late-19th and 20th centuries, and how local Japanese endeavours in the visual arts, such as the Calligraphy Performance Kōshien and the projects of Benesse Art Site Naoshima, undertake cultural preservation, social renewal, economic development, and internationalization.

My recent publications include the exhibition catalogue All under Heaven: The Chinese World in Maps, Pictures, and Texts from the Collection of Floyd Sully (Edmonton: University of Alberta Libraries, 2013), which won the American Library Association’s Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab American Book Prices Current Exhibition Catalogue Award (Category 1, Expensive) for 2014, and “Art, Aesthetics, and Religion in Modern China,” in Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850-2015, eds. Vincent Goossaert, Jan Kiely, and John Lagerwey (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 197-257. My monograph Culture in Common: Wang Yiting’s Art of Exchange with Japan will soon be published by Brill. 

I teach and supervise student research in the Department of Art & Design and Department of East Asian Studies. My course offerings in Art & Design include historical surveys of Chinese and Japanese art, design, and visual culture; advanced lecture courses on Chinese painting and East Asian calligraphy and script culture; and seminars on various topics in early modern and modern Chinese and Japanese art, design, and visual culture. In the Department of East Asian Studies, I offer courses on Japanese culture and the Buddhist art of Asia.

Graduate Supervision

I supervise graduate students in both the Department of Art & Design and the Department of East Asian Studies. I encourage my students to develop their art historical and professional skills by engaging with University of Alberta Museums' Mactaggart Art Collection and Print Studies Centre, which have strong holdings in early modern Chinese painting and textiles as well as Japanese prints. My supervisees have have incorporated art from the University of Alberta Museums Art Collection into successful theses, and they have worked as curatorial interns and gallery assistants for the collection. They have gone on to such PhD programs as those at the University of Sydney, The Ohio State University, and Cambridge University, and they have found employment in post-secondary institutions and the private sector. In 2023 I was awarded the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Arts Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentorship.

BA Honors Supervision

I supervise undergraduate honors thesis research on topics in early modern and modern Chinese and Japanese art history. 

Undergraduate and Graduate Course Offerings

• EASIA 101 Understanding East Asia
• EASIA 240 Overview of Japanese Culture
• HADVC 214 History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture in China
• HADVC 217 History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture in Japan
• HADVC 301 Geographies of Art, Design and Visual Culture--Painting of Imperial China
• HADVC 311 Issues in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture--Cultures of the Brush: East Asian Calligraphy and Script Culture
• EASIA 322 Buddhist Art of Asia
• HADVC 412/512 Topics/Advanced Studies in Asian Art: Orthodoxy and Eccentricity in Early Modern Chinese Painting
• HADVC 412/512 Topics/Advanced Studies in Asian Art: Museumification and Modernization of Japan
• HADVC 412/512 Topics/Advanced Studies in Asian Art: Traditionalism in Modern Japanese Art and Design
• EASIA 598 Topics in East Asian Research
• EASIA 599 Directed Readings in East Asian Studies