Steffani Bennett
Position title: Assistant Professor of Japanese Art, and the Joan B. Mirviss Chair in Japanese Art
Pronouns: she/her/hers
Email: steffani.bennett@wisc.edu
Address:
214 Conrad A. Elvehjem Building
Office Hours: Tuesdays 11:00am–12:30pm, and by appointment.
Education
B.A. University of Washington, 2011
Ph.D. Harvard University, 2020
Research Interests
Medieval Japanese art, Japanese painting, Sino-Japanese cultural relations, landscape painting, artistic identity, traveling artists, Zen-related art, premodern print culture.
Biography
I am an art historian of premodern Japan with specialization in medieval painting. Within that realm, my research has focused on the fifteenth-century monk-painter Sesshū Tōyō (1420–ca.1506). I am particularly interested in Sino-Japanese cultural relations in the premodern period and much of my scholarship is interregional in nature. I am currently completing my first book manuscript tentatively titled Profession of the Brush: Sesshū Tōyō and the Painterly Profession in Muromachi Japan. I am also working on a subsequent book project on the development of the landscape genre in Japanese painting history.
Publications
“Child of the Cranes: Sesshū’s Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons and the Painterly Profession in Muromachi Japan.” Archives of Asian Art 73:1 (2023):25–74.
“Sesshū Tōyō (Scholarly Biographical Encyclopedia Entry).” In Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon (Artists of the World). Berlin: K. G. Saur, 2019.
“The Politics of Prayer: Sesshū’s Thirty-three Kannon Paintings and Ming-Dynasty Illustrated Guanyin Sutras.” Kokusai Tōhō gakusha kaigi kiyō (Transactions of the International Conference of Eastern Studies) 62 (December 2017):41–67.
Teaching
ART HIST 103: Introduction to Japanese Art
ART HIST 303: Topics in Art History – Introduction to Japanese Art
ART HIST 411/775: The Floating World: A History of Japanese Prints
ART HIST 575/875: Transmitting the Flame: Zen and the Art of Insight