Steffani Bennett
Position title: Assistant Professor of Japanese Art, and the Joan B. Mirviss Chair in Japanese Art
Email: steffani.bennett@wisc.edu
Address:
she/her/hers
214 Conrad A. Elvehjem Building
Office Hours: Wednesdays 12:00–1:30pm, 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 Tōyō’s Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons and the Painterly Profession in Muromachi Japan.” Archives of Asian Art (forthcoming, Spring 2023).
“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
AH 303: Topics in Art History – Introduction to Japanese Art