Louisa McDonald in Japan

Louisa McDonald, ’67, MA ’70, PHD ’76, is a professor of art history with an emphasis on Japan at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she has been teaching for 20 years. Since getting her doctoral thesis on gender distinctions in medieval Japanese scroll painting at Stanford, she has broadened her scholarly interests in French Japonisme, modern and contemporary Japanese art, and the relationship between art and war. Her scholarship focuses on Japanese modernism and the construction of national and individual cultural identity. She has written on Japanese war paintings commissioned by the Imperial Japanese army and navy during World War II, questions of truth and propaganda, art as autobiography, and artists’ widows. A co-editor of Art and War in Japan and Its Empire: 1931–1960 (2012), an anthology of art historical essays, she’s currently working on a study of the 20th-century Japanese artist Foujita Tsuguharu. Dr. McDonald has taught in New England and Japan and has traveled extensively throughout Australia, East Asia, and Europe. An avid reader of Nordic crime fiction and theology, she is fascinated with the endless variety of human creativity. During our program she will speak about Japanese art, from its ancient origins to its contemporary manifestations in the global art world.

•  Professor, art history, since 2000, and former chair, art department, 2012–2017, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

• Visiting professor, Graduate School of Education, Nagoya University, 2005

• Associate in Research, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, Harvard University, 1982–1998