Jamie Sullivan

Jamie is a second-year student in the JSIS Japan Studies program. He received a B.A. in Art History from Williams College in 2018. He is a 2023 Summer and 2023-24 Academic Year FLAS fellow, a Kitto Scholarship recipient, and a Francis Blakemore and Griffith Way Asian Art fellowship recipient. Outside of the Jackson School, Jamie has held various Teaching Assistant positions in the School of Art + Design for Japanese and Chinese Art History courses.

Jamie’s interests lie in modern and contemporary Japanese art, and how visual culture serves to create, codify, and challenge ideas of national identity. He is especially interested in kokutai, the notion of a unique Japanese identity rooted in the divinity of the Emperor. He is currently studying in a series of woodblock prints released in December of 1945, three months after Japan’s surrender. The series is titled “Scenes of Lost Tokyo,” and contains re-prints depicting an earlier, more prosperous, and imperial era of Japanese history. Alongside new prints of Meiji structures destroyed during the war, Jamie believes the re-prints are recontextualized as visual representations of anxiety over the yet-undecided fate of the Japanese emperor, a crucial aspect of Japanese national identity. Jamie hopes to eventually pursue a Ph.D. in Art History to better aid the development of English-language scholarship in this critical period of Japanese cultural development.