2018-2019 Visiting Faculty & Scholars
Visiting Associate Professor in East Asian Studies
Dr. Ayelet Zohar is a Senior Lecturer at the History of Art Department, Tel Aviv University, and currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the History of Art and CEAS at Yale (2018). She received her PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London (2007), followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University (2007-9), and a second Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (2011). In 2012 Dr. Zohar was a Japan Foundation Research Fellow at Hokkaidô University, followed by two research periods at Waseda University in Tokyo (2017 and 2018). Dr. Zohar holds a research grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) for her research on war memory in contemporary Japanese photography and video art (2016-2019).
Dr. Zohar’s main fields of research are the history and theory of Japanese photography; contemporary fine art photography; Historical, Meiji era photography, and its links to the traditions of ink painting; Art and visual culture in Japan; Postcolonial theory, Deleuzian studies and Trauma Studies. Dr. Zohar has published extensively on issues of Japanese photography and contemporary art in Japan, war memory in Japanese photography, gender and sexuality in contemporary Japanese art and photography. Dr. Zohar is also an expert on camouflage practices in relation to photography, and has related to issues of Foucauldian, Deleuzian and Rancierian theories in this respect. Recently, Dr. Zohar is working on a major project that has developed her own reading of photography in Japan as an opaque medium, created through performative processes.
Dr. Zohar is a transdisciplinary artist and an independent curator. In 2005 she curated the now globally famous “PostGender” exhibition (Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Haifa, 2005), and in 2015 her curated exhibition “Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed” was shown at the Tel Aviv Universirty Art Gallery. She was the Head of the Museology and Critical Curatorial Studies Programme at Tel Aviv University (2016-2018).
Lecturers in East Asian Studies
Caroline Merrifield completed her PhD in sociocultural anthropology at Yale in 2018. Her research focuses on food sourcing arrangements in China within the context of China’s growing food movement. In this research, food is a crucial site for investigating problems of moral consensus-making in a time of Chinese “moral crisis.”
Kelsey Seymour received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages & Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania in June 2018. At Yale, she expanded her dissertation, “The Buddha’s Voice: Ritual Sound and Sensory Experience in Medieval Chinese Religious Practice,” and prepared it for publication. The project explores chanting practices surrounding Chinese Buddhist texts during the Six Dynasties and Tang periods, and how these sonic activities and aural experiences affected not only people’s religious lives in a ritual context, but also the larger role of chant in the lives of medieval Chinese Buddhists, both lay and monastic.
Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Studies
Mio Shimazaki
Visiting Fellow in East Asian Studies
Hao Peng