Stephanie M. Hohlios

History of Art Ph.D. Candidate
University of California, Berkeley

Stephanie M. Hohlios is a History of Art Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley where she specializes in modern and contemporary art from Japan. She has taught art history courses on the global modern and contemporary, Buddhist visuality and architecture, Japan, and Asia.

Her forthcoming dissertation examines the intersection of labor, gender, and the arts in a former coal mining community in the region of Kyushu, Japan from the Early to Late Twentieth Century. It explores how region (as shared identity and socially coded landscape) takes form through mobility: that of laborers and their families; visual artists and theater troupes; artistic styles and fashions; and political values. The arts function as a conduit for passing on collective regional memory, and as an asset to regional activists who negotiate a place for the region within grand narratives of industrial modernization and reconsiderations of its troubled legacy.

Hohlios has received research travel grants and fellowships from the Center for Japanese Studies, Shinjō Itō Chair Fund, and Marian Hahn Simpson Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. As a Blakemore Freeman Fellow, she attended the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (Yokohama, Japan) from 2017 – 2018. For the 2019 – 2020 academic year she is conducting dissertation research as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Research Fellow and is affiliated at Tokyo University of the Arts.

Contributions

Anthropology and I: My Time at the University of Paris Department of Ethnology

This source is an English translation by Stephanie M. Hohlios of a compelling 1971 memoir-essay by Japanese artist Okamoto Tarō—“Watashi to jinruigaku: pari daigaku minzoku gakka no koro (Anthropology and I: My Time at the University of Paris Department of Ethnology)”. Okamoto’s essay “Anthropology and I” sheds light on a widely recognized but little understood…