Melissa McCormick

Melissa McCormick

(On Leave: AY2023-2024)
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Art and Culture
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Melissa McCormick

McCormick’s interest in art history began while in performing arts high school, where she trained in modern dance. Study of the Japanese language inspired her to pursue Japanese art history at the University of Michigan, where she graduated with a B.A. in art history and Japanese in 1990. In the same year, she won a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities for graduate studies, which she took to the Ph.D. program at Princeton University to study with Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu (1936-2021). She completed her dissertation in 2000, after having spent two years at Gakushūin University in Tokyo under the mentorship of Professor Chino Kaori (1952-2001). McCormick began her teaching career as the Atsumi Assistant Professor of Japanese Art at Columbia University in the Department of Art History and Archaeology and then moved to Harvard as Associate Professor in 2005. She was promoted to Professor with tenure in 2009. Shehas since lectured around the world, including guest professorships in the art history programs at the University of Campinas, Brazil, and the University of Zurich, Switzerland. 

As an art historian with an interdisciplinary approach, McCormick investigates the relationship between pictorial/literary artifacts and social history. Her first book, Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan (University of Washington, 2009) rewrites the history of emaki(narrative picture scrolls) by arguing that a new genre of scroll symbiotic with the short story emerged in the late fifteenth century. Her work examines media specificity and the act of reading, integrating formal, theoretical, philosophical, and historical analyses through original research into premodern readers and viewers. Numerous articles have examined gender and interpretive communities of women readers, writers, and artists, while McCormick’s work on the monument of world literature, the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, has resulted in over a dozen publications in both English and Japanese. Her research was featured in two NHK televised specials (2008, 2019), and is the basis of her monograph, The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion(Princeton University Press, 2018). 

In 2019 McCormick co-curated and co-edited/authored the catalogue for the international loan exhibition The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, named among the top five exhibitions that year by The Washington Post. The exhibition emphasized the female readership and authorship of the tale, while devoting an entire room to the work’s Buddhist interpretation based on McCormick’s research. Current projects include three separate articles on the material poetics of the Buddhist nun-artist Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875); medieval Genji Genealogies as paratexts; and an essay for the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford on interpreting early modern Japanese manuscripts as bridal books and gifted objects.

At Harvard McCormick teaches gateway courses such as Humanities 10 for first-year undergraduates on important works of world literature, philosophy, and the arts, and an introductory survey on the Arts of Japan (HAA18k), which spans the premodern to the contemporary period. Her upper level undergraduate and graduate courses include Gender and Art in Japan; Tea in Japan/America; Threads: Histories and Theories of Clothing and Fashion; The Tale of Genji in Word and Image; Medieval Picture Scrolls; The Lotus Sutra; and a Museum Research course examining works in the Harvard Art Museums to prepare for publications and exhibitions. Her external pedagogical initiatives include teaching and consulting for the Getty’s Connecting Art Histories program to foster the study of non-European art in South America, and an online course, Japanese Books: From Manuscript to Print, which has reached over twenty-thousand enrollees to date. McCormick also serves as a consultant for the performing arts, lending her expertise to artists in the fields of opera, modern dance, and ballet, for performances at venues such as the Japan Society of New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Asia Society of Texas.

Contact Information

485 Broadway,
Cambridge,
MA 02138
p: 617.496.2276