Kristopher Kersey’s first book honored by Medieval Academy of America
Courtesy of Kristopher W. Kersey (left); Penn State University Press
Kersey said he hopes his first book encourages scholars from different disciplines to form new connections.
| February 27, 2025
With his first book, UCLA art historian Kristopher W. Kersey invites readers to rethink traditional divides — those between premodern and modern art, and between Western and non-Western art.
In “Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity” (Penn State University Press, 2024), Kersey explores artifacts from 12th-century Japan with characteristics that are generally associated with modern art, and demonstrates that the period is more expansive in style and form than how it has traditionally been defined by Eurocentric art history.
For his work, Kersey has been honored by the Medieval Academy of America with the 2025 Monica H. Green Prize, which recognizes projects demonstrating the value of medieval studies in the present day. In its award citation, the academy praises “Facing Images” for provoking readers to “recognize moments in the human archive when a person of the distant past had a similar emotion, used a similar artistic strategy or saw something in a manner that is consonant with the present viewer.”
Kersey said he was gratified to be acknowledged for a text that he hoped would encourage scholars to form new connections across disciplines.
“I wanted to build bridges between different communities of scholarship,” he said. “Everything that’s ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ or ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ is sometimes treated as if it were distinct and disconnected. These two binary ways of thinking have been really problematic; I wanted to deconstruct those binaries.
“People who study the medieval period should understand the relevance of modernity to their work and vice-versa. We can’t stay in our subfields; we can think more capaciously about the temporal boundaries of our work.”
Kersey wrote much of the text during the COVID-19 pandemic; he said the process itself even helped him connect his research subject to the 21st century.
“I realized that while I was writing about surfaces and screens — pages of manuscripts and the surfaces of icons — I was also spending my whole life staring at screens in front of me, so this was about the present in some ways, too.”
Kersey, a UCLA faculty member since 2018, is an affiliated faculty member of the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. He teaches lecture courses on modern and contemporary Japanese art and the history of print in Japan, as well as a general education course on the arts of Japan.
Kersey is already at work on his next two books, including one tentatively titled “Art as Metabolism: Fragmentation, Decay, and Assemblage,” which examines the nature of creativity, cultural heritage and archival survival.
The award, which carries a $1,000 prize, will be presented at a ceremony in Boston on March 22.