Kristopher W. Kersey researches the history and theory of art, with a primary focus on Japanese art, design, and aesthetics. His first book Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity (Penn State University Press, 2024) models a new paradigm for the study of art history, one that moves beyond reductive West/rest and modern/pre-modern frameworks. The book was awarded the 2025 Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research (Medieval Academy of America) and was shortlisted for the 2025 Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize.
He is currently at work on two monographs. The first, “Art as Metabolism: Fragmentation, Decay, and Assemblage,” discusses the nature of creativity, cultural heritage, sustainability, and archival survival; the second, “The Lens of Language and the Diversity of Sight,” interrogates image theory, linguistic imperialism, and the ways in which language inflects trans-cultural aesthetic experience. Shorter essays address an array of topics: the encounter with Europe ca. 1600 CE, the trope of impermanence, death and Buddhist manuscript culture, theory and historiography, media theory, and archival anxieties in the Anthropocene.
In summer semester 2025, he was Ishibashi Foundation Visiting Professor of Japanese Art History at Universität Heidelberg (Germany). For the academic year 2025-2026 he is in residence as a fellow with the Centre for Advanced Study “inherit. heritage in transformation” (a BMFTR-funded Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).
Major past awards include a Getty Scholar fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, a postdoctoral fellowship from the European Research Council (with Global Horizons in Pre-Modern Art at the University of Bern), an Anne van Biema Fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art (Washington, DC), and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington, DC).
In 2023–24, he held the William Andrews Clark Professorship at the UCLA Clark Memorial Library, where he organized the core program Open Edo: Diverse, Ecological, and Global Perspectives on Japanese Art, 1603–1868. The program entailed three conferences, which respectively addressed intercultural exchange in early modern Japan, environmental and eco-critical art history, and Ryukyuan and Ainu art. An edited volume is underway.
He is a member of the First-Generation Faculty Initiative and is on the advisory boards for the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Center for 17th-and-18th-Century Studies, and the Center for Buddhist Studies. He is also an affiliated faculty member with Global Antiquity.