YUKIO LIPPIT
Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura Professor of History of Art and Architecture;
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of History of Art and Architecture;
Harvard College Professor
Yukio Lippit received his B.A. (1993) in Literature from Harvard University and his M.A. (1998) and Ph.D. (2003) in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University before becoming a member of Harvard’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture in 2003. In addition to affiliations with the Centre Parisien d’Etudes Critiques (1993-4) and the University of Tokyo (1998-2000), he has spent a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow (2002-3), and been a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow (2004-5). He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, Heidelberg University, University of Campinas in Brazil, and University of Los Andes in Bogota.
Professor Lippit’s research and teaching interests center around Japanese painting of the medieval (1200-1600) and early modern eras (1600-1868), as well as the history of Japanese architecture. His book Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan (2012) was awarded the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award by the College Art Association and the John Whitney Hall Book Prize by the Association of Asian Studies. His article “Of Modes and Manners in Medieval Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshū’s Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495” was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by CAA in 2013. Other books include: Sesson Shūkei: A Zen-Monk-Painter in Medieval Japan (with Frank Feltens), Painting Edo: Selections from the Feinberg Collection of Japanese Art (with Rachel Saunders), The Artist in Edo, Irresolution: The Paintings of Yoshiaki Shimizu, Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Impossible Painting, Sōtatsu: Making Waves (with James Ulak), The Thinking Hand: Tools and Traditions of the Japanese Carpenter (with Mark Mulligan), Kenzo Tange: Architecture for the World (with Seng Kuan), Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (1716-1800), and Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan (with Gregory Levine).
Current book projects focus on medieval ink painting and the Shōsōin Treasury. From 2013 to 2018, Professor Lippit served as the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. In 2018, he was appointed Harvard College Professor for a five-year term for distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching.