The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. To commemorate this celebration, the department spotlights some of its alumni.
Nicholas Liou ’20 recently shared about his experiences in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, and the impact of those experiences.
Liou:
“I was an art history major at Northwestern (Class of ’20) and took my first ALC class with Prof. Gaubatz in the spring of my sophomore year, Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture: 17th – 19th c., as a way to flesh out my art historical interests in Japan and East Asia more broadly. I went on to take Taiwanese New Wave Cinema with Prof. Byrnes and both of Prof. Noonan’s Japanese Cinema classes. As I decided to more seriously pursue Japanese art history, I also took Japanese language courses in the department my third and fourth years, studying with Taira Sensei, Sato Sensei, Sanga Sensei, and Shiojima Sensei. (I feel very fortunate to have been taught by all the Japanese language and culture professors when I was at Northwestern!)
All of these classes have informed my interest in and study of art history both when I was an undergrad and in my current graduate studies. During my senior year, I wrote an art history senior thesis about the photomontage of Japanese artist and graphic designer Kimura Tsunehisa and was able to access texts in Japanese because I took language classes. Currently I am a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Williams College Museum of Art (2021-2024) and a second year MA student in the Williams College/Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in the History of Art (Class of ’24). In the museum’s curatorial department, one of the projects I have been working on centers on an album of kabuki actor prints in the collection and has greatly benefited from my study of kabuki in Prof. Gaubatz’s class. In my academic work, I have recently started engaging with ecocritical art historical methods and wrote a paper last semester about director Naomi Kawase’s 2007 film The Mourning Forest, which I first watched and was completely taken by in Prof. Noonan’s class. In both of these examples and others, I have been able to go further with my research by reading sources in Japanese. After graduating, I’m also thinking about pursuing a PhD in art history and I’m confident Japan will continue to be a geographical focus of mine.
Most recently, I just returned from a three week long study trip in January co-leading the first year class of Williams Art History MA students to Japan with a professor in the College’s comparative literature department. We traveled to Kyoto, Nara, Naoshima, and Tokyo looking at everything from Buddhist statuary and traditional wooden architecture to postwar artistic movements and contemporary exhibitions. We also had the opportunity to attend a traditional puppet play (bunraku) and kabuki while we were there. It was an incredible trip of a lifetime for both myself and the students, and I feel so thankful to have had the opportunity to both plan and lead the trip.”