Faculty

Sarah E. Fraser (Ph.D. 1996, UC Berkeley; Associate Professor) teaches and researches primarily in Chinese painting with an emphasis on questions of artistic enterprise in medieval Buddhist art and national identity formation through archaeological and ethnographic projects in the Republican period (1912-1949). Her books include Performing the Visual: Buddhist Wall Painting Practice in China and Central Asia, 618-960 (Stanford University Press, 2004), which concerns Chinese theories of spontaneity and workshop production in the middle period. Performing was nominated for the College Art Association’s annual award for best art history book 2005; her book was recognized as a Choice Outstanding Academic title in 2004. Fraser's edited volume on Buddhist material culture published by the Shanghai Fine Arts Publishers, 2003, entitled Merit, Opulence and the Buddhist Network of Wealth, contains the Chinese proceedings of a major conference she organized with Peking University in 2001. She was the Chief Editor of wall painting and sculpture for the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA), part of ARTstor––a new genre of web-based, art history research publication.

Her articles and essays include contributions to Artibus Asiae, Orientations, L'art de Dunhuang à la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Asia Major, and the Tenth Tibetan Studies Conference, Oxford University. She has received fellowships from the Getty Center for Arts and Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, National Academy of Sciences, The Luce Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH. In 2007-2008 Fraser will be residence as a Getty Scholar in Los Angeles finishing a manuscript, What is Chinese About Chinese Art? Archaeology, Identity, and Politics, 1928-1947. 2007-2010 she is a Frederick Burkhardt Fellow awarded for ambitious cross-disciplinary projects. In 1999-2000 she was appointed Directrice d’Études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. Fraser has directed major international research projects on Buddhist art at Northwestern. Under the auspices of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she served as Dunhuang Project Director, 1999-2004. She also founded and directed a Luce Foundation Cooperative Research project on technology and archaeology with the Dunhuang Research Foundation and Peking University, 1998-2003. Prof. Fraser served as Art History Department Chair 2004-2007 and Director of Graduate Studies 2000-2003.

s-fraser2@northwestern.edu

http://buddhist-art.arthistory.northwestern.edu/buddhistweb/index.html

http://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/winter2006/feature/fraser.html

Curriculum Vitae