Education
Anne Burkus-Chasson (BA, Oberlin College; MA and PhD, University of California, Berkeley) studies painting and woodblock-printed books of the late Ming (1520–1644). In her work on late imperial China, she has focused on literary and visual strategies of self-representation, the relationship between words and pictorial images, optics and the nature of seeing, in addition to the materiality of illustrated foliated books. Her article “Elegant or Common? Chen Hongshou’s Birthday Presentation Pictures and His Professional Status,” published in The Art Bulletin (June 1994) was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, College Art Association, January 1995. Her book, Through a Forest of Chancellors: Fugitive Histories in Liu Yuan’s Lingyan ge, an Illustrated Book from Seventeenth-Century Suzhou, was published by the Harvard Asia Center in 2010. Her research has been supported by the Louise W. Hackney Fellowship for the Study of Chinese Painting (American Oriental Society), the Association of American University Women, the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in the History of Art and Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
She is currently researching and writing a second book tentatively entitled “Containing the Image: Chen Hongshou (1598/99–1652) and the Illustrated Book,” which delves into the complex relationship between painting and print during the late Ming.