Professor Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer

Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer is Deputy Director and Professor of Japanese Arts at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. 

Prof Bogdanova-Kummer is an art historian specialising in modern Japanese art. She received her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University and held postdoctoral positions at Emory University, Atlanta, and Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C., before joining the Sainsbury Institute. 

She is the author of Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde (Japanese Visual Culture Series 19, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020), which spotlights postwar calligraphers’ contribution to global abstract art in the 1950s and 60s, and their creative collaborations and competitive interconnections with artists of the European Art Informel and American Abstract Expressionism. 

Her recent article “Zen Violence: The Legacy of Nantenbō Tōjū's Calligraphy in the Postwar Avant-Garde” won the Kenneth B. Pyle Prize for the best article published in the Journal of Japanese Studies in 2025. She is currently working on her second book project on the history of calligraphy modernization in East Asia, which explores the role of Tokyo’s calligraphic community within the cultural landscape of the Japanese Empire. She also serves as Vice-President of Japan Art History Forum. 

Her research interests include postwar art in Japan; modern calligraphy history in East Asia; transcultural studies; abstract art; and the relationship between image and language, and she is available to supervise PhD and MA projects in these and related areas.

• Postwar art in Japan
• Modern calligraphy history in East Asia
• Transcultural studies
• Abstract art
• The relationship between image and language in modern Japan