Yui Suzuki

Yui Suzuki (Center Fellow; 2008-2012) is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Maryland. She has taught at UMD since 2006. Suzuki is a specialist in Japanese Buddhist art, and her research explores issues of Japanese religiosity and its manifestations in visual/material culture. Her publications include Medicine Master Buddha: The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2012), which examines the primacy of icons in disseminating the devotional cult of the Medicine Buddha. Suzuki is currently working on images of birth and parturition rites in medieval Japan. Her work attempts to shed light on the complex relationship between invisible, dis-embodied entities and human bodies through the use of magico-religious objects. Part of her findings will be published as a chapter in an edited volume, Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2014).