Sherry Fowler

Sherry Fowler is Professor of Japanese Art History at the University of Kansas. At present, she is serving as President of the Japanese Art History Forum (JAHF) and as a member of the Archives of Asian Art editorial board. Research for her book Buddhist Bells and Dragons: Under and Over Water, In and Out of Japan, University of Hawaiʻi Press (2025) was generously supported by a Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies / American Council of Learned Society, an Ishibashi Foundation / Japan Foundation Fellowship and the book won a College of Arts and Sciences Research Product Award in 2025. Other publications include the books Accounts and Images of Six Kannon in Japan (2005) and Murōji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple (2016), and over twenty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.

Fowler’s research interests include pre-modern Japanese sculpture, prints, metalwork, foreign interactions with Japanese art, pilgrimage, issues of collecting, ritual, and tattoos. Her article, “From Christian Church to Buddhist Temple: The Remarkable Conversion of the 1577 Nanbanji Bell at Shunkōin in Japan,” on Buddhist/Christian exchanges in sixteenth-century Kyoto, will appear in vol. 86, no. 1 of the journal Artibus Asiae in 2026. She is currently researching the religious dimensions of the Japanese dragon tattoo. This year she is delighted to be helping with the exhibition Visions of the Sacred from the Japanese Past: Visual and Material Culture of Buddhist Practice and Devotion, sponsored by the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Standford University, which will be held in 2027.