Yui Suzuki

Terasaki Center For Japanese Studies

Established in 1991, the UCLA Terasaki Center has been a platform for research on Japan. Our distinguished faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and the board of advisors have been contributing to the field of Japanese studies for over 20 years.

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Center programs were established with strong support from the local community to promote research and instruction in Japanese studies, with a recent focus on the profound transformations unfolding in contemporary Japanese society.

UCLA Japanese Studies
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Understanding Japan/Japanese culture within a global context.

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Yui Suzuki

Associate Professor, University of Maryland

Art History PhD, 2005
https://arthistory.umd.edu/faculty/Yui%20Suzuki

I joined the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland in 2006, after earning my Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. I am a historian of early medieval Japanese Art whose research examines issues of Japanese religiosity and its manifestations in visual/material culture. I am particularly interested in how humanity’s basic need to understand the unfathomable, intangible something, finds concrete expression through the material and visual realms of religion and art. My interest in Buddhist icons culminated in the book, Medicine Master Buddha: The Iconic Worship of Yakushi in Heian Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2012), which explores the primacy of icons in disseminating the devotional cult of the Medicine Buddha. The book analyzes surviving examples of Medicine Buddha statues from the Heian period (794-1185 CE), which I argue were symbolically and ritually linked to Saichō (766-822 CE), the founder of the Japanese Tendai Buddhist school.