Nicole Rousmaniere

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, PhD, is the founding Director and currently the Research Director of the Sainsbury Institute and Professor of Japanese Art and Culture at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1998. She spent three years on secondment as a Visiting Professor in Cultural Resource Studies at Tokyo University (2006-2009). She published Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval and Modern Japan with Bloomsbury Academic in 2012 and translated Professor Tsuji Nobuo’s A History of Art in Japan with Tokyo University Press in 2018.  She was until recently the IFAC Handa Curator of Japanese Art at the Department of Asia, British Museum, and was the lead curator there for the Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan exhibition in 2007 and the Citi Exhibition Manga held in the Sainsbury Exhibition Galleries, British Museum in 2019.

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere’s previous research includes completing a manuscript for the British Museum Press entitled Four Hundred Years of Japanese Porcelain based on the British Museum holdings, to be published in 2014. Her research interests include early modern to contemporary ceramics in East Asia and particularly Japan, East Asian trade networks, the history of archaeology and collecting things Japanese.

She also has a particular interest in contemporary craft art, manga and popular culture in Japan. She was lead curator of the ambitious Citi Manga exhibition at the British Museum (2019) and the accompanying book published by Thames and Hudson. This comprehensive exhibition on manga traced its evolution, influences, current forms and impact. In terms of visitor numbers, demographics, financial intake (including shop profits) and profile building for the museum, the Manga exhibition was considered the most innovative and successful exhibition at the British Museum in the last two decades.