Aya Louisa McDonald is Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Her range of interest in both research and teaching includes modern and contemporary Japanese art, manga and anime; themes of violence in contemporary Japanese art, Japanese war art of WWII, the historical relationship between art and war, ethics and art, Japanese art and the West - historical and contemporary interconnections, and the modern Japanese artist, Foujita Tsouguharu (1886-1968).

Her most recent publication is an essay on the Foujita estate in the College Art Association’s Art Journal – The Politics of Legacy – Position Papers, July 2017.

She has two manuscripts being prepared for publication: a comprehensive study of Foujita Tsugouharu’s confrontation with Japanese and European modernism; and a monograph dedicated to Foujita’s war art, created primarily for the Japanese military from 1937-1945.

Other work-in- progress includes individual papers on “Horror and the Grotesque in the Later War Art of Foujita Tsugouharu;” “Godzilla’s Children: Makoto Aida, Takashi Murakami, and Tabaimo – the Unholy Trinity of Contemporary Japanese Art;” and “Disparate Reactions to the Art of Foujita in France and Japan in the 1920’s;” all originally presented as conference papers 2016-1017.