• April 2025 – Present | Doctoral student, Graduate School of Humanities, University of Osaka (Supervisor: Professor Hiroshige Okada). A Grantee of “Osaka University JST SPRING Fellowship,” 2025–2027
• August 2024 – February 2025 | Curatorial and Editorial Associate of a Special Exhibition, “Emulation and Admiration: Two Stories of Collecting European Art – European Master Paintings from The San Diego Museum of Art and The National Museum of Western Art” (March 11th – June 8th, 2025), at The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
• September 2022 – June 2024 | MA with Distinction in Public History. Central European University (Vienna/Budapest) and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The two-year MA program “History in the Public Sphere” was funded by Erasmus Mundus’s EMJMD and the Japanese government’s MEXT.
• April 2018 – March 2022 | BA in Spanish Language and Culture. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. BA dissertation focused on Diego Velázquez’s Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1617–18, The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) with an attempt to reinterpret the painting partly with the artist’s probable Jewish origins. 

Kana Fukumoto is a doctoral student specializing in Spanish Art History of the early modern period, with particular interest in the visual representation of non-European subjects that appear in artworks created across the Spanish Empire. Her research interrogates the complex dynamics of representing racial or ethnic differences within the pictorial tradition of specific locations. Kana’s MA dissertation titled “Making Visible the Invisible: The Civic Life of Africans Visualized in Sevillian Paintings from 1600 to 1750,” analyzed the complex yet multivalent significations of Black African figures in paintings by Juan de Roelas, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Domingo Martínez, by having as its entry point Diego Velázquez’s Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1617–18, The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin). With her master’s study, she illustrated how these African figures functioned in the works created in Seville - one of the principal centers in the trans-Atlantic slave trade - revealing a complex interplay between artistic convention, social reality, and imperial ideology.

Her doctoral project, “Representations of Black Africans and Other Non-Europeans in Art across the Spanish Empire during the Early Modern Period,” extends beyond nation-centered art historical paradigms to examine visual culture through the conceptual framework or political entity of “empire.” This transcontinental approach integrates methodologies from diverse fields, including Atlantic slave trade studies, missionary history, and material and human circulations history. Through this interdisciplinary lens centered on art history, Kana aims to elucidate how artistic representations reflected and, at times, contributed to construct racial categories or hierarchies while simultaneously revealing the Hispanic ways of representing otherness.