Maris Boyd Gillette is the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Museum Studies and Community History and Director of the Museum Studies program. She is a sociocultural anthropologist and filmmaker who has studied porcelain workers and entrepreneurs in Jingdezhen (southeast China) and urban Chinese Muslims in Xi’an (northwest China). Gillette took her Ph.D in Anthropology from Harvard University, and has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. She has curated and co-curated exhibits and installations at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Haverford College, and the Missouri History Museum. Her 2009 documentary Broken Pots Broken Dreams has been shown at film festivals in Russia, France, and the US. Together with Louis Massiah of Scribe Media Center, Gillette co-directed the planning phase of the community history project Muslim Voices of Philadelphia, and facilitated several community-based documentary shorts in the Philadelphia area. Recent publications include a special issue of Visual Anthropology Review on ethnographic film in China (30:1, 2014) and an article on labor in Jingdezhen’s ceramic industry (Anthropology of Work Review 35:1, 2014). Her book, China’s Porcelain Capital: the Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in November 2016.

Maris Gillette's groundbreaking study tells the story of Jingdezhen, China's porcelain capital, from its origins in 1004 in Song dynasty China to the present day.

Gillette explores how Jingdezhen has been affected by state involvement in porcelain production, particularly during the long 20th century. She considers how the Chinese government has consumed, invested in, taxed and managed the local ceramics industry, and the effects of this state intervention on ceramists' lives, their local environment and the nature of the goods they produce. Gillette traces how Jingdezhen experienced the transition from imperial rule to state ownership under communism, the changing fortunes of the ceramics industry in the early 21st century, the decay and decline that accompanied privatisation, and a revival brought about by an entrepreneurial culture focusing on the manufacture of highly-prized 'art porcelain'. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/chinas-porcelain-capital-9781474259422/#sthash.4TQEDn9u.dpufReviews

“Historians like to boast of getting their hands dirty in the archives. In this fascinating book, Maris Gillette got her feet muddy to tell the 1000-year story of how the Chinese state, global markets and the potters of Jingdezhen have interacted to produce the most extraordinary porcelains in the world.” – Dr Steven Conn, W E Smith Professor of History at Miami University, USA

“Positioning ethnographic writing at the center of art historical and anthropological perspectives, Gillette makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of cultural production in China. This astute and intimate portrait uses first-rate scholarship and a unique apprenticeship in the community to reveal the complexities of contemporary ceramic production in Jingdezhen.” – Dr Morgan Perkins, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Art at the State University of New York, USA

“What a story, the town of Jingdezhen! It began making ceramics over a thousand years ago, produced porcelain for emperors of four dynasties while it made blue-and-white ware famous throughout the world, declined sadly under the Nationalist Republic, revived under Mao's state socialism, and was abruptly shut down in China's economic reforms of the 1990s, only to emerge for the third time as a destination for tourists and artists in the 21s century. Maris Gillette tells this story in a clear, fast-moving narrative, completely free of academic jargon, that will appeal to scholarly and popular readers alike.” – Dr Stevan Harrell, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, USA

“A fascinating read providing an historic and contemporary context of a city in China, whose economic survival and worldwide fame has been uniquely due to a single product, porcelain. For me, involved in education and as an artist potter making work on a regular basis in 'Jingdezhen' it was both intriguing in its narrative and hugely informative.” – Felicity Aylieff, Head of Programme for Ceramics and Glass at the Royal Academy of Art, UK

- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/chinas-porcelain-capital-9781474259422/#sthash.4TQEDn9u.dpuf