Craig Clunas is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford. Born in Aberdeen, he studied Chinese at Cambridge and in Beijing in the last years of the Cultural Revolution, before graduate studies at London University. He has been a curator of Chinese art at the V&A Museum, and taught art history at the universities of Sussex and Chicago, as well as at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is the author of many books on China’s art and culture, including Superfluous Things: Social Status and Material Culture in Early Modern China (1991), Art in China (1997), Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (1997), and most recently Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China (2007).