Staff:Shilla Lee

Shilla Lee is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on rural social changes in Japan and contemporary forms of traditional craft practices. She received her Ph.D. from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in 2022 and worked as a doctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Germany), within the Department "Anthropology of Economic Experimentation" from 2017 to 2022. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, UK, working on her first book publication that provides a critical overview of Japan's recent regional revitalisation policies and the implication of the rise of creativity rhetoric in rural regions. Based on her fieldwork in Tamba Sasayama (Hyōgo prefecture), Japan, in 2018-19, she investigates the regional revitalization policies led by the municipal government and the involvement of local creative agents, the local traditional craftspeople of Tamba pottery, in the promotion of a new regional image of the creative village.