Traditional wood-fired ceramics are compelling objects in many frames of reference. In this lecture I will discuss how materiality (as an aesthetic consideration), material agency (as in contemporary social science and philosophy) and materials science provide rich transdisciplinary context for appreciating the process and products of wood firing.

Hideo Mabuchi is a Professor of Applied Physics here at Stanford University. His degrees (both in physics) are from Princeton (A.B., 1992) and Caltech (Ph.D., 1998); prior to moving to Stanford in 2007 he served as a faculty member at Caltech with appointments in Physics and in Control & Dynamical Systems. His group's technical research program focuses mainly on core issues of quantum engineering, ranging from materials and device physics to circuit theory and new concepts for information processing architectures. He has a strong personal interest in traditional ceramics and through this topic he is exploring interactions with fields such as art and art history, anthropology/archaeology, philosophy and literary theory.