Louise Allison Cort is a craft historian. Her research has focused on ceramics—both historical and contemporary, both stoneware and earthenware—made in Japan, India, and Mainland Southeast Asia. Ceramic production still rooted in long-standing rural communities has been of special interest. In 1961, the American Field Service high school exchange program sent her to Japan and introduced her to Asian material culture. Fascination with the unfamiliar kitchen utensils that her host mother used led to a broad interest in craft traditions and eventually to graduate studies in Japanese art history at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University, 1966–1969. There her advisor, Dr. Mary Tregear, a specialist in Chinese ceramics, encouraged her to narrow her focus to ceramics for her thesis. While living in Tokyo for a year of advanced language studies at the Inter-University Center, 1967-1968, she encountered Shigaraki, a stoneware ceramic producing community with a 700-year-old continuous tradition, and chose it as the subject of her thesis. Eventually, after further research in Japan 1976-79, the thesis became a book, Shigaraki, Potters’ Valley (Kodansha International, 1979; Weatherhill, 2000). 

Louise first encountered the ritual use of earthenware on her initial visit to India in 1973. During a visit to Puri, she learned of the requirement of just a single use for ritually-pure earthenware, whether for commercial teacups or for the pots used to cook the food offerings in the kitchen of the Jagannath Temple. The brief lives of these earthenware vessels contrasted fundamentally to the cherished durability of stoneware made in Japan and used for storage or for the tea ceremony. But she encountered earthenware again while living in Japan 1976-79 and learned that it had been highly important historically, was nearly forgotten in the present day, but still playing a meaningful role in shrine rituals. Wanting to know more about this distinctive role for earthenware led her back to India and to the collaborative research project with Purna Chandra Mishra.

She began a third phase of her ceramics studies in 1989, when she made the first of many visits to mainland Southeast Asia, specifically to Northeast Thailand, where she found an abundance of village-based production of both stoneware, by men, and earthenware, by women. Interested in the juxtaposition of the two different types of ceramic production, she began a long-term collaboration with Japanese ceramic archaeologist Narasaki Shoichi and cultural anthropologists Leedom Lefferts to survey and document the technical and ethnic variations among ceramic producing villages throughout Thailand and in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Yunnan province, China. 

Louise’s ongoing research was supported by her position as curator for ceramics at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, now the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, where she worked from 1981 to 2018. During that time she made almost annual visits to East and Southeast Asia. Previously, from 1969 to 1976, she served as assistant curator in the Department of Oriental Art, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.