In October 2025, Christopher Maxwell was named chair of European applied arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. A curator in the department since 2022, Maxwell was instrumental in the reinstallation of the applied arts galleries at the museum, which opened in July after an extensive three-year renovation, now showing more than 300 pieces of furniture, silver, ceramics and glass made between 1600 and 1900. He is working on a new publication on one of the institute’s most cherished displays – the Thorne Miniature Rooms – while also curating an installation of never-before-published Renaissance ceramics from a private collection, slated for spring. As a curator at the Corning Museum of Glass from 2016–22, Maxwell organised ‘In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s’. Perhaps the museum’s most high-profile display in recent years, the exhibition and its accompanying publication offered an unprecedented view of the ways that glass production for the wealthy shaped the cultural values of the period – and was made possible only by colonialism. Maxwell has also worked at the V&A and the Royal Collection Trust.