Katherine听Alexander
- Associate Professor of Chinese
- Undergraduate Faculty Advisor (Chinese)
- Honors Council Representative
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Wednesdays 11am - 12pm or by appointment
Katherine Alexander鈥檚 research interests in early modern China sit at the intersection of literary culture, social history, and religious history. Her first book,听Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing听was published by University of Michigan Press in 2005. 听The book examines the works of evangelical Confucian teacher Yu Zhi (1809-1874), who gave a voice to the zealous side of conservative Confucian reform efforts before, during, and after the Taiping War.
She received her MA and PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, after a BA with honors in Physics and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Beloit College. She joined the faculty at CU91福利社 in 2016.
She is a steering committee member for the Chinese Religious Text Authority project (), an open-access database project seeking to create reliable, thick bibliographic descriptions of Chinese religious texts in order to reconstruct webs of relationships between textual producers, publishers, and distributors of texts before the modern/contemporary era. She also serves on the board of directors for the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions.听
Publications:
- , University of Michigan Press, 2025.
- 鈥淭eaching Through the Uncanny: Red Candle Games鈥 Devotion,鈥 co-authored with Dr. Gregory Scott British Journal of Chinese Studies. 12.2 (July 2022):70-75.
- 鈥,鈥 Journal of Chinese Buddhist Studies.听34 (July 2021):27-62.
- 鈥The Precious Scroll of Liu Xiang:听late Ming Roots and late Qing Proliferation,鈥 Journal of Chinese Religions.听49.1 (May 2021): 49-74.听
- 鈥淐onservative Confucian Values and the Promotion of Oral Performance Literature in late Qing Jiangnan: Yu Zhi's Influence on Two Appropriations of Liu Xiang baojuan鈥 CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature听36.2 (December 2017):89-115.
Research & Teaching Interests:听
Late Imperial/Early Modern China: publication history and print cultures; historical relationship between Chinese popular literatures and popular religions; Taiping Civil War and postwar reconstruction, particularly in relation to didactic literature, popular religions, and elite attitudes towards social change and reform; Chinese women鈥檚 history; Taiwan history and popular religions; cultural histories of relationship between oral performance genres and textualizations of performance; status and uses of Chinese vernaculars.听