KatherineAlexander

  • Associate Professor of Chinese
  • Undergraduate Faculty Advisor
  • Honors Council Representative
K.Alexander
Address

310

Office Hours

Wednesdays 1:30-2:30pm on Zoom, or by appointment

Katherine Alexander’s research interests in early modern China sit at the intersection of literary culture, social history, and religious history. Her first book,Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qingwas published by University of Michigan Press in 2025. 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 CUBoulder 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.

Publications:

  • , University of Michigan Press, 2025.
  • “Teaching Through the Uncanny: Red Candle Games’ Devotion,” co-authored with Dr. Gregory Scott British Journal of Chinese Studies. 12.2 (July 2022):70-75.
  • “,” Journal of Chinese Buddhist Studies.34 (July 2021):27-62.
  • “The Precious Scroll of Liu Xiang:late Ming Roots and late Qing Proliferation,” Journal of Chinese Religions.49.1 (May 2021): 49-74.
  • “Conservative Confucian Values and the Promotion of Oral Performance Literature in late Qing Jiangnan: Yu Zhi's Influence on Two Appropriations of Liu Xiang baojuan” CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature36.2 (December 2017):89-115.

Research & Teaching Interests:

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’s history; Taiwan history and popular religions; cultural histories of relationship between oral performance genres and textualizations of performance; status and uses of Chinese vernaculars.