Jessey J.C. Choo 朱雋琪
Jessey Choo (Ph.D., Princeton) is an Associate Professor of Chinese History and Religion at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. As a historian specialising in China’s medieval period (200–1000 CE), her research focuses on cultural and religious practices related to childbirth, death, and memory, as well as women’s acquisition and exercise of personal agency in everyday life.
Her first book, Inscribing Death: Burials, Representations, and Remembrance in Tang China, 618–907 CE (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022), examines how people in late medieval China used burial and entombed epitaph inscriptions (muzhiming) to shape and preserve the identities and memories of the deceased, themselves, and their families.
She is currently working on two book-length monographs. The first, The Blood Debts: Childbearing, Filial Piety, and Women’s Soteriology in Chinese Religions, 600–1500 CE, explores the growing linkages between childbearing and women’s religious salvation during China’s middle period. This book traces the rise of a Budho-Daoist soteriology centred on women’s damnation to, and deliverance from, a hell filled with uterine blood and its connection to evolving notions of filial piety and women’s personal agency in religious discourses and practices throughout this period.
The second monograph, co-authored with Alexei Ditter, is titled The Study of Medieval Chinese Entombed Epitaphs. This book serves as both a primer for reading entombed epitaph inscriptions—key historical artefacts that have been excavated in significant numbers in recent decades, transforming the field of medieval studies—and an anthology of translations of pieces presented by experts from various disciplines at the first four New Frontiers in the Study of Medieval China workshops, which she co-organised with Alexei Ditter.
In addition, she is a co-editor of Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping Guangji (Hackett Publishing Co., 2017), as well as the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.
Her research has been supported by multiple grants and fellowships, most recently including a membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (2024–2025), a fellowship from the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Cologne in Germany (2019), and a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Scholar Grant (2018–19).
Address: Scott Hall, Room 341
43 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Her first book, Inscribing Death: Burials, Representations, and Remembrance in Tang China, 618–907 CE (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022), examines how people in late medieval China used burial and entombed epitaph inscriptions (muzhiming) to shape and preserve the identities and memories of the deceased, themselves, and their families.
She is currently working on two book-length monographs. The first, The Blood Debts: Childbearing, Filial Piety, and Women’s Soteriology in Chinese Religions, 600–1500 CE, explores the growing linkages between childbearing and women’s religious salvation during China’s middle period. This book traces the rise of a Budho-Daoist soteriology centred on women’s damnation to, and deliverance from, a hell filled with uterine blood and its connection to evolving notions of filial piety and women’s personal agency in religious discourses and practices throughout this period.
The second monograph, co-authored with Alexei Ditter, is titled The Study of Medieval Chinese Entombed Epitaphs. This book serves as both a primer for reading entombed epitaph inscriptions—key historical artefacts that have been excavated in significant numbers in recent decades, transforming the field of medieval studies—and an anthology of translations of pieces presented by experts from various disciplines at the first four New Frontiers in the Study of Medieval China workshops, which she co-organised with Alexei Ditter.
In addition, she is a co-editor of Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (Columbia University Press, 2014) and Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the Taiping Guangji (Hackett Publishing Co., 2017), as well as the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.
Her research has been supported by multiple grants and fellowships, most recently including a membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (2024–2025), a fellowship from the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Cologne in Germany (2019), and a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Scholar Grant (2018–19).
Address: Scott Hall, Room 341
43 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
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Workshops by Jessey J.C. Choo 朱雋琪
1. Defining and delineating “textuality” and “materiality”
What does it mean to look at these objects and texts in terms of their “textuality” or their “materiality”? How does one’s categorization of and approach towards these materials change when an emphasis is placed on one aspect over another?
2. Interaction between texts and materials
How does consideration of a text’s material aspects, as well as its position within its material context, change our perspective and understanding of those texts? For example, how does our understanding of muzhiming change when they are viewed as one among many objects buried in the tomb?
3. Production of texts and materials
How does consideration of the context (social, religious, material, political, etc.) within which these texts and materials were produced change how we understand them? For example, what differences might be identified between commemorative texts and objects produced by the commission, or by the court or individual families? How might the relative social status of authors, calligraphers, inscribers, and subjects positively or negatively impact the anticipated perception of the deceased?
4. Consumption of texts and materials
How were these texts and materials consumed by the contemporary or near-contemporary audiences they nominally might address? In addition to consumption in anticipated ways by those audiences, in what ways were texts and materials consumed for other purposes, or even “re-purposed” to serve new ends?
This workshop is open to all faculty and students but RSVP is required. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.reed.edu/new-frontiers/index.html
Publications by Jessey J.C. Choo 朱雋琪
1. Defining and delineating “textuality” and “materiality”
What does it mean to look at these objects and texts in terms of their “textuality” or their “materiality”? How does one’s categorization of and approach towards these materials change when an emphasis is placed on one aspect over another?
2. Interaction between texts and materials
How does consideration of a text’s material aspects, as well as its position within its material context, change our perspective and understanding of those texts? For example, how does our understanding of muzhiming change when they are viewed as one among many objects buried in the tomb?
3. Production of texts and materials
How does consideration of the context (social, religious, material, political, etc.) within which these texts and materials were produced change how we understand them? For example, what differences might be identified between commemorative texts and objects produced by the commission, or by the court or individual families? How might the relative social status of authors, calligraphers, inscribers, and subjects positively or negatively impact the anticipated perception of the deceased?
4. Consumption of texts and materials
How were these texts and materials consumed by the contemporary or near-contemporary audiences they nominally might address? In addition to consumption in anticipated ways by those audiences, in what ways were texts and materials consumed for other purposes, or even “re-purposed” to serve new ends?
This workshop is open to all faculty and students but RSVP is required. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.reed.edu/new-frontiers/index.html