Jean Tsui

My research focuses on China from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, with particular interests in late imperial Chinese intellectual history, philosophical hermeneutics, aesthetic theory, and translation studies. 

My first monograph, Affective Betrayal: Mind, Music, and Embodied Action in Late Qing China (2024), uses “affect” as an analytical category to illuminate the fragility and fragmentation of Chinese political modernity. The book begins with an observation: after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), one of China’s leading political reformers, presented modern political knowledge through musical and visual forms designed to stimulate the bodily senses. By expanding the reception of textual knowledge beyond reading to include auditory and visual experience, Liang helped generate an epistemic shift, if not a broader intellectual transformation, that accompanied China’s political reforms. 

I am currently working on two new projects. The first explores the influence of the Ming philosopher Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) moral philosophy on the formation of intellectual, literary, and political culture during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The second is a collaborative editorial project: together with Professor On-cho Ng of Penn State University, I am co-editing Volume Four, on the Ming and Qing dynasties, of a six-volume Bloomsbury Publishing series on the cultural history of Confucianism, spanning antiquity to the twenty-first century.