Katherine Alexander

Katherine Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Chinese and Undergraduate Faculty Advisor at the University of Colorado. She holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago and a BA in Physics and East Asian Languages from Beloit College. Her research focuses on Late Imperial China, particularly popular religious literature and print cultures in the late Qing era. She explores how Confucian moral reform efforts influenced grassroots social reconstruction post-Taiping War.

Her work emphasizes vernacular morality literature’s role in societal recovery and elite-local interactions. She is a steering committee member for the Chinese Religious Text Authority (CRATA), an open-access database mapping pre-modern Chinese religious texts. Her publications analyze topics like Baojuan literature, Liu Xiang baojuan, and the intersection of Confucianism with oral performance traditions.

Award-winning research includes studies on Red Candle Games’ religious devotion and Ming-Qing era religious texts. She advises undergraduate programs and serves on the Honors Council. Her office hours are Wednesdays 11am-12pm via Zoom.