Professor Choo is a cultural historian specializing in medieval China (ca. 200–1000 CE). She began teaching Chinese History and Religion at Rutgers in 2012. Her recent research centers on four interrelated areas: death and commemorative rituals, epigraphy (especially the entombed epitaphs also known as muzhiming), memory and identity, and gender and religion. Her monograph “Inscribing Death: Burials, Texts and Remembrance in Tang China, 500-1000 CE,” examines the transformations of ancestor worship and the constructions of identity and memory that resulted from the wide dissemination of Buddhist ideas is forthcoming from University of Hawai’i Press. She is currently finishing two other book length monographs. The first, “Blood Debts: Childbirth, Filial Piety, and Women’s Salvation in Chinese Religions, 500–1500 CE,” traces the development and popularization of various soteriologies centered on women’s menstruation and parturition blood and their social impacts. The second, “Being Women in Late Medieval China, 500-1000 CE,” reconstructs women’s everyday during China’s late medieval period using entombed epitaphs. She is also 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).
Humanities
- Jessey Choo
- Research Interests: cultural history of medieval China
