Jean Tsui is a visiting scholar at the Humanities Institute at Penn State University. Her research focuses on late imperial to modern Chinese literature and intellectual history.

Her first monograph, Affective Betrayal: Mind, Music, and Embodied Action in Late Qing China (2024), seeks to introduce an “affective turn” to the study of China’s political modernization process. In this book, Jean studies the musical and visual representations of the progressive reformer Liang Qichao’s (1873-1929) political writings, emphasizing how Liang expanded the reception of textual knowledge from reading to listening and visualizing experiences. By tracing the marginalized academic and philosophical positions Liang sought to restore in this uncharted epistemic transition, Jean argues that the formation of China’s modern “political” order was contingent on the radical restructuring of the internal “moral, philosophical, and intellectual” order.

At the Humanities Institutes, Jean is working on two new but closely-related research projects. One examines the Ming philosopher Wang Yangming’s (1472-1529) later poetry; the other explores the influences Wang’s moral philosophy exerted on the formation of the intellectual, literary, and political culture in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).   

Jean is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at the College of Staten Island, the City University of New York. She received her PhD from UC Irvine.