Dr. Alexander's work focuses on narratives - historical, fictional, religious - and how in the midst of disaster some reformers of the late Qing wove stories about the world they hoped to rebuild for good, even as their faith in collective goodness, and its ability to be harnessed for moral (and socio-political) restoration, faltered. Her first book, Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the late Qing (U of Michigan Press, 2025) focuses on one mid-19th century reformer and his extensive publications across a variety of genres, which targeted diverse social audiences in the hope of effecting moral change throughout society. Her new research project engages with nineteenth century collections of morality tales and anecdotal literature, including hearsay, which were compiled into morally edifying collections, and considers the the way such stories distill and reproduce literati social ties in print. Her new project also tracks these collections into the early twentieth century to explore how readers and producers in the modern era, in the process of negotiating their relationships with China's traditional literature, reframed and reimagined this work as still relevant.
