Professor Maria H.A. Jaschok

Professor Maria H.A. Jaschok (PhD London/SOAS) formerly Director of the International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall, 2000-2018, she is currently a Senior Research Associate of the Contemporary China Studies Programme in OSGA, and Supervisor and Tutor for Masters in Women’s Studies. She is holding a Visiting Professorship with King’s College, London, 2019-2021.

Maria Jaschok followed the award of her doctorate with a teaching/supervisory position at Zhongshan University, Guangzhou, enabling her to continue fieldwork in Shunde county in Guangdong. Maria’s decision to live in China for a prolonged period was motivated by her conviction (furthermore receiving theoretical and methodological reinforcement through education as social historian and, importantly, as anthropologist) that only a prolonged and deep (directly experienced) immersion in Chinese society would facilitate the desired degree of ‘near-instinctive’ familiarity with a country about which she had chosen to teach and conduct research. That conviction shaped subsequent choices in relation to her academic career.  It took her from a more conventional appointment as lecturer and director of Chinese Studies at Long Island University, USA, where she set up undergraduate study programs in Taiwan and in mainland China, to participation in ambitious projects (when she joined Chinese feminist academics to set up a first international women’s college in China, becoming its vice-principal and professor of gender studies,  as well as establish a first Chinese Women’s Museum, where, as its deputy director she initiated a range of research/exhibition projects), and to directorship of the International  Gender Studies Centre in Oxford,  where she continued participation in international research projects, including China and Southeast Asia. 

Maria’s research interests and topics of investigation have most importantly arisen from her many years of research and life in China, derived from close observations of rapidly (and unevenly) changing moral and political economies, particularly in their gendered manifestations and performances, and from the serendipity of (sometimes fateful) chance encounters and random conversations. Early research and writing focused on kinship, concubinage and domestic servitude in the early twentieth century of a modernizing and industrializing southern China, including the British Colony of Hong Kong, and shifted in the course of time and with change of discursive/research contexts to anthropology of religion (Islam), processes of indigenization under female-led Islamic (but also other religious) institutions and the place and marginality of religious identity in the feminist historiography of China. Long years of close research partnerships and friendships in the field engendered interest in feminist theorizing and ethnographic methodology and led to writing on collaborative modes of cross-cultural research and authorship.

Maria’s most recent participation in a team-led research project (supported by a Leverhulme grant) entailed collaboration with ethnomusicologists and anthropologists of Islam in China with an interest in sensory anthropology. Continuing to work with her Chinese colleague of many years of standing, Shui Jingjun, Maria has produced articles and chapters related to the musical soundscapes of women’s mosques and is currently co-editing a volume on Islam in China and ethnography.  She has also commenced work on two books, one is centered on feminist debates surrounding voice, empowerment and silence (utilizing discourse analysis of chants from women’s mosque oral traditions) and the other book entails a return to Maria’s participation in a key moment of Chinese feminism and the attempt by the feminist philosopher and theoretician Li Xiaojiang (around the time of the Beijing World Women’s Congress) to internationalize the HE curriculum and to develop a feminist educational curriculum with Chinese characteristics.

Maria is bringing her China research track-record into a new research initiative (based at King’s College, London) on patriarchal carvings of female flesh (Patriarchal Inscriptions), embracing historical and contemporary practices, from footbinding and corseting to scarification, female genital mutilation, body modification and self-harm. The objective is the establishment of a research program including longitudinal research based on cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary approaches, uses of multi-media technology and educational applications.

Current supervision

Ling Tang: Digital and Gendered Guanxi: Urban Chinese Businesswomen in the Internet Age (doctoral thesis)

Aga Zuoshi: Experiencing Development on China’s Frontier: The Nuosu’s Bridewealth (doctoral thesis)

Benedicte Wulff: Gender, ethnicity, and protection: Danish women missionaries in China at the beginning of the 20th century (undergraduate dissertation)

Dominique Fortes: When marketing isn’t a brand enhancer: an exploration of the limited appeal of Western fashion brands advertising in China (MSc, Chinese Studies)

Dorina Heller: Mapping Chinese Feminisms: Qiu Jin-A Contested National Heroine (M.St., Women’s Studies)

Stephanie Cheng: The state of affairs; precarious relationships and the institution of family in China (MSc, Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology)

Publications

Co-authored with her research partner Shui Jingjun, the study of female-led Islamic traditions in China was published in English under the title of The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam (Richmond: Curzon) and in Chinese under the title of  中国清真女寺史  (Sanlian Chubanshe, Harvard-Yench'ing Academic Library Series) was followed by a sequel, Women, Religion, and Space in China, published by Routledge. An outcome of recently completed research collaboration on ethnographies of Islamic soundscapes – a study of women’s religious voices, empowerment and traditions of silence in the context of Islamic resurgence in China – will complete the trilogy on Chinese women’s mosques. 

Maria is currently finalizing several submissions: a co-edited volume on Islam and ethnography in China (Hawai’i U.P.), a contribution to a Handbook on Islam (OUP) and a chapter in an edited volume on China’s Hui Muslim Diaspora.