Professor Maria Jaschok is a Senior Research Associate of the Contemporary China Studies Programme and a member of the steering committee of the Masters in Women’s/Gender/Sexuality Studies in Humanities. Her research interests are in the areas of gendered constructions of memory; feminist and aural ethnography; innovative research methodologies and uses of oral history in the writing of women’s history in Asian contexts. She has conducted collaborative research projects in central China since 1994, addressing issues and implications of growing female membership of religions for local citizenship and civil society.

Professor Jaschok has co-presented and co-authored with her Chinese collaborator, Shui Jingjun, in China and internationally, in Chinese and in English, seeking to make published findings fully accessible to their respective home audiences. Women, Religion, and Space in China, published by Routledge, forms the sequel to the study of female-led Islamic traditions in China, published in 2000/2002, entitled The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam (Curzon/Routledge, published in paperback in 2015).

Most recently,  Professor Jaschok has been collaborating with ethnomusicologists and anthropologists in a study of Islamic soundscapes in China and their function and place in recovery of ruptured collective memory (Leverhulme); the collaboration resulted in an edited volume Ethnographies of Islam in China (U. of Hawai’i Press, 2021). She is currently working on interpretations of Islamic chants as part of China’s women’s mosque long-standing oral tradition of teaching, worshipping, and celebration.

Professor Jaschok is a member of many international academic and professional organizations, serving on steering committees, editorial and advisory boards to contribute to the future of Chinese gender studies to academe at home and abroad. Among her roles: Member of Advisory Editorial Board for Gendering Asia series, NIAS, Copenhagen, Denmark. Member of International Advisory Board, Research Center of Translation Studies, China Women’s University, Beijing, China. Member of Editorial Board, Berliner China-Hefte, Chinese History and Society. Berlin: Lit Verlag, Germany. Life Fellow of the Global China Academy, London, UK. Founder member of the Women’s Initiative on International Affairs in Asia, Hong Kong. Co-founder: Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Network (WAGNet) and Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Review (WAGRev).