Katherine Alexander received her MA and PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, prior to which she received a BA with honors in Physics and East Asian Languages and Cultures from Beloit College. Her book manuscript, Teaching and Transformation: Yu Zhi and Popular Confucian Literature in the Late Qing, is based in part on her doctoral dissertation, "Virtues of the Vernacular: Moral Reconstruction in late Qing Jiangnan and the Revitalization of Baojuan," and addresses the role of popular religious literature and culture in Jiangnan during and after the Taiping War. She explores how the traditional Confucian civilizing mission of “teaching and transformation” (jiaohua) took an inward, local turn in the late Qing and was reflected in the works of social reformers working at the grassroots level to rebuild a society in deep crisis. The perceived high stakes of moral reform – averting future disasters and shoring up the Qing against collapse – made for a fertile environment in which vernacular morality literature proliferated.
In addition to her research-related writing, she is also a steering committee member for the Chinese Religious Text Authority project (crta.info), an open-access database project seeking to create reliable, thick bibliographic descriptions of Chinese religious texts in order to reconstruct webs of relationships between textual producers, publishers, and distributors of texts before the modern/contemporary era.