Jeffrey Moser
· Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Director of Graduate Studies, 2025-2026Brown University · History of Art and Architecture
Active 1958–2024
About
Professor Jeffrey Moser is an Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the department. His research broadly attends to the conceptual and material processes through which past objects are made present, with a particular focus on the artistic practices and scholarly techniques of medieval China. He is interested in the problem of historical agency and the interconnections between ecological, technological, and perceptual change over time. His most recent book, Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China, examines how the rediscovery and decipherment of ancient bronzes in eleventh-century China influenced medieval understandings of the relationship between words, images, and things. His work also encompasses ceramics, ink painting, antiquarianism, visual exegesis, and geography, all linked through an interrogation of how new modes of attention to materiality catalyze new understandings of the past. Professor Moser is currently working on a second book project titled Moral Depths: Making Antiquity in a Medieval Chinese Cemetery, which explores the recently discovered family cemetery of the Neo-Confucian philosopher and antiquarian Lü Dalin (1040–1093). He is collaborating with scholars across China and Hong Kong on a traveling exhibition and scholarly catalogue of grave goods recovered from the cemetery. With a background that includes studies in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, and teaching experience in China and Quebec, he endeavors to integrate diverse scholarly traditions into his teaching. He offers courses on the arts of Asia, including an introductory course organized around the biographies of exemplary objects, as well as a range of surveys and seminars. Additionally, he advises graduate students in Chinese art history and is affiliated with the Department of East Asian Studies, serving on the steering committee for the Program in Early Cultures, and collaborating with faculty in Anthropology, Religious Studies, and the Joukowsky Institute.
Awards & honors
- Bei Shan Tang Prize (2025)
- Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and Their Environments (…
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