Professor Maria Jaschok

Academic profile

Oxford School of Global and Area Studies

About

Professor Maria Jaschok is a Senior Research Associate in the Contemporary China Studies Programme and a member of the faculty and steering committee of the MSc in Women’s/Gender/Sexuality Studies (Humanities). 

Her research is grounded in feminist, aural and collaborative ethnography, with particular attention to oral history, autoethnography and methodological innovation in the writing of women’s histories in Asian contexts.

Since 1994, she has conducted long-term collaborative research in central China, examining women’s religious participation and leadership and the wider implications of female religious agency for citizenship, civil society and local governance. Working closely with her long-term Chinese collaborator, Shui Jingjun, she has co-authored and co-presented extensively in both Chinese and English, ensuring accessibility and reciprocity across research communities.

Her multidisciplinary scholarship on female-led Islamic traditions in China comprises a trilogy of monographs: The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam (2000/2002; pb 2015), Women, Religion, and Space in China (2011) and Inside the Expressive Culture of Women’s Mosques (2025, Open Access). Together, these works have comprehensibly explored and enriched understandings of gender, religion, space and expressive culture in Chinese Islam. 

Professor Jaschok has also collaborated with ethnomusicologists and anthropologists on a Leverhulme-funded project on Islamic soundscapes in China and their role in the recovery of ruptured collective memory, resulting in the edited volume Ethnographies of Islam in China (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021).

Her current British Academy–funded project combines autoethnography and archival research to examine leadership, movement-building and feminist activism in China during the early 1990s.

Expertise

• Gender studies and modern China
• Women’s mosques and female imams in China
• Chinese feminisms
• Anthropology of Islam in China
• Family planning in China
• Researching in sensitive contexts

Selected publications

• Inside the Expressive Culture of Chinese Women's Mosques: 'This Turmoil of the Soul' (2025)
• Women's Mosques in China in The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam (2025)
• Muslim Women's Religious and Social Activism in China in The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women (2023)
• Ethnographies of Islam in China (2021)
• The Sound of Faith: Chinese Women’s Mosques, Islamic Resurgence and Religious Agency (2021)
• Covering Body, Uncovering Identity: Chinese Muslim Women’s Vocabularies of Dress (2016)
• 'Outsiders Within': Speaking to Excursions Across Cultures (Researching Gender. Situated Knowers and Feminist Standpoint. Vol.1. SAGE Publications, 2013 (2000, Feminist Theory, 1(1), reprint))
• Women, Religion, and Space in China (2011)
• The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam (2000/2015)

Media experience

Professor Maria Jaschok has experience of working with the media including interviews on BBC Radio 4 discussing gender and Islam in China, the state of religious education in China, women’s history and feminism in China and family planning, as well as issues surrounding COVID-19-related racial discrimination, particularly concerning treatment of Chinese students.

Recent media work

• Remembering Judith Okely. A Tribute. ODID Website. University of Oxford (March 2025)
• We must halt the spread of xenophobia surrounding coronavirus (The Guardian, 2020)
• China: The Best and the Worst Place to Be a Muslim Woman (Foreign Policy, 2015)
• The gold superyacht for ladies: Is this every woman's dream boat? (CNN, 2015)
• Other lives: Katherine Talati obituary (The Guardian, 2015)

Languages