Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Professor Moser’s research attends, broadly, to the conceptual and material processes whereby past things are made present, with particular attention to the ways in which these processes intersect in the artistic practices and scholarly techne of medieval China. He is also interested in the problem of historical agency, and the interconnections between ecological, technological, and perceptual change over time. His forthcoming book, Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (University of Chicago Press), examines the role that the rediscovery and decipherment of ancient bronzes in eleventh-century China played in restructuring medieval understandings of the relationship between words, images, and things. Other publications—on such subjects as ceramics, ink painting, antiquarianism, visual exegesis, and geography—are linked through a consistent interrogation of the ways in which new modes of attention to the material world, both past and present, catalyze new understandings of the past.