History of Art and Architecture

Professor Moser’s research attends 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. His book Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (University of Chicago Press, 2023), was awarded the Bei Shan Tang prize from the Association of Asian Studies. Other publications include the co-edited volume Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and Their Environments (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2025) and essays on such subjects as epigraphy, ceramics, and the geoaesthetics of rock-cut Buddhist sculpture. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the Bard Graduate Center, ACLS, and the Library of Congress, among others. He has taught at Zhejiang University and McGill University and, in 2025, was the Hulsewé-Wazniewski Visiting Professor at Leiden University.

Professor Moser is currently at work on two book projects. The first, entitled Moral Depths: Making Antiquity in a Medieval Chinese Cemetery, examines the recently discovered family cemetery of the Neo-Confucian philosopher and antiquarian Lü Dalin (1040–1093). The second is a series of essays on the relationship between ecological and artistic change over the course of China’s long eleventh-century. He is also in the process of completing several essays on print and its precursors in Tang and Song China.

Having studied in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, and taught in China and Quebec before coming to Brown, Professor Moser endeavors to integrate the perspectives of diverse scholarly traditions in his teaching. He teaches an introductory course on the arts of Asia organized around the biographies of exemplary objects, as well as a wide range of other surveys and seminars. He also advises graduate students in all fields of Chinese art history.

In addition to chairing the department of History of Art and Architecture, Professor Moser also directs the Center for Global Antiquity and serves on the steering committees for the Program in Medieval Studies and Premodern China Initiative. He has collaborated with faculty in Anthropology, Religious Studies, and the Joukowsky Institute on a variety of teaching and research projects.