Her other research projects include a transnational film history of Manchuria and a cultural history of noise in modern China. Her current book project, Cinematic Guerrillas: Maoist Propaganda as a Spirit Medium explores film exhibition and reception in socialist China, including movie theatres and open-air screenings, projectionists and audiences, as well as memories of revolutionary and foreign films. Li has co-edited a volume entitled Red Legacies: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Harvard Asia Center, 2016).

Her second monograph, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020), explores contemporary cultural memories of the 1950s to the 1970s through textual, audiovisual, and material artifacts, including police files, photographs, documentary films, and museums. Her first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia, 2014), excavates a century of memories embedded in two alleyway neighborhoods destined for demolition.

As a scholar of literary, film, and cultural studies, Jie Li’s research interests center on the mediation of memories in modern China.

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