Jessica Zu is the author of Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2025). Her research uncovers surprising ways that ancient Buddhist processual philosophy was reinvented by overlooked groups to transform the self, seek justice, build community, and change the world.

She is working on two new book-length projects, Liberation Buddhology and its Elite Capture: Views from Śantiniketan, and Quantum Consciousness: Spirituality for a Scientific World (1930–2008). Both projects combine in-depth studies of archives preserved by marginalized groups with analytic inquiries into these historical actors’ own philosophical critiques of the secular, scientific, epistemological paradigm. While Liberation Buddhology problematizes the secular discourses that differentiate renunciation from revolution, Quantum Consciousness challenges the scientific discourses that set apart the subjective silo against a universalized objectivity.

More than exposing the impoverished imaginations undergirded the dominant secular-scientific discourses, both projects invite scholars to exit the tunnel vision of the secular-scientific bubble by showcasing how historical actors offered alternative ways of theorizing the self, the social, and the world relationally and interdependently.