Jiayi Chen is a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai, in partnership with the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies. She is an assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis.

Her research focuses on early modern Chinese literature and culture, particularly their intersections with games, theater, visual and material culture, and the history of books and reading. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Early Modern Ludic: Gaming and Literary Culture in China, studies how authors, playwrights, publishers, and readers from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries leveraged the critical potential of games to model reading, learning, and thinking, thereby cultivating new epistemological perspectives for navigating reality. The project spotlights a pre-digital ludic age before games became a global industry or a burgeoning field of academic inquiry. Her other research interests include early modern Chinese discourses on virtual reality, magic, and cultural exchanges in East Asia.

She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2023.