The Board of Directors of the Geiss Hsu Foundation is delighted to announce awards made during the fall 2022 application cycle. These awards support projects and publications that advance scholarship and interpretation of the Ming dynasty and adjacent time periods and peoples.
PROJECT AWARDS
Book Prizes
Society for Ming Studies: Two Book Prizes in Ming Studies
To increase the visibility of pathbreaking work on Ming China within the broader field of Asian Studies and related disciplines, the Society for Ming Studies will develop and promote a prize for an “outstanding contribution” to the study of Ming China and a prize for a best first book on the Ming. Both prizes will be awarded at the annual meeting.
Open-Access
University of Washington Press: Two More UW Press-Geiss Hsu Foundation Open Access Books
The University of Washington Press will add two titles to the collection of Geiss Foundation Open Access Books: The Interweaving of Rituals by Nicolas Standaert (2008) and Many Faces of Mulian (2017) by Rostislav Berezkin. These works illuminate the development over time of important social, cultural, religious, and literary trends that took root in the Ming.
Travel Support
Association for Asian Studies: Geiss-Hsu Annual Conference Travel Grant
The Association for Asian Studies will offer grants of up to $2,000 for scholars of the Ming dynasty and Ming-adjacent peoples to attend, either virtually or in person, the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Boston. Preference will be given to contingent and part-time faculty, students, and independent scholars.
Society for Ming Studies: New Voices in Ming Studies: Presentations of New Research on Ming China
Nine graduate students will give ten-minute presentations on their research at the Society for Ming Studies’ Annual Meeting. The initiative aims to encourage Ming research and engagement at the junior scholar level, and bring to the fore questions, research materials, and methodologies that productively challenge and enlarge the study of Ming China.
Workshop
Michigan State University: Nonproducing Skills: Failure, Maintenance, Recycling, and Transport in Early Modern East Asia
This workshop examines “nonproducing” skills that have been overlooked in the literature of craftsmanship and artisanal knowledge. The organizers aim to bring the study of skills into conversation with emerging concepts, to contextualize Ming material culture and technology in the transnational and connected history of East Asia and beyond, and to publish select papers.
Conferences
Academia Sinica and Mount Holyoke College: A Conference on Border-Crossing in the Ming
Graduate students and early-career scholars will attend an in-person, workshop-style conference to foster discussion about border-crossing over the longue durée history of late imperial China. Scholars across academic ranks in Asia and North America will circulate their papers in advance for in-depth discussion, and research will be shared as an open-source publication.
University of Georgia (with Emory University and Georgia Southern University): Zhonghe Dragon Conference (SEUSS-FLIC)
This conference of the Southeast US Scholars and Friends of Late Imperial China will serve as an open space in which Ming and late imperial scholars, students, researchers, and friends can share work with engaged colleagues in a welcoming and supportive environment. Wai-yee Li, 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, will give a keynote address.
SUBVENTION AWARDS
Asia Center Publications Program, Harvard University: The Cornucopian Stage: Performing Commerce in Early Modern China by Ariel Fox
The Cornucopian Stage: Performing Commerce in Early Modern China explores the ways in which late imperial Chinese drama articulated and enacted an early modern economic imaginary. This book, which will be the first Western-language monograph on the Suzhou circle, draws on these rich texts to expand our understanding of what a late imperial play was and what a late imperial play could do.
Columbia University Press: Towers in the Void: Li Yu and Early Chinese Media by S.E. Kile
Towers in the Void analyzes the contents, format, and circulation of books in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties and explores how they functioned to connect readers to one another and to the material world. Kile considers writing and materiality together, thereby elucidating issues as varied as spatial ideology, performance practices, gender roles, and the genre of short vernacular fiction.
Columbia University Press: The Matter of Inscription in Early Modern China by Thomas Kelly
This book’s central claim is that the act of inscribing an object with lines of prose and verse became, in the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties, a central means through which writers grappled with the material contingencies and technical preconditions of writing in general, a space where they came to reflect upon their investments in, and dependencies on, the permanence of the written word.
Columbia University Press: The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty by Sagang Sechen, translated by Johan Elverskog
What became of the Mongols after the glories of the empire? The Precious Summary, written by Sagan Sechen in 1662, shortly after the Mongols’ submission to the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912), offers an unparalleled historical perspective on what happened in China and Inner Asia from the late fourteenth century to the founding of the Qing dynasty in the early seventeenth century.
University of Hawai’i Press: Remapping the World in East Asia: Toward a Global History of “Ricci Map,” edited by Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky
Remapping the World in East Asia aims to rewrite the narrative surrounding the “Ricci Map,” which assumes that a Jesuit missionary taught the Chinese what the world looked. The volume presents a thoughtful revision, contextualizing and displacing the Jesuit missionary as the central historical actor and questioning assumptions of the superiority of European science.