The Board of Directors of the Geiss Hsu Foundation is delighted to announce awards made during the fall application cycle. Congratulations to the awardees!
PROJECTS
Books in Ming China, a Rare Book School Course at Princeton
In collaboration with the Princeton University Library, Rare Book School will offer a new course on Books in Ming China as part of the School’s 2024 course roster. Intended for scholars already familiar with Ming studies, this course will introduce participants to the collection of some 2,000 Ming books held at the Princeton libraries. Students will have the chance to conduct research in Princeton’s Gest Collection of East Asian Materials and generate ideas for current and future research projects in Ming Studies.
Global Voices in Ming Studies: A Roundtable on New Books by International Scholars of the Ming
To support emerging scholars, the Society for Ming Studies will host a roundtable on new books by international Ming scholars at the Society’s meeting-in-conjunction at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Seattle. Funding from GHF will allow three junior scholars who are based at institutions outside of North America and have recently released books with non-US publishers to travel to the conference to participate in the roundtable.
More UW Press / Geiss Hsu Foundation Open Access Books: Three Translations
University of Washington Press will add three titles to the collection of UW Press / Geiss Hsu Foundation Open Access Books: Jiang Yonglin’s translation of The Great Ming Code / Da Ming lü, first published in 2005; the annotated translation of Further Adventures on the Journey to the West, prepared by Qiancheng Li and Robert Hegel and published in 2020; and the 2021 annotated edition of The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons, translated by Kristin Ingrid Fryklund, with an introduction and notes by Mark Edward Lewis and Brigitte Baptandier.
New Approaches to the Study of Traditional Chinese Food Culture: A Workshop
By examining the ways that food and drink shaped, and were shaped by, a wide range of cultural practices in imperial China, the workshop at the University of California, Santa Barbara will highlight the Ming dynasty’s pivotal place in their development. The workshop will also provide a venue for participants to hone their papers prior to submitting them for publication in a special issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Chinese History, which will be guest-edited by the workshop’s organizers.
Performance Theory in Early Modern China
This workshop, which will be held at Harvard University, reconsiders the significance of critical writings about theater and musical performance in early modern China (1500 – 1800). How did artists, intellectuals, and critics reflect on experiences of watching or listening to live performance? How did the act of writing about theatrical spectatorship become an artform in and of itself? What might these texts offer for theater and performance studies across the world today?
Wulong / Fifth Dragon Conference
An award from GHF will support the SEUSS-FLIC Annual Conference, which will be held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from February 23 – 25, 2024. Organized around the theme of “Family, Friendship, and Community,” panel sessions will focus on the benefits of familial and community networks and the tensions that sometimes arose between these relationships and obligations to family, society and the state. Mark Halperin, Professor of Chinese at the University of California, Davis, will give a keynote address.
SUBVENTIONS
Games and Play in Chinese and Sinophone Culture. Edited by Li Guo, Douglas Eyman, and Hongmei Sun (University of Washington Press, forthcoming May 2024)
The rising scholarly field of game studies examines games as global, interconnected phenomena, but little has been published on the history of games and gaming in China and this volume begins to fill that gap with a perspective that counters Western-focused views of gaming. Among the topics explored in Games and Play are rock carvings of board games, weiqi cultures, scholars’ and courtesans’ games, gambling, games based on literature, internet-game addiction, video-game politics, and the appropriation of Chinese culture in video games.
More Swindles from the Ming: Scams, Sex, and Sorcery by Zhang Yingyu. Translated by Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk (Columbia University Press, forthcoming May 2024)
This companion volume to The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection (Columbia University Press, 2017) translates the remaining 40 stories from A New Book for Foiling Swindlers, Based on Worldly Experience, by Zhang Yingyu, that were not included in the 2017 selection. Together, the two volumes make the entirety of the original book available to an English-speaking audience.
Three Impeachments: Guo Xiu and the Kangxi Court by R. Kent Guy (University of Washington Press, forthcoming October 2024)
Bringing together a rich trove of sources, Three Impeachments traces the process of impeachment, review, condemnation, and restoration to provide unique insights into the Kangxi golden age. Part I reveals that the highly lauded accomplishments of the Kangxi emperor were not his alone, but the result of collaboration between Manchu elite, the newly formed Chinese Martial Banner Army, and Chinese scholars. Part II, which focuses on Guo Xi’s impeachments, sheds new light on dynastic history and political agency.