The Board of Directors of the James P. Geiss & Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation is pleased to announce thirteen awards made during the fall application cycle:
SUBVENTIONS
Print & Open Access Publication
Wading Barefoot through a Mountain Stream: The Travel Diaries of Xu Xiake (1587-1641), James Hargett, lead translator and editor I University of Washington Press, forthcoming July 2025
Xu Xiake stands as China’s most distinguished traveler and travel writer, whose extensive journeys through Ming-dynasty China offer a unique window into the era’s geography, history, and cultural traditions. This new, fully annotated English translation includes maps and illustrations, allowing readers to follow Xu’s routes. It will be indispensable for scholars of Chinese history, geography, and travel writing and will bring Xu Xiake’s extraordinary journeys to a broader audience. The award from GHF will support print and open-access editions.
Print Publication
The Woven Image: The Making of Mongol Art in the Yuan Empire by Yong Cho I Yale University Press, forthcoming February 2026
The Woven Image: The Making of Mongol Art in the Yuan Empire paints a drastically different picture of the visual and material worlds of the Mongols in their imperial court. It focuses on fabric images to demonstrate that in the eastern half of their world empire known as the Yuan (1271-1368), the Mongol rulers created a completely new system of the arts. This new system subverted the traditional hierarchies of visual and material arts that had thrived in the various dynasties that previously ruled East Asia.
PROJECTS
Special Journal Issue
CHINOPERL Anniversary Volume: Music, Language, and Drama in Late Imperial China I Jing Shen, Eckerd College
CHINOPERL is an interdisciplinary and international peer-reviewed journal devoted to Chinese oral and performing literature with authors and readers from all over the world. Revolving around the thread of “music, language, and drama,” articles for this anniversary volume of CHINOPERL delve into collections of arias, qin handbooks, and fragments of play texts from the Ming dynasty and related periods. These musical and literary analyses speak to broader late-imperial intellectual trends, contributing to current scholarly conversations about the subjects.
Conferences
China on the Move: Southeast U.S. Scholars and Friends of Late Imperial China (SEUSS-FLIC) Annual Conference I Dan Du, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
The sixth annual SEUSS-FLIC conference, themed “China on the Move,” will take place at UNC-Charlotte from February 28 – March 1, 2025. It will bring together scholars who study historical exchanges and changes brought by the migration of people, goods, and ideas during the Ming dynasty and beyond. Yuhang Li, associate professor of Chinese art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the award-winning GHF-funded book Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China, will give the keynote address.
Echoes of Great Brightness: The Ming Dynasty and Beyond, An International Conference in Honor of Craig Clunas I J.P. Park with Craig Clunas, University of Oxford
Professor Craig Clunas pioneered the application of social history to the study of the Ming dynasty and Chinese art history. His innovative methodology has positioned the study of the Ming dynasty as one of the most dynamic and engaging areas in both art history and sinology. In recognition of his outstanding scholarship, groundbreaking contributions to the field, and his extensive curatorial and academic career, a group of twenty-three scholars are collaborating to present an equal number of papers at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, in fall 2025.
Worlding the Ming Empire in Global Early Modernity I Xiaoqiao Ling, Arizona State University
This conference, held at Arizona State University from April 4 – 5, 2025, investigates the role of the Ming Empire (1368-1644) as a cultural and geopolitical imaginary that actively contributed to the formation of a textual world during the early modern era (16th-19th centuries). It aims to understand the Ming as a multilayered and co-constructed civilization, along with its participatory role in global early modernity, without casting the empire as a prelude to capitalism, colonization, and globalization.
Workshops
Manuscript Review Workshop for “The Uses of Anger in Late Imperial Chinese Literature” I Zhaokun Xin, University of Manchester
Were people in late imperial China angry? Judging from a long-standing scholarly tradition, they were not, but according to this period’s literary productions, they were frequently so. The project proposes to organize a manuscript review workshop in June 2025 for the first dedicated monograph on the understudied representation of anger in late imperial Chinese literature. The Uses of Anger will not only investigate what give rise to the emotion, but also demonstrate how literary works reconfigure the emotion’s regulation in late imperial China.
“Mapping the Weird” Manuscript Review Workshop I Rania Huntington, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This March 2025 workshop will bring together scholars to review Mapping the Weird: the Geography of the Seventeenth Century Strange Tale. Focusing on two understudied tale collections from the early 17th century, the manuscript combines mapping and geographical analysis with close reading to create an “atlas of the imagination” for the Wanli period (1572-1620), exploring how conceptual maps of the divine and demonic intersect with the maps of administrative, natural, and cultural geography.
Plant Humanities in China I Natasha Heller, University of Virginia
Using multiple approaches from the humanities to think through a plant’s cultural significance is the work of the nascent subfield of Plant Humanities. This spring 2025 workshop will be an interdisciplinary exploration of what it means to take plants as an organizing focus in the study of Chinese culture. Countering the presentist orientation of much of environmental humanities, the workshop will take a long view of plant studies, with scholars whose work spans from the Song dynasty through the Qing.
Grants, Scholarships, & Fellowships
Geiss Hsu Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ming Studies I Bruce Rusk, University of British Columbia
This two-year fellowship at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver for a recent PhD recipient in Ming studies will allow the fellow to focus on research with a robust community of Ming and Ming-adjacent scholars, an excellent library collection, and strong connections to East Asia. The fellowship will begin on September 1, 2025, and the fellow will give at least one research talk, present at the Ming & More text-reading group, and organize a one-time workshop, small conference, or talk series at UBC on a topic related to Ming studies.
GHF Support for Friends of the Princeton University Library (FPUL) Grants I Mireille Djenno, Princeton University Library
Funding from GHF will earmark Friends of the Princeton University Library (FPUL) Grants for Ming scholars. During this three-year pilot program, a selection committee will award up to three Ming-focused grants to scholars who wish to conduct research at the Princeton University Library’s Special Collections, including the in the East Asian Library (Gest Collection). These grants, which have a value of up to $6,000 plus transportation costs, are meant to help defray expenses incurred in traveling to and residing in Princeton during the tenure of the grant.
RBS-Geiss Hsu Foundation Scholarships I Michael Suarez, S.J., Rare Book School
Funding from GHF will support scholarships for students of the history of the book in Asia at Rare Book School(RBS). The Geiss Hsu Scholarships will allow young scholars to pursue learning in areas germane to the study of the book in the greater Ming world, studying with the School’s distinguished international faculty in seminar-style classes. The RBS course week includes academic lectures, discussion forums, demonstrations, exhibitions, and additional opportunities to socialize with students and faculty from early morning through late evening.
Open-Access Platform
Exploring Literati Discourses, 14th– 18th Centuries I Peter Bol, Harvard University
This project will build an open-access public platform, based on Large Language Models and Private Knowledge Bases, with which scholars can explore the collected writings of 325 individuals from the late Yuan to the early Qing found in the Siku quanshu. The user interface will allow researchers and the interested public to investigate topics in Ming history and culture. They will be able to call up documents and have them punctuated, analyzed, and translated, and they will be able to discover who else spoke to those topics.