The National Humanities Center (NHC) recently announced the appointment of Ruiying Gao, assistant professor of the history of art and architecture at Wake Forest University, as the Geiss Hsu Fellow for the 2025–26 academic year. Professor Gao will join 31 other leading scholars who will come to the Center from universities and colleges in 13 US states and the District of Columbia as well as Canada and Hong Kong. Chosen from 588 applicants, they represent humanistic scholarship in African American studies; Africana studies; anthropology; Caribbean studies; history; history of art and architecture; history of the book; studies of languages and literature; medieval studies; music history and musicology; philosophy; religious studies; and theater, dance, and performance studies. Each Fellow will work on an individual research project and will have the opportunity to share ideas in seminars, lectures, and conferences at the Center.
These newly appointed Fellows will constitute the forty-eighth class of resident scholars to be admitted since the Center opened in 1978. The National Humanities Center will award over $1,570,000 in fellowship grants to enable the selected scholars to take leave from their normal academic duties and pursue research at the Center. This funding is provided from the Center’s endowment and by grants and awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the James P. Geiss & Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation, as well as contributions from alumni and friends of the Center.
Professor Gao’s project, titled Collating Nature: Illustrated Bencao Books in Ming China, explores illustrated books of bencao—an intellectual field originating in the study of natural species and materials for therapeutic purposes—that proliferated in Ming China (1368–1644). From imperially commissioned treatises to commercially published woodblock prints and albums illustrated by eminent women artists, they provide insightful clues into a complex cultural landscape in which the regime, the book market, and the literate elites converged and came into conflict. Interweaving art history, history, book culture, and the history of science, this project offers new perspectives on the dynamic relationships of art, knowledge, and their social functions in Ming China.