Past Awards

An award from the Geiss Hsu Foundation will allow the Society for Ming Studies to continue awarding 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. A committee of senior Ming scholars will review nominated publications, and prizes will be awarded at the Society for Ming Studies’ annual meeting-in-conjunction, held at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference.

The AAS Annual Conference draws 3,000 participants who network with scholars from all over the world and participate in interdisciplinary dialogues. GHF will fund travel to the March 2026 conference in Vancouver, B.C. for up to twelve scholars specializing in Ming and Ming-adjacent research. The grant is open to graduate students, contingent and part-time faculty, tenure-track faculty, and independent scholars, regardless of membership or participation in a session.

Relieving the People examines the environmental, medical, and political aftermath of the Imjin War (1592-1598), which was waged between Japan, Korea, and China. Central to the book is the concept of “relieving the people”, derived from Confucian texts on benevolence and medical manuals. The book details how this principle shaped official and local responses to outbreaks, particularly efforts to aid potential virus carriers such as soldiers, displaced people, the sick poor, and prisoners. Senior scholars in the fields of early modern Chinese medicine, Korean medicine, and environmental history will participate in the manuscript review workshop.

The Ming History English Translation Project (MHETP) is a collaborative project that makes available translations from Chinese to English of portions of the 明史 Mingshi, or the Official History of the Ming Dynasty. Compiled from materials collected over the course of the Ming period (1368-1644) and thereafter, it contains valuable information on Ming government, society, and prominent individuals and is one of the most important sources for the study of Ming history. GHF funding will support website hosting and other technology fees.

GHF will support travel for eight to ten PhD students participating in “Ming Studies in Five” at the Society for Ming Studies’ Annual Meeting, which takes place during the AAS Annual Conference. Students will present a five-minute talk on their current research and engage with audience members during a poster and social session to gain public-facing presentation experience and increase their professional visibility.

Since 2021, GHF has supported an open access collection of books published by the University of Washington Press on the Ming dynasty and adjacent periods and territories. This award will allow the Press to add two of their most significant and most often used books in Ming studies to the collection, bringing these resources to a larger audience, facilitating their use in courses, and fostering new avenues for scholarly research.

Observing the Unseen explores perspectives in early-modern China around such questions as, how did people understand invisible or puzzling aspects of their natural world? How were things investigated and envisioned when they lacked visual context, either because they were everywhere (water, wind, life) or nowhere (dragons, the future)? Schonebaum pursues these topics by examining “practical” literature; local and court histories, gazetteers, and newspapers; and “entertainment” literature. The result is an enlightening sweep through early-modern imaginings and beliefs.

A group of established and emerging scholars specializing in environmental history, genealogy, geomantic knowledge, and the spatial arrangement of folk religions will meet to plan the next stage of an intensive fieldwork project on fengshui landscapes in Wuyuan County. Research goals include developing a more nuanced understanding of China’s historical ecology, especially of how it changed in the Ming and early Qing; developing new methodologies for historical ecology; and providing historical baselines and models for contemporary efforts to stabilize the climate and protect local and regional ecologies.