Past Awards

The award will help fund educational activities related to a performance at the University of Minnesota of a new, shorter, semi-staged version of the English-language opera Dream of the Red Chamber, of which a fully-staged version premiered in 2016. These educational activities include workshops with the composer, librettist, conductor, director, and choreographer that will illuminate the textual and musical transformations of the opera, and will utilize local resources, such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s holdings of Chinese art and opera costumes. Other projects include a course on the novel and its adaptations, and seminars on related topics.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, members of the Naqshbandi Sufi dynasty vied for influence in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang. The ensuing conflict saw the region incorporated into the expanding Qing imperium. Three decades afterward, Muḥammad Ṣadiq Kashghari was commissioned to write an account of these Naqshbandi Sufis and their downfall. Providing a rare local perspective on China’s expansion into Muslim borderlands, this translation sheds light on Xinjiang’s political and religious traditions and makes a foundational work of Inner Asian literature available to students and scholars.

This international conference seeks to foster dialogue between specialists of Korean and Vietnamese humanities. It will consist of eight panels, each featuring a pair of specialists, one working on Vietnam, the other working on Korea, who will give thematically-linked presentations on a common area of study: Pedagogy and Learning; Book History; Literacy and Poetic Culture; Political Legacies; Vernacular Culture; Popular Fiction; Environmental History; and Frontiers and Borders. It will also include a round-table on rare materials collections and digital source material. Several projects will be selected for publication in a special issue of a journal.

This musical performance of three arias from the opera Ghost Village will accompany a two-day symposium, The Sensorium of the Early-Modern Chinese Text, scheduled for October 23-25 at the University of Chicago. Ghost Village is based on one of the stories from Strange Tales of the Liaozhai by the early Qing dynasty author, Pu Songling (1640-1715). The opera is a collaboration between Chen Yao, of the Central Conservatory in Beijing, and Judith Zeitlin, of the University of Chicago. Open to the public, the project aims to foster an appreciation of late-imperial Chinese culture.

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons is a seventeenth-century novelistic account of the founding myth of the Lady of Linshui, the goddess of women, childbirth, and childhood, who is still venerated in places in Southeast Asia. The goddess’s story evolved from the life of Chen Jinggu in Ming Dynasty Hunan and has taken the form of vernacular short fiction, legends, plays, sutras, and stele inscriptions at temples where she is worshipped. This unabridged, annotated translation provides insights into late imperial Chinese religion, the lives of women in the period, and more broadly, the structure of families and local society.

The iconoclastic scholar Li Zhi was a central figure in the cultural world of the late Ming dynasty. His provocative and controversial writings and actions strongly influenced late-Ming print culture, commentarial and epistolary practice, discourses on authenticity and selfhood, attitudes toward friendship and masculinity, displays of filial piety, understandings of the public and private spheres, views toward women, and perspectives on Buddhism and the afterlife. In this edited volume, leading sinologists demonstrate the interrelatedness of seemingly discrete aspects of Li Zhi’s thought and emphasize the far-reaching impact of his ideas and actions.

The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported the development of the University of Irvine Libraries’ crowd-translation system for Ming government official titles. A critical reference tool for scholars of the Ming dynasty in China, this online reference uses an Application Programming Interface (API) to synchronize crowd-sourced translations. It includes 3,245 entries arranged in tiers related to the hierarchy of government offices. Each lists the official title in traditional Chinese, followed by its pinyin, English translation, and alternative title names (including abbreviations, colloquial names, and commonly-known names).

Fir and Empire traces changes in China’s woodland environment in the early modern period, exploring how subtle shifts in policy enabled transformations in both forest ecology and forest oversight. Woodlands evolved from open-access, natural-growth environments to privately owned, largely anthropogenic ones. Developments as seemingly distinct as the Zheng He fleets, Beijing palaces, Single Whip Reforms, and the emergence of the Hakka diaspora all had roots in the transformation of South China’s forests.