Past Awards

Funding supports membership dues, conference travel, lodging, and registration for at least five scholars of Ming or Ming-adjacent fields to attend the Modern Language Association of American Conference in Philadelphia from January 4-7, 2024. Preference will be given to graduate students, contingent faculty, independent scholars, faculty at poorly resourced institutions, and international scholars.

A three-year award will support the work of the managing editor of the Journal of the Society for Ming Studies and fund his travel to the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference.

The award funds an interdisciplinary workshop in January 2024 at Universidad de Granada, Spain, that will bring together experts on West Lake in order to produce the first broad-based, edited volume showcasing West Lake from multiple lenses.

GHF funds will support a recording and workshop performance of the opera Ghost Village, based on Liaozhai’s Strange Tales by Pu Songling. Composer Chen Yao (Central Conservatory of Music), conductor Chen Lin (Tianjin Julliard School), and répétiteur Wei-En Hsu (Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts) will take part.

The award supports an interdisciplinary workshop on China and East Asia in premodern Korean literature at Arizona State University on December 8, 2023. The goal of workshop is to publish the papers presented in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

The award supports the exhibition Treasures for Buddha: The Legendary Offerings from Nanjing Dabao’en Temple at the China Institute Gallery from October 24, 2023 to May 16, 2024, which will showcase objects discovered during the excavations of the Dabao’en Temple in Nanjing.

Graduate students and early-career scholars will attend an in-person, workshop-style conference to foster discussion about border-crossing over the longue durée history of late imperial China. Scholars across academic ranks in Asia and North America will circulate their papers in advance for in-depth discussion, and research will be shared as an open-source publication. The conference will be held in two parts, with meetings in New York and Teipei.

Bandits in Print reexamines Ming vernacular literature and print culture through the influential Ming novelShuihu zhuan (The Water Margin). Moving away from ultimately unanswerable questions about authorship and urtext, Scott Gregory focuses on the editor-publishers who decided the shape the novel would take as they crafted their print editions. By placing each edition firmly within its own socio-historical context, Bandits in Print shows that in the Ming dynasty, a novel like The Water Margin was not so much as a single literary work but a complex family of print editions, each with its own meaning.