Past Awards

In collaboration with the Princeton University Library, Rare Book School will offer a new course on Books in Ming China as part of the School’s 2024 course roster. Intended for scholars already familiar with Ming studies, this course will introduce participants to the collection of some 2,000 Ming books held at the Princeton libraries. Students will have the chance to conduct research in Princeton’s Gest Collection of East Asian Materials and generate ideas for current and future research projects in Ming Studies. 

The rising scholarly field of game studies examines games as global, interconnected phenomena, but little has been published on the history of games and gaming in China and this volume begins to fill that gap with a perspective that counters Western-focused views of gaming. Among the topics explored in Games and Playare rock carvings of board games, weiqi cultures, scholars’ and courtesans’ games, gambling, games based on literature, internet-game addiction, video-game politics, and the appropriation of Chinese culture in video games. 

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.

To support emerging scholars, the Society for Ming Studies will host a roundtable on new books by international Ming scholars at the Society’s meeting-in-conjunction at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Seattle. Funding from GHF will allow three junior scholars who are based at institutions outside of North America and have recently released books with non-US publishers to travel to the conference to participate in the roundtable.

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.

This companion volume to The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection (Columbia University Press, 2017) translates the remaining 40 stories from A New Book for Foiling Swindlers, Based on Worldly Experience, by Zhang Yingyu, that were not included in the 2017 selection. Together, the two volumes make the entirety of the original book available to an English-speaking audience.

University of Washington Press will add three titles to the collection of UW Press / Geiss Hsu Foundation Open Access Books: Jiang Yonglin’s translation of The Great Ming Code / Da Ming lü, first published in 2005; the annotated translation of Further Adventures on the Journey to the West, prepared by Qiancheng Li and Robert Hegel and published in 2020; and the 2021 annotated edition of The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons, translated by Kristin Ingrid Fryklund, with an introduction and notes by Mark Edward Lewis and Brigitte Baptandier.

By examining the ways that food and drink shaped, and were shaped by, a wide range of cultural practices in imperial China, the workshop will highlight the Ming dynasty’s pivotal place in their development. This in-person workshop will also provide a venue for participants to hone their papers prior to submitting them for publication in a special issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Chinese History, which will be guest-edited by the workshop’s organizers.