Past Awards

This interdisciplinary, workshop-style conference aims to develop a deeper understanding of, and foster discussion and debate about, Ming history, global experience with empire in the early modern period, and the role of historical precedents in Chinese governance today. Papers will be presented on four panels, each built around the pre-circulation of papers and designated commentators. The conference will bring together scholars from around the world, and the best papers will be published as an edited volume or one or more special issues of recognized scholarly journals. GHF funds support travel, per diem, and accommodation for graduate student and early-career academics, and cover the costs of the keynote session.

Place has emerged as a major focus and concept in recent scholarship on Chinese art, architecture, and material culture, and has been redefining approaches to landscape and its representation, to cities and the built environment, and to objects and their materiality. This conference connects scholars from Canada, the US, and the UK whose work foregrounds place as a critical term across different media and time periods, with a focus on the Ming-Qing period. It will result in greater awareness of how related questions are examined by colleagues and graduate students working from adjacent fields, and articulate how current research centered on “place” is changing the field of Chinese art, visual, and material culture. A selection of conference papers will be published in a thematic issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

The Southeast US Scholars and Friends of Late Imperial China (SEUSS-FLIC) will hold an in-person conference at Vanderbilt University in conjunction with a slate of virtual panels organized by the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Panels will explore the ways in which China’s late imperial period created the foundation for China’s identity today, and address issues in Chinese history, literature, and culture in the context of global connections and comparisons. The conference aims to forge connections between scholars from institutions within driving distance of Nashville, Tennessee, who may encounter barriers to attending other regional and national conferences.

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 two-day conference aims to be the inaugural meeting of a regional forum to promote scholarly interaction and to support emerging scholars of late imperial China working in the southeastern United States. By establishing these formal gatherings, the organizers hope to provide intellectual benefits to the scholars and graduate students in the region, to enrich their own scholarship and teaching, and to engage broader interest in studies of the Ming.

Complementing the British Museum’s exhibition, Ming: 50 Years that Changed China, this major conference brought together more than 30 Ming scholars from across the globe, who presented new perspectives and research papers about the Ming spanning 1400–1450. Focusing on the aftermath of the Zhu Yuanzhang’s overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, the conference examined the role of China’s imperial and provincial princely courts, and discussed China’s relations and exchanges with other parts of the world.

Held at St. John’s College and the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia, the conference explored the different types of biography in East Asian countries from 1400 to 1900. Presenters challenged the traditional position maintained by past studies that the biography in China and Korea was simply a means to compartmentalize individual lives into pre-established moral categories. Papers and panel discussions examined the ways in which various standard biographies, public or private, treated their subjects. Ming Studies published a summary of the conference (2013, issue 68), and the research presented was collected in Representing Lives in China: Forms of Biography in the Ming-Qing Period, 1368-1911 (Cornell University East Asia Program, 2018).

Conference program: https://geissfoundation.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/JPGFWeb-3D-1a-ConfBioSchdl-16Feb14.pdf
Publication: https://eap.einaudi.cornell.edu/publication/new-representing-lives-china-forms-biography-ming-qing-period-1368-1911

Held in honor of Edward “Ted” Farmer’s retirement from the University of Minnesota after 43 years of teaching, the two-day “mini-conference” covered a broad range of topics, including Chinese culture, Ming institutions, world history, and modern China.