Past Awards

An award from GHF will allow the Society for Ming Studies to expand the responsibilities of the editor of the Ming Studies journal, who is an elected and semi-permanent member of the Society for Ming Studies’ executive committee. The editor will creatively develop the journal’s digital presence, explore new publishing opportunities for the Ming Studies Monograph Series, work to cement the relationship between the academic society and the journal, and strengthen their positions as leading international venues for scholarship on all aspects of Ming China.

GHF made an award to the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) to support travel to the 2022 annual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii for as many as 15 scholars specializing in Ming studies and Ming-adjacent research. The goal of the travel grants is to encourage greater participation in the annual conference by scholars specializing in early modern China, who have been underrepresented at recent conferences. Priority will be given to contingent or part-time faculty, students, and independent scholars.

Asia for Educators will create a series of recorded presentations and related professional development resources to expose secondary and non-specialist undergraduate-level teachers and their students to the Ming dynasty, and to introduce them to the narrative classics of Chinese literature. These presentations, given by experts in the field, will include background information on the period in which the work was written, a short biography of the author, and suggested excerpts to read in class.

GHF funded ten scholarships to allow scholars of books and printing in the Ming dynasty to attend the Rare Book School (RBS), a world-leading institute for the study of written, printed, and born digital materials. Affiliated with the University of Virginia, RBS is a mainstay of education for rare book librarians and scholars of the history of the book. The RBS course week includes 30 hours of hands-on instruction in interpreting the material forms of textural artifacts, as well as academic lectures, discussion forums, demonstrations, and exhibitions on topics pertinent to the book in the Asian world.

The China Biographical Database project (CBDB) has opened the beta version of its crowdsourcing platform to a project for identifying Ming dynasty social associations, which is currently devoted to Ming dynasty letters. The GHF award will support the hiring of graduate students in China in Ming literature and history to review the more than 4,000 existing identifications writers of Ming dynasty letters and to add new ones.

GHF issued a project award to the National Humanities Center (NHC) in support of a Geiss Hsu Foundation Fellowship for Johan Elverskog for the 2021–2022 academic year. The award allows the selected scholar to intensively pursue a book-length project at the Center in the company of a stimulating intellectual community while receiving the exemplary research support for which the NHC is known. During the fellowship year, Dr. Elverskog, Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, will work on a project examining the history of Uighur Buddhism from 800 to 1800 CE.

The National Humanities Center will create five self-paced, asynchronous professional development modules that integrate current scholarship, model source analysis, and support curriculum development for teaching about the Ming dynasty. Organized as volumes in the Humanities in Class TeacherNotes collection, this project will allow pre-collegiate and non-expert collegiate level educators to acquire in-depth subject knowledge. Teachers who complete the modules earn professional credits, and may create and publish classroom-ready instructional resources that will be made openly available for other educators to use.

As part of their outreach to junior scholars, the Society for Ming Studies will encourage nine promising graduate students to present their research at their Annual Meeting, held at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii in March 2022. Geiss Hsu Foundation funds will cover the travel and lodging costs for participating students. By actively inviting the next generation to participate in the meeting, the Society for Ming Studies hopes to grow their community and extend their impact within the field of Asian Studies.