Past Awards

As part of their new outreach to junior scholars, the Society for Ming Studies invited nine promising Ph.D. candidates, fellows, and visiting professors to present their research at the Society for Ming Studies Annual Meeting at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Denver, Colorado. The Geiss Hsu Foundation helped supplement the travel costs for the March 2019 meeting. The goal of the session was to grow the community of Ming scholars by helping junior researchers cement new connections.

The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported a second performance of Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music, presented at Best Buy Theater at the University of Minnesota on May 5, 2014. The concert featured music, words, and images to explore the 1602 map of the world in Chinese made by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci while he was in China. The Baroque instruments and voices of the musical group ¡Sacabuche! were joined by Chinese instruments.

Inspired by the James Ford Bell Trust’s acquisition of the 1602 world map by Matteo Ricci, Ming historian Ann Waltner, in collaboration with with iSacabuche!, an early music ensemble based at Indiana University, presented a rich program that included a lecture about the map, a demonstration of Baroque and Chinese instruments, and a multi-media performance reanimating the pivotal cultural exchange between Italian Jesuits and Chinese literati in seventeenth-century China. This program combined music composed by Huang Ruo and dramatic readings visually framed by a projected digitized version of the world map that Matteo Ricci created and presented to the Wanli Emperor.

This project digitized and enhanced a Ming scroll depicting a street in Nanjing during the Lantern Festival marking the end of Lunar New Year. Users zoom in to examine details that were unrecognizable prior to digital enhancement, and click on hotspots to learn more information.