Past Awards

The Association for Asian Studies will offer grants of up to $2,000 for scholars of the Ming dynasty and Ming-adjacent peoples to attend, either virtually or in person, the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Boston. Preference will be given to contingent and part-time faculty, students, and independent scholars.

Nine graduate students will give ten-minute presentations on their research at the Society for Ming Studies’ Annual Meeting, highlighting their primary arguments, key sources, and the ways in which their research connects to the Ming. The initiative aims to encourage Ming research and engagement at the junior scholar level, and bring to the fore questions, research materials, and methodologies that productively challenge and enlarge the study of Ming China.

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.

To increase the visibility of pathbreaking work on Ming China within the broader field of Asian Studies and related disciplines, the Society for Ming Studies will develop and promote a prize for an “outstanding contribution” to the study of Ming China and a prize for a best first book on the Ming. Both prizes will be awarded the annual meeting, which is held at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference.

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.