Past Awards

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 award will help fund educational activities related to a performance at the University of Minnesota of a new, shorter, semi-staged version of the English-language opera Dream of the Red Chamber, of which a fully-staged version premiered in 2016. These educational activities include workshops with the composer, librettist, conductor, director, and choreographer that will illuminate the textual and musical transformations of the opera, and will utilize local resources, such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s holdings of Chinese art and opera costumes. Other projects include a course on the novel and its adaptations, and seminars on related topics.

This musical performance of three arias from the opera Ghost Village will accompany a two-day symposium, The Sensorium of the Early-Modern Chinese Text, scheduled for October 23-25 at the University of Chicago. Ghost Village is based on one of the stories from Strange Tales of the Liaozhai by the early Qing dynasty author, Pu Songling (1640-1715). The opera is a collaboration between Chen Yao, of the Central Conservatory in Beijing, and Judith Zeitlin, of the University of Chicago. Open to the public, the project aims to foster an appreciation of late-imperial Chinese culture.

The Geiss Hsu Foundation supported the development of the University of Irvine Libraries’ crowd-translation system for Ming government official titles. A critical reference tool for scholars of the Ming dynasty in China, this online reference uses an Application Programming Interface (API) to synchronize crowd-sourced translations. It includes 3,245 entries arranged in tiers related to the hierarchy of government offices. Each lists the official title in traditional Chinese, followed by its pinyin, English translation, and alternative title names (including abbreviations, colloquial names, and commonly-known names).

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.