Past Awards

Remapping the World in East Asia aims to rewrite the narrative surrounding the “Ricci Map,” which assumes that a Jesuit missionary taught the Chinese what the world looked like by translating and adapting a Renaissance world map. The volume presents a thoughtful revision, contextualizing and displacing the Jesuit missionary as the central historical actor and questioning assumptions of the superiority of European science. Its editors and contributors introduce readers to the processes of remapping the world, a result of conversations between the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his Chinese collaborators during the last decades of Ming rule. 

The Cornucopian Stage: Performing Commerce in Early Modern China explores the ways in which late imperial Chinese drama articulated and enacted an early modern economic imaginary. At the center of Fox’s study are a group of plays attributed to the so-called “Suzhou School”, a circle of collaborative playwrights whose works were widely read and performed throughout the Qing dynasty but who have received limited attention in modern scholarship. This book, which will be the first Western-language monograph on the Suzhou circle, draws on these rich texts to expand our understanding of what a late imperial play was and what a late imperial play could do. 

Why write on things? This book’s central claim is that the act of inscribing an object with lines of prose and verse became, in the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties, a central means through which writers grappled with the material contingencies and technical preconditions of writing in general, a space where they came to reflect upon their investments in, and dependencies on, the permanence of the written word. The most eloquent inscriptions on objects from this period of profound societal upheaval consequently conceive of durability—the capacity to withstand destruction and damage—as a pressing matter of literary concern.    

The Mongols are famous on account of Chinggis Khan and the empire they built and ruled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Yet, what became of the Mongols after the glories of the empire? This is the history that Sagang Sechen relates in the Precious Summary, which was written in 1662, shortly after the Mongols’ submission to the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912). The Precious Summary offers an unparalleled historical perspective on what happened in China and Inner Asia from the late fourteenth century to the founding of the Qing dynasty in the early seventeenth century.

Towers in the Void analyzes the contents, format, and circulation of books in the late Ming and early Qing and explores how they functioned to connect readers to one another and to the material world. Kile uses the analytic of media to consider writing and materiality together, thereby elucidating issues as varied as spatial ideology, performance practices, gender roles, and the genre of short vernacular fiction. Kile argues that Li Yu’s idiosyncratic magnum opus, Xianqing ouji (Leisure Notes) was a unique literary form that he forged by combining his expertise in a variety of fields with his interest in generic and stylistic experimentation. Although Leisure Notes has often used by historians as a core source on many topics, no one has considered this pivotal text as a composite whole.

On the eve of the sixteenth-century economic transformation and the age of exploration that was to propel China into the modern world, the scholar-official Lu Rong (1436-94) recorded his observations of contemporary society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden. Within its genre, Bean Garden is unusual in its author’s willingness to express admiration, frustration, and outrage toward his subjects. Mark Halperin has selected about a quarter of the pieces from the original work, arranging them in topical categories that provide a richly textured first-hand observation of late imperial China designed for course use with undergraduates.

As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally. By treating learning as the subject, it broadens our perspective, going beyond a history of ideas to investigate the social practices and networks of kinship and collegiality with which literati defined themselves in local, regional, and national contexts.

Porcelain for the Emperor explores one key to China’s extraordinary production and export of fine porcelain during the early modern period: the role of specialist officials in producing the technological knowledge and distinctive artistic forms that were essential to the cultural policies of the Chinese state in the early Qing dynasty. Through a detailed study of porcelain manufacture loosely structured around the career of the potter who supervised ceramic production for the Qing dynasty court, the book shows how these imperial technocrats engaged in fiscal management, technical experimentation, and design to organize rationalized manufacturing in a precapitalist, preindustrial society.