Past Awards

Amid the turmoil of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition in seventeenth-century China, some intellectuals sought refuge in romantic memories from what they perceived as cataclysmic events. This volume presents two memoirs by famous men of letters, Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Convent by Mao Xiang (1611–93) and Miscellaneous Records of Plank Bridge by Yu Huai (1616–96), that recall times spent with courtesans. They evoke the courtesan world in the final decades of the Ming dynasty and the aftermath of its collapse.

Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming-Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic texts and performances against Qing sartorial regulations, Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule in seventeenth-century China, revealing not just how political and ethnic conflicts shaped theatrical costuming, but also the ways in which costuming enabled different modes of identity negotiation during the dynastic transition.

The Diary of 1636 is a unique source on Ming and post-Ming Chinese history, narrating the decline of the Ming and the rise of the Qing through the eyes of contemporary Koreans. Written by Na Man’gap (1592–1642), a scholar and government official, this well-known diary records the second Manchu attack on Korea.

The goddess Guanyin began in India as a male deity and by the Ming and Qing periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that they used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from art history and Buddhist studies, the book is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay among material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

In early modern China, Jesuit missionaries associated with the male elite Confucian literati in order to proselytize more freely, but they had limited contact with women, whose ritual spaces were less accessible. Amsler’s investigation brings the domestic and devotional practices of women into sharp focus, uncovering a rich body of evidence that demonstrates how Chinese households functioned as sites of evangelization, religious conflict, and indigenization of Christianity. Now available in an open-access edition (link below).

The vast majority of the porcelain that circulated throughout the early modern world was made in Jingdezhen. This book traces the development of this remarkable city from its earliest beginnings at the end of the tenth century, when Jingdezhen first emerged as site of imperial production, through the appearance of the first blue-and-white wares in the Yuan dynasty (1275–1368), to the height of its flourishing in the eighteenth century.

This book analyzes the empire-wide construction projects of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, one of the most famous emperors in Chinese history, to demonstrate how the siting, architecture, and the use of his palaces and temples established his authority and contributed to the legitimization of his usurpation of power. Although a number of books in English have dealt with the architecture of the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1368) periods, this is the first book in any Western language that specifically addresses the architecture of the Ming.

The Approaches to Teaching World Literature series collects within each volume different points of view on teaching a literary subject such as a work, a tradition, or a writer widely taught to undergraduates. The series is intended to serve nonspecialists as well as specialists, inexperienced as well as experienced teachers, graduate students as well as senior professors. The book presents a guide to the most helpful available materials and comprises essays written by instructors, describing their approaches to teaching the subject of the volume.