Past Awards

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 Plum in the Golden Vase (also known as The Golden Lotus) may be the first long work of Chinese fiction written by a single (though anonymous) author. Featuring both complex structural features and psychological and emotional realism, the novel centers on the rich merchant Ximen Qing and his household and describes the physical surroundings and material objects of a Ming dynasty city. The essays in this volume provide ideas for teaching the novel from a variety of approaches, from questions of genre, intertextuality, and the novel’s reception to material culture, family and social dynamics, and power structures in sexual relations.

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This genre first appeared around the fourteenth century and endures as a living tradition. In exploring the evolution of the story, Berezkin illuminates changes in the literary and religious characteristics of the genre. Ultimately, he reveals the special features of baojuan as a type of performance literature that had its foundations in multiple literary traditions.