Past Awards

By examining the ways that food and drink shaped, and were shaped by, a wide range of cultural practices in imperial China, the workshop will highlight the Ming dynasty’s pivotal place in their development. This in-person workshop will also provide a venue for participants to hone their papers prior to submitting them for publication in a special issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Chinese History, which will be guest-edited by the workshop’s organizers.

The award funds an interdisciplinary workshop in January 2024 at Universidad de Granada, Spain, that will bring together experts on West Lake in order to produce the first broad-based, edited volume showcasing West Lake from multiple lenses.

This workshop reconsiders the significance of critical writings about theater and musical performance in early modern China (1500 – 1800). How did artists, intellectuals, and critics reflect on experiences of watching or listening to live performance? How did the act of writing about theatrical spectatorship become an artform in and of itself? What might these texts offer for theater and performance studies across the world today? 

GHF funds will support a recording and workshop performance of the opera Ghost Village, based on Liaozhai’s Strange Tales by Pu Songling. Composer Chen Yao (Central Conservatory of Music), conductor Chen Lin (Tianjin Julliard School), and répétiteur Wei-En Hsu (Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts) will take part.

The award supports an interdisciplinary workshop on China and East Asia in premodern Korean literature at Arizona State University on December 8, 2023. The goal of workshop is to publish the papers presented in a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

This workshop examines skills that have been overlooked in the literature of craftsmanship and artisanal knowledge. “Nonproducing” skills underscore labor and technical strategies devised to manage the unpredictable human-material interaction that arose in the course of production. The organizers aim to bring the study of skills into conversation with emerging concepts, to contextualize Ming material culture and technology in the transnational and connected history of East Asia and beyond, and to publish select papers.

An award from Geiss Hsu Foundation will make possible a manuscript review workshop for Laws of the Land: Fengshui and Administration in Qing China by Tristan G. Brown. Laws of the Land examines fengshui’s role in late imperial China as a discourse for articulating legal claims pertinent to the relationship between humans and their environments. Brown will invite two scholars working in Ming-Qing studies in the areas of cultural history, environmental history, or the history of science to read and comment on a draft of the work.

For many, the most obvious architectural symbol of Chinese imperial power is the Great Wall. Yet in the imperial period the Grand Canal was arguably much more important. To do justice to its multifaceted history, the workshop brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds such as social history, the history of science, environmental history, comparative and Chinese literature, global and Chinese art history, and the history of architecture. Participants led discussions about documents that illuminated their scholarly approach to the Canal.