Past Awards

Relieving the People examines the environmental, medical, and political aftermath of the Imjin War (1592-1598), which was waged between Japan, Korea, and China. Central to the book is the concept of “relieving the people”, derived from Confucian texts on benevolence and medical manuals. The book details how this principle shaped official and local responses to outbreaks, particularly efforts to aid potential virus carriers such as soldiers, displaced people, the sick poor, and prisoners. Senior scholars in the fields of early modern Chinese medicine, Korean medicine, and environmental history will participate in the manuscript review workshop.

This multi-year project aims to broaden knowledge of Ming society by examining non-gentry workers. The research will explore the potential of using Chicago-school occupational sociology to study work in the Ming through the analysis of a wide variety of primary sources. Organizers will make studies available to researchers and teachers; introduce the framework to historians both inside and outside the Ming field; test and refine the framework for Ming and for the past more broadly; and offer contributions to sociologists of knowledge and others who wish to go beyond Euro-centrism. The project includes a workshop, conference, and publication.

An award from the Geiss Hsu Foundation will support a series of online and in-person workshops on the materialities of Ming books and manuscripts for fourteen East Asian studies librarians specializing in Chinese studies in North America. Participants will acquire knowledge and skills to move beyond traditional “one-shot” bibliographic instruction toward a new model of teaching that integrates material analysis into undergraduate and graduate curricula.

This March 2025 workshop will bring together scholars to review Mapping the Weird: the Geography of the Seventeenth Century Strange Tale. Focusing on two understudied tale collections from the early 17th century,  the manuscript combines mapping and geographical analysis with close reading to create an “atlas of the imagination” for the Wanli period (1572-1620), exploring how conceptual maps of the divine and demonic intersect with the maps of administrative, natural, and cultural geography.

Were people in late imperial China angry? Judging from a long-standing scholarly tradition, they were not, but according to this period’s literary productions, they were frequently so. The project proposes to organize a manuscript review workshop in June 2025 for the first dedicated monograph on the understudied representation of anger in late imperial Chinese literature. The Uses of Anger will not only investigate what give rise to the emotion, but also demonstrate how literary works reconfigure the emotion’s regulation in late imperial China.

Using multiple approaches from the humanities to think through a plant’s cultural significance is the work of the nascent subfield of Plant Humanities. This spring 2025 workshop was an interdisciplinary exploration of what it means to take plants as an organizing focus in the study of Chinese culture. Countering the presentist orientation of much of environmental humanities, the workshop took a long view of plant studies, with scholars whose work spans from the Song dynasty through the Qing, to the present day.

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.