Past Awards

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.