Past Awards

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 supported 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) took part.

This cross‐cultural, interdisciplinary inter‐Asia workshop will provide an opportunity to share new information and perspectives on primary sources and cutting‐edge research on China and the World in Chosŏn Literature. Bringing together global scholars in literature, history, cultural and religious studies, the workshop aims to promote an interdisciplinary and transnational dialogue that will advance understanding of this complex subject.

This workshop reconsiders the significance of critical writings about acting, singing, and theatrical performance in China (c.1200–1850). How did artists, intellectuals, and critics reflect on experiences of watching or listening to live performance? How did the act of writing about spectatorship become an artform in and of itself? What might these texts offer for theater and performance studies across the world today? The central question these texts address —namely, “what is the function of Chinese theater?”—has ramifications for students of Chinese history, literature, and thought more broadly.

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.

The award helped fund educational activities related to a performance at the University of Minnesota of a new, shorter, semi-staged version of the English-language opera Dream of the Red Chamber, of which a fully-staged version premiered in 2016. These educational activities included workshops with the composer, librettist, conductor, director, and choreographer that illuminated the textual and musical transformations of the opera, and utilized local resources, such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s holdings of Chinese art and opera costumes. Other projects included a course on the novel and its adaptations, and seminars on related topics.

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.