Past Awards

The University of Washington Press will add two titles to the collection of Geiss Foundation Open Access Books: The Interweaving of Rituals by Nicolas Standaert (2008) and Many Faces of Mulian (2017) by Rostislav Berezkin. These works illuminate the development over time of important social, cultural, religious, and literary trends that took root in the Ming; making them freely available facilitates their use in courses, fosters new lines of scholarship, and brings them to a wider audience in the U.S. and abroad.

This conference of the Southeast US Scholars and Friends of Late Imperial China will serve as an open space in which Ming and late imperial scholars, students, researchers, and friends can share work with engaged colleagues in a welcoming and supportive environment. Wai-yee Li, 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, will give a keynote address titled “Gender and Friendship in Ming and Qing Literature.”

On the eve of the sixteenth-century economic transformation and the age of exploration that was to propel China into the modern world, the scholar-official Lu Rong (1436-94) recorded his observations of contemporary society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden. Within its genre, Bean Garden is unusual in its author’s willingness to express admiration, frustration, and outrage toward his subjects. Mark Halperin has selected about a quarter of the pieces from the original work, arranging them in topical categories that provide a richly textured first-hand observation of late imperial China designed for course use with undergraduates.

The Southeast US Scholars and Friends of Late Imperial China (SEUSS-FLIC) held an in-person conference at Vanderbilt University in conjunction with a slate of virtual panels organized by the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Panels explored the ways in which China’s late imperial period created the foundation for China’s identity today, and addressed issues in Chinese history, literature, and culture in the context of global connections and comparisons. The conference aimed to forge connections between scholars from institutions within driving distance of Nashville, Tennessee, who may encounter barriers to attending other regional and national conferences.

GHF made an award to the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) to support travel to the 2022 annual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii for as many as 15 scholars specializing in Ming studies and Ming-adjacent research. The goal of the travel grants is to encourage greater participation in the annual conference by scholars specializing in early modern China, who have been underrepresented at recent conferences. Priority will be given to contingent or part-time faculty, students, and independent scholars.

Asia for Educators will create a series of recorded presentations and related professional development resources to expose secondary and non-specialist undergraduate-level teachers and their students to the Ming dynasty, and to introduce them to the narrative classics of Chinese literature. These presentations, given by experts in the field, will include background information on the period in which the work was written, a short biography of the author, and suggested excerpts to read in class.

GHF funded ten scholarships to allow scholars of books and printing in the Ming dynasty to attend the Rare Book School (RBS), a world-leading institute for the study of written, printed, and born digital materials. Affiliated with the University of Virginia, RBS is a mainstay of education for rare book librarians and scholars of the history of the book. The RBS course week includes 30 hours of hands-on instruction in interpreting the material forms of textural artifacts, as well as academic lectures, discussion forums, demonstrations, and exhibitions on topics pertinent to the book in the Asian world.

As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical scholarship, encyclopedic learnedness, and literary writing, and traces how debates over the relative value of moral cultivation, cultural accomplishment, and political service unfolded locally. By treating learning as the subject, it broadens our perspective, going beyond a history of ideas to investigate the social practices and networks of kinship and collegiality with which literati defined themselves in local, regional, and national contexts.