Past Awards

Place has emerged as a major focus and concept in recent scholarship on Chinese art, architecture, and material culture, and has been redefining approaches to landscape and its representation, to cities and the built environment, and to objects and their materiality. This conference connects scholars from Canada, the US, and the UK whose work foregrounds place as a critical term across different media and time periods, with a focus on the Ming-Qing period. It will result in greater awareness of how related questions are examined by colleagues and graduate students working from adjacent fields, and articulate how current research centered on “place” is changing the field of Chinese art, visual, and material culture. A selection of conference papers will be published in a thematic issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

The Cornucopian Stage: Performing Commerce in Early Modern China explores the ways in which late imperial Chinese drama articulated and enacted an early modern economic imaginary. At the center of Fox’s study are a group of plays attributed to the so-called “Suzhou School”, a circle of collaborative playwrights whose works were widely read and performed throughout the Qing dynasty but who have received limited attention in modern scholarship. This book, which will be the first Western-language monograph on the Suzhou circle, draws on these rich texts to expand our understanding of what a late imperial play was and what a late imperial play could do.

Why write on things? This book’s central claim is that the act of inscribing an object with lines of prose and verse became, in the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties, a central means through which writers grappled with the material contingencies and technical preconditions of writing in general, a space where they came to reflect upon their investments in, and dependencies on, the permanence of the written word. The most eloquent inscriptions on objects from this period of profound societal upheaval consequently conceive of durability—the capacity to withstand destruction and damage—as a pressing matter of literary concern.

The Mongols are famous on account of Chinggis Khan and the empire they built and ruled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Yet, what became of the Mongols after the glories of the empire? This is the history that Sagang Sechen relates in the Precious Summary, which was written in 1662, shortly after the Mongols’ submission to the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912). The Precious Summary offers an unparalleled historical perspective on what happened in China and Inner Asia from the late fourteenth century to the founding of the Qing dynasty in the early seventeenth century.

Towers in the Void analyzes the contents, format, and circulation of books in the late Ming and early Qing and explores how they functioned to connect readers to one another and to the material world. Kile uses the analytic of media to consider writing and materiality together, thereby elucidating issues as varied as spatial ideology, performance practices, gender roles, and the genre of short vernacular fiction. Kile argues that Li Yu’s idiosyncratic magnum opus, Xianqing ouji (Leisure Notes) was a unique literary form that he forged by combining his expertise in a variety of fields with his interest in generic and stylistic experimentation. Although Leisure Notes has often used by historians as a core source on many topics, no one has considered this pivotal text as a composite whole.

To increase the visibility of pathbreaking work on Ming China within the broader field of Asian Studies and related disciplines, the Society for Ming Studies will develop and promote a prize for an “outstanding contribution” to the study of Ming China and a prize for a best first book on the Ming. Both prizes will be awarded the annual meeting, which is held at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference.

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.”