Past Awards

In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class conflict. Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China, offering new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with literature, intellectual history, and art history. With examples spanning the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how relations with things can both encode and resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss.

Do the portrayals of objects in literary texts represent historical evidence about the material culture of the past? Or are things in books more than things in the world? Sophie Volpp considers fictional objects of the late Ming and Qing that defy being read as illustrative of historical things. Instead, she argues, fictional objects are often signs of fictionality themselves, calling attention to the nature of the relationship between literature and materiality. A deeply insightful analysis of late Ming and Qing texts and reading practices, The Substance of Fiction has important implications for Chinese literary studies, history, and art history, as well as the material turn in the humanities.

Born to a powerful family and educated at a prominent monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699-1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity to play a central role in the reconstruction of her religious community. Alison Melnick Dyer employs literary and historical analysis, centered on a biography written by the nun’s disciple, to consider how privilege influences individual authority, how authoritative Buddhist women have negotiated their positions and situations, and how the lives of historical Buddhist women are (and are not) memorialized by their communities.

The award will help 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 include workshops with the composer, librettist, conductor, director, and choreographer that will illuminate the textual and musical transformations of the opera, and will utilize local resources, such as the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s holdings of Chinese art and opera costumes. Other projects include a course on the novel and its adaptations, and seminars on related topics.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, members of the Naqshbandi Sufi dynasty vied for influence in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang. The ensuing conflict saw the region incorporated into the expanding Qing imperium. Three decades afterward, Muḥammad Ṣadiq Kashghari was commissioned to write an account of these Naqshbandi Sufis and their downfall. Providing a rare local perspective on China’s expansion into Muslim borderlands, this translation sheds light on Xinjiang’s political and religious traditions and makes a foundational work of Inner Asian literature available to students and scholars.

This international conference seeks to foster dialogue between specialists of Korean and Vietnamese humanities. It will consist of eight panels, each featuring a pair of specialists, one working on Vietnam, the other working on Korea, who will give thematically-linked presentations on a common area of study: Pedagogy and Learning; Book History; Literacy and Poetic Culture; Political Legacies; Vernacular Culture; Popular Fiction; Environmental History; and Frontiers and Borders. It will also include a round-table on rare materials collections and digital source material. Several projects will be selected for publication in a special issue of a journal.

This musical performance of three arias from the opera Ghost Village will accompany a two-day symposium, The Sensorium of the Early-Modern Chinese Text, scheduled for October 23-25 at the University of Chicago. Ghost Village is based on one of the stories from Strange Tales of the Liaozhai by the early Qing dynasty author, Pu Songling (1640-1715). The opera is a collaboration between Chen Yao, of the Central Conservatory in Beijing, and Judith Zeitlin, of the University of Chicago. Open to the public, the project aims to foster an appreciation of late-imperial Chinese culture.

The Culture of Language in Ming China traces the origins of the study of phonetic scripts designed for writing Chinese, as well as early proposals for language standardization that brought together seemingly unrelated communities, from Buddhist monks to opera librettists. Conventionally understood as a period of intellectual stagnation, the late Ming dynasty represented a pivotal moment in scholarly practices and literary production revolving around philological pursuits, which continue to resonate to the present day. The Culture of Language in Ming China is the first book to examine the broad body of Ming scholarly texts on language.