Past Awards

The sixth annual SEUSS-FLIC conference, themed “China on the Move,” brought together scholars who study historical exchanges and changes brought by the migration of people, goods, and ideas during the Ming dynasty and beyond. Yuhang Li, associate professor of Chinese art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the award-winning GHF-funded book Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China, delivered the keynote address.

CHINOPERL is an interdisciplinary and international peer-reviewed journal devoted to Chinese oral and performing literature with authors and readers from all over the world. Revolving around the thread of “music, language, and drama,” articles for this anniversary volume of CHINOPERL delve into collections of arias, qin handbooks, and fragments of play texts from the Ming dynasty and related periods. These musical and literary analyses speak to broader late-imperial intellectual trends, contributing to current scholarly conversations about the subjects.

Professor Craig Clunas pioneered the application of social history to the study of the Ming dynasty and Chinese art history. His innovative methodology has positioned the study of the Ming dynasty as one of the most dynamic and engaging areas in both art history and sinology. In recognition of his outstanding scholarship, groundbreaking contributions to the field, and his extensive curatorial and academic career, a group of twenty-three scholars collaborated to present an equal number of papers at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.

This project will build an open-access public platform, based on Large Language Models and Private Knowledge Bases, with which scholars can explore the collected writings of 325 individuals from the late Yuan to the early Qing found in the Siku quanshu. The user interface will allow researchers and the interested public to investigate topics in Ming history and culture. They will be able to call up documents and have them punctuated, analyzed, and translated, and they will be able to discover who else spoke to those topics.

GHF entered into a five-year partnership with the National Humanities Center to support residential fellowships for emerging, mid-career, or senior scholars studying China and its world, during and adjacent to the Ming dynasty. Fellows are assigned private studies with 24-hour access to the Center’s facilities, enjoy meals prepared by the Center’s dining staff, and receive the support of the Center’s dedicated librarians. They may also take part in scholarly colloquia, reading groups, and social activities with other leading scholars from around the world.

This two-year fellowship at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver for a recent PhD recipient in Ming studies will allow the fellow to focus on research with a robust community of Ming and Ming-adjacent scholars, an excellent library collection, and strong connections to East Asia. The fellowship will begin on September 1, 2025, and the fellow will give at least one research talk, present at the Ming & More text-reading group, and organize a one-time workshop, small conference, or talk series at UBC on a topic related to Ming studies.

Funding from GHF will earmark Friends of the Princeton University Library Grants for Ming scholars. During this three-year pilot program, a selection committee will award up to three Ming-focused grants to scholars who wish to conduct research at the Princeton University Library’s Special Collections, including the in the East Asian Library (Gest Collection). These grants, which have a value of up to $6,000 plus transportation costs, are meant to help defray expenses incurred in traveling to and residing in Princeton during the tenure of the grant. 

Were people in late imperial China angry? Judging from a long-standing scholarly tradition, they were not, but according to this period’s literary productions, they were frequently so. The project proposes to organize a manuscript review workshop in June 2025 for the first dedicated monograph on the understudied representation of anger in late imperial Chinese literature. The Uses of Anger will not only investigate what give rise to the emotion, but also demonstrate how literary works reconfigure the emotion’s regulation in late imperial China.