Past Awards

The National Humanities Center will create five self-paced, asynchronous professional development modules that integrate current scholarship, model source analysis, and support curriculum development for teaching about the Ming dynasty. Organized as volumes in the Humanities in Class TeacherNotes collection, this project will allow pre-collegiate and non-expert collegiate level educators to acquire in-depth subject knowledge. Teachers who complete the modules earn professional credits, and may create and publish classroom-ready instructional resources that will be made openly available for other educators to use.

The Aura of Confucius is a ground-breaking study that reconstructs the remarkable history of Kongzhai, a shrine founded on the belief that Confucius’ descendants buried the sage’s robe and cap a millennium after his death and far from his home in Qufu, Shandong. Improbably located on the outskirts of modern Shanghai, Kongzhai featured architecture, visual images, and physical artifacts that created a ‘Little Queli,’ a surrogate for the temple, cemetery, and Kong descendants’ mansion in Qufu. Although Kongzhai gained recognition from the Kangxi emperor, its fortunes declined with modernization, and it was finally destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Unlike other sites, Kongzhai has not been rebuilt and its history is officially forgotten, despite the Confucian revival in contemporary China.

From the mid-sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese intellectuals attended more to dreams and dreaming than in any other period of Chinese history. Taking the approach of cultural history, this ambitious yet accessible work aims both to describe the most salient aspects of this “dream arc” and to explain its trajectory in time through the writings, arts, and practices of well-known thinkers, religionists, litterateurs, memoirists, painters, doctors, and political figures of late Ming and early Qing times. The work makes a contribution to the history of how people have understood human consciousness in various times and cultures. GHF supported the open-access version of this book.

The Fragrant Companions is the most significant work of literature that portrays female same-sex love in the entire premodern Chinese tradition. Written in 1651 by Li Yu, one of the most inventive and irreverent literary figures of seventeenth-century China, this play is at once an unconventional romantic comedy, a barbed satire, and a sympathetic portrayal of love between women. It offers a sensitive portrait of the two women’s passion for each other, depicts their intellectual pursuits and resourcefulness, and celebrates their partial triumph over social convention.

As part of their outreach to junior scholars, the Society for Ming Studies invited nine promising graduate students to present their research at their Annual Meeting, held at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii in March 2022. Geiss Hsu Foundation funds covered the travel and lodging costs for participating students. By actively inviting the next generation to participate in the meeting, the Society for Ming Studies hopes to grow their community and extend their impact within the field of Asian Studies.

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.