Past Awards

An award from the Geiss Hsu Foundation will support a series of online and in-person workshops on the materialities of Ming books and manuscripts for fourteen East Asian studies librarians specializing in Chinese studies in North America. Participants will acquire knowledge and skills to move beyond traditional “one-shot” bibliographic instruction toward a new model of teaching that integrates material analysis into undergraduate and graduate curricula.

This March 2025 workshop brought together scholars to review Mapping the Weird: the Geography of the Seventeenth Century Strange Tale. Focusing on two understudied tale collections from the early seventeenth century, the manuscript combines mapping and geographical analysis with close reading to create an “atlas of the imagination” for the Wanli period (1572-1620), exploring how conceptual maps of the divine and demonic intersect with the maps of administrative, natural, and cultural geography.

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.