Past Awards

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.”

On the eve of the sixteenth-century economic transformation and the age of exploration that was to propel China into the modern world, the scholar-official Lu Rong (1436-94) recorded his observations of contemporary society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden. Within its genre, Bean Garden is unusual in its author’s willingness to express admiration, frustration, and outrage toward his subjects. Mark Halperin has selected about a quarter of the pieces from the original work, arranging them in topical categories that provide a richly textured first-hand observation of late imperial China designed for course use with undergraduates.

The Southeast US Scholars and Friends of Late Imperial China (SEUSS-FLIC) held an in-person conference at Vanderbilt University in conjunction with a slate of virtual panels organized by the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Panels explored the ways in which China’s late imperial period created the foundation for China’s identity today, and addressed issues in Chinese history, literature, and culture in the context of global connections and comparisons. The conference aimed to forge connections between scholars from institutions within driving distance of Nashville, Tennessee, who may encounter barriers to attending other regional and national conferences.

GHF made an award to the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) to support travel to the 2022 annual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii for as many as 15 scholars specializing in Ming studies and Ming-adjacent research. The goal of the travel grants was to encourage greater participation in the annual conference by scholars specializing in early modern China, who have been underrepresented at recent conferences. Priority was given to contingent or part-time faculty, students, and independent scholars.

GHF issued a project award to the National Humanities Center (NHC) in support of a Geiss Hsu Foundation Fellowship for Johan Elverskog for the 2021–2022 academic year. The award allowed the selected scholar to intensively pursue a book-length project at the Center in the company of a stimulating intellectual community while receiving the exemplary research support for which the NHC is known. During the fellowship year, Dr. Elverskog, Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, worked on a project examining the history of Uighur Buddhism from 800 to 1800 CE.