AAS 2021 Prizes

The AAS is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s prize competitions and offer congratulations to all honorees. Please join us at 5:00pm Eastern Time on Wednesday, March 24 to celebrate all winners during the AAS 2021 Virtual Annual Conference Award Ceremony.

Book Prizes

Joseph Levenson Prize (China, Pre-1900)

Stephen Owen, Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019)

Honorable Mention: Macabe Keliher, The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China (University of California Press, 2019)

Honorable Mention: Charles Sanft, Literate Community in Early Imperial China: The Northwestern Frontier in Han Times (State University of New York Press, 2019)

Joseph Levenson Prize (China, Post-1900)

Joel Andreas, Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Honorable Mention: Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (Columbia University Press, 2019)

John Whitney Hall Prize (Japan)

Benjamin Uchiyama, Japan’s Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Honorable Mention: Kirsten L. Ziomek, Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019)

James B. Palais Prize (Korea)

Monica Kim, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press, 2019)

Bernard S. Cohn Prize (First book on South Asia)

Nosheen Ali, Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize (South Asia)

Tony K. Stewart, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (University of California Press, 2019)

Honorable Mention: Arupjyoti Saikia, The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Harry J. Benda Prize (First book on Southeast Asian Studies)

Christian C. Lentz, Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (Yale University Press, 2019)

Honorable Mention: Taomo Zhou, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019)

George McT. Kahin Prize (Southeast Asia)

Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66 (Princeton University Press 2018)

Franklin R. Buchanan Prize for Asia Curriculum Materials

Rylan Sekiguchi, “What Does It Mean To Be An American?” (Published by Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) and the Mineta Legacy Project)

Honorable Mention: Kusum Knapczyk & Peter Knapczyk, Reading Hindi: Novice to Intermediate (Routledge)

Career Awards

Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies Awards

Nancy Abelmann (posthumous)
Norma Field

Distinguished Service to the Association for Asian Studies Awards

Anna Leon Shulman, Bibliography of Asian Studies
Frank Joseph Shulman, Bibliography of Asian Studies

Student Paper Prizes

China and Inner Asia Council

Chloe Estep (Columbia University), “Futurist Biopoetics in Republican China”

Katrin Heilmann (King’s College, London), “‘Shelter-mentality’: China’s 1969 Mass Underground Construction Campaign”

Chuncheng Liu (University of California, San Diego), “In Score We Trust: Examination of a Social Credit System Infrastructure in China”

Northeast Asia Council

Jing Sun (University of Pennsylvania), “Broken Promise: Rice, Manchuria and the Failure of Food Autarky of Imperial Japan, 1919-1941”

South Asia Council

Ayelet Kotler (University of Chicago), “The Origin of Poetry, Retold: On Translating the Ramayana into Persian”

Southeast Asia Council

Takahiro Kamisuna (National University of Singapore), “Beyond Nationalism: The Youth’s Struggle for the Independence of East Timor and Democracy for Indonesia”