April 2020 AAS Member News & Notes

Congratulations to the four AAS Members in the 2020 class of Guggenheim Fellows: Mark Philip Bradley (University of Chicago), Robert Campany (Vanderbilt University), Tyrell Haberkorn (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and David A. Pietz (University of Arizona).


We also extend congratulations for the four AAS Members awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the following research and publication projects:

Nicholas Abbott (Old Dominion University Research Foundation), “Sarkars into State: Language, Family, and Politics in Early Colonial India”
Alexander Gardner (Treasury of Lives, Inc.), “The Treasury of Lives Encyclopedia: Creating Access to the People and Places of Tibet, Inner Asia”
Michael Hill (College of William and Mary), “Chinese and Arabic Literatures at the End of Empire, 1850–1950”
Nathan Vedal (Washington University in St. Louis), “The Category of Everything: Ordering and Circulating Knowledge in Early Modern China”


AAS Members Bryna Goodman (University of Oregon), Rivi Handler-Spitz (Macalester College), Mrinalini Rajagopalan (University of Pittsburgh), and Mitra J. Sharafi (University of Wisconsin-Madison) have been appointed Fellows of the National Humanities Center for the 2020-21 academic year.


The American Council of Learned Societies has named its 81 new Fellows, which include eight AAS Members. These scholars will receive grants to work on the projects below:

Arjun Guneratne (Macalester College), “Ornithology at the margins: The social history of a field science in Sri Lanka”
Jing Jiang (Reed College), “The World Embedded in Modern Chinese Literary Imagination”
Xiaofei Kang (The George Washington University), “Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953”
Ryan Moran (University of Utah), “Tabling Death: Life Insurance in Modern Japan, 1881-1945”
Anne Katharine Rasmussen (College of William & Mary), “Monsoon Music: The Soundscape of Indonesian Islam in an Indian Ocean World”
Samira Sheikh (Vanderbilt University), “Landscapes of Conflict: Geographical mapping in early modern Gujarat, India”
Nathan Vedal (Washington University in St. Louis), “The Category of Everything: Ordering and Circulating Knowledge in Early Modern China”
Ding Xiang Warner (Cornell University), “Lost Narratives of the Great War: Trench Art of the Chinese Labour Corps”


ACLS has also announced the 2020 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellows; congratulations to AAS Member Philip Thai (Northeastern University), who will work on a project entitled “In the Shadows of the Bamboo Curtain: Underground Economies across Greater China during the Cold War” during his fellowship term.


Graduate students who were scheduled to present at the AAS 2020 conference in Boston are invited to submit their work to the Graduate Student Paper Prizes organized by the four AAS Area Councils. Submission instructions and paper requirements vary by council, so please make sure to consult the appropriate ones for your topic. All papers must be submitted for consideration by April 30, 2020.


Each month in 2020 the Journal of Asian Studies will select five featured articles from its archive at Cambridge Core and offer them open-access during that month. April’s featured articles focus on “History of Epidemics and Diseases”—an appropriate theme for our current time.


If you plan to attend one of our Regional Conferences in 2020, please check our website regularly for updates. The conferences scheduled for June and July have been cancelled, while those slated to be held in the fall are tentatively planning to move ahead. More information will be posted as soon as we have it.

We welcome submissions for the AAS Member News & Notes column, so please forward material for consideration to mcunningham@asianstudies.org.