Joseph Levenson Prize – Pre-1900 and Post-1900
The Merlin Foundation, established by the late Audrey Sheldon, has provided for the two awards, one for works whose main focus is on China before 1900 and the other for works on post-1900 China. The prizes will be awarded to the English-language books that make the greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics, or economy of China. In keeping with the broad scholarly interests of Joseph Levenson, special consideration will be given to books that, through comparative insights or groundbreaking research, promote the relevance of scholarship on China to the wider world of intellectual discourse
Prize
The AAS China and Inner Asia Council will offer two $1,000 Joseph Levenson Prizes for nonfiction scholarly books on China published in 2021.
$1,000 – Pre-1900 prize winner
$1,000 – Post-1900 prize winner
Guidelines for Submission
- Works in all disciplines and in all periods of Chinese history are eligible, but anthologies, edited works, and pamphlets will not be considered.
- Only books bearing a copyright date of 2021 will be eligible for the 2023 awards.
- Publishers must complete the book nomination form. Each press may nominate a maximum of three books per Levenson Prize competition (pre-1900 and post-1900 are separate competitions).
- Only publishers may nominate books.
- Upon receipt of a completed nomination form, publishers will be provided with addresses for prize committee members. A copy of each entry, clearly labeled “Joseph Levenson Prize,” must be sent to each member of the appropriate committee.
Deadline
Nominations must be received by June 30, 2022 to be eligible for the 2023 awards.
Pre-1900 Committee
Patricia Ebrey (Chair)
University of Washington
James Benn
McMaster University
JP Park
University of Oxford
Post-1900 Committee
Joel Andreas
Johns Hopkins University
Letty Chen
Washington University in St. Louis
Victor Shih
University of California, San Diego
2022 Awards
Pre-1900 Winner and Citation
Robert Ford Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape 300 BCE – 800 CE (Harvard University Asia Center, 2020)
Robert Ford Campany’s The Chinese Dreamscape 300 BCE-800 CE is a brilliant and deeply empathetic study of how people in China from the Warring States period to the Tang thought about dreams. Campany brings a wide array of texts—divination records, dream interpretation manuals, religious scriptures, liturgical instructions, treatises, verse, official histories, and anecdotes—into conversation with studies of dreams across the globe. He also invites us to turn the lens back on ourselves and reflect on our own ideas about dreaming. The Chinese Dreamscape thus raises important questions about the nature of the self and the place of a person, perhaps equipped with multiple souls, in a larger interconnected cosmos. The book draws on Campany’s deep knowledge of the sources, both well-known and obscure, as well as his profoundly humanistic approach to the study of Chinese culture and religions. Campany provides a variety of frameworks in which the sources may be meaningfully read, and gives center stage to the texts themselves by providing richly annotated translations. The specialist will find much to appreciate, but the book reaches out beyond the world of Sinology to encompass the broader humanities. It is an exemplary piece of scholarship and a beautifully written book.
Pre-1900 Honorable Mention
Post-1900 Winner and Citation
Silvia M. Lindtner, Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020)
In Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, Silvia M. Lindtner illuminates how the aspirations of a transnational maker movement intersect with the transformation of China’s image into a leading force of technological innovation. Based on extensive fieldwork primarily conducted in hacker- and makerspaces in Shenzhen, the book argues that the yearnings for equality, participation, and social justice that inspired the maker movement (and that the author provocatively calls “the socialist pitch”) produce feelings of change and imbue technological innovation with countercultural value, while in fact occluding enduring race and gender discrimination. Theoretically engaging and clearly written, Prototype Nation provides thick ethnographies of individuals and groups committed to alternative ways of producing technologies, while at the same time uncovering the colonial tropes and exploitative labor practices that undergird their work and that sustain the ongoing expansion of finance capitalism. The book thus puts China at the center of a global story of labor precarization, offering insights and provocations on the future tasks of critical scholarship beyond China.
Past Awards
Pre-1900 Category
1987 Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth Century China
1988 Robert Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-Chou Chiang-Hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung
1989 Andrew H. Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel
1990 Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu
1991 Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art
1992 Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768
1993 Martin J. Powers, Art and Political Expression in Early China
1994 Jing Wang, The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism of Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West
1995 Patricia Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Women and Marriage in Sung Dynasty China
1996 Stephen F. Teiser, Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism
1997 James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793
1998 Maggie Bickford, Ink Plum: The Making of a Scholar-Painting Genre
1999 Susan L. Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century
2000 Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China
2001 Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology
2002 Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things
2003 David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography
2004 Robert Hymes, Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China
2005 John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects
2006 Antonia Mary Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850
2007 Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
2008 Martin J. Powers, Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China
2009 Anthony Barbieri-Low, Artisans in Early Imperial China
2010 Robert E. Harrist Jr., The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China
2011 Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China
2012 Christopher M. B. Nugent, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China
2013 Dagmar Schäfer, The Crafting of 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth Century China
2014 Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900
2015 Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
2016 Wai-yee Li, Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature
2017 Ping Foong, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court
2018 Li Chen, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics
2019 Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule
2020 Lara Blanchard, Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire: Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry
2021 Stephen Owen, Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries
Post-1900 Category
1987 Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy
1988 Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry
1989 Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising
1990 Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942
1991 David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s
1992 Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988
1993 Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village/Socialist State
1994 Gregor Benton, Mountain Fires: The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938
1995 Vaclav Smil, China’s Environmental Crisis: An Inquiry into the Limits of National Development
1996 Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1979
1997 Keith Schoppa, Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China
1998 John J. Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution
1999 Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 3: The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961-66
2000 Lynn T. White III, Unstately Power: Volume I: Local Causes of China’s Economic Reforms
2001 Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasants, Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market
2002 Edward J.M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928
2003 Lucien Bianco, Peasants Without the Party: Grass-roots Movements in 20th Century China
2004 Geremie Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975)
2005 Yan Yunxiang, Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Changes in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999
2006 Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China
2007 Michael Dutton, Policing Chinese Politics: A History
2008 Sherman Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia
2009 Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950
2010 Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China
2011 Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Artisans in Southwest China, 1920-2000
2012 Yomi Braester, Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
2013 Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China
2014 Joseph Allen, Taipei: City of Displacements
2015 Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade
2016 Luigi Tomba, The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China
2017 Christopher Rea, The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China
2018 Sigrid Schmalzer, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China
2019 Ching Kwan Lee, The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa
2020 Sasha Welland, Experimental Beijing. Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art
2021 Joel Andreas, Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China