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
2026 Prizes
The AAS East and Inner Asia Council will offer two $1,000 Joseph Levenson Prizes for nonfiction scholarly books on China published in 2024.
$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 2024 will be eligible for the 2026 awards.
- Books may only be nominated for one prize competition within each regional category; please see the main Book Prizes page for regional categories.
- 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.
Books published by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc. are ineligible for consideration for prizes administered by the Association for Asian Studies. Employees of the Association are excluded from consideration for AAS book prizes, subventions, and grants. Publishers should check with authors to certify that they are not employed by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc.
Nominations for the 2026 Levenson Prizes will open on April 28, 2025. Please check back for more information after that date.
2025 Pre-1900 Levenson Prize Committee
Lara Blanchard
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Tamara Chin (Chair)
Brown University
Ruth Mostern
University of Pittsburgh
Post-1900 Committee
Silvia Lindtner (Chair)
University of Michigan
Rana Mitter
Harvard Kennedy School
Shengqing Wu
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2025 Awards
Pre-1900 Winner and Citation
Xin Wen, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press)
This revelatory history of diplomatic travel in and beyond Dunhuang between 850 and 1000 mines the multilingual corpus of Dunhuang documents. Drawing upon the “accidental archive” accumulated within the renowned library cave, The King’s Road investigates the mechanisms of diplomatic exchanges, the provisions, gifts and letters that envoys carried, the multicultural composition of groups of travelers, and the support received from sponsors and hosts. Xin Wen’s book sheds new light on a network of Han Chinese, Khotanese, Tibetan, Sogdian, and Uyghur envoys and their everyday social, linguistic, political and economic practices, which weathered the rise and fall of centralized empires.
Pre-1900 Honorable Mention
Post-1900 Winner and Citation
Xiaofei Kang, Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953 (Oxford University Press)
What makes propaganda work? In this groundbreaking book that brings together historical and ethnographic research, Xiaofei Kang shows the central role religion played for the makings of China’s Cultural Revolution. Enchanted Revolution provides a compelling case for how beliefs in ghosts, gods, spirits, and a cosmology rooted in the notion of qi retained their enchanting power and constituted an instrument of persuasion that successfully enrolled citizens into the communist party’s campaigns. While Chinese modernization was perceived as a secular project, informed by ideals of science, technology, military skills, and Western values, it required the mobilization of the spiritual. The book offers a beautifully written account of the cultural workers and their productions (e.g. revolutionary art and cinema) that constituted crucial translators of old narratives of female ghosts and ritual exorcism into a new (and ironically masculine and seemingly secular) vision of the state. They reanimated gendered scripts of religion to endow the Communist party state with scientific legitimacy and the heavenly mandate.
Post-1900 Honorable Mention
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
2022 Robert Ford Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape 300 BCE–800 CE
2023 Ruth Mostern, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History; Honorable Mention, Tao Jiang, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China
2024 Susan Naquin, Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000–2000; Honorable Mentions, Christian de Pee, Urban Life and Intellectual Crisis in Middle-Period China, 800–1100 and Lawrence Zhang, Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China
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
2022 Silvia M. Lindtner, Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation
2023 Joshua Goldstein, Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing; Honorable Mention, Nicole Willock, Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China
2024 Ho-fung Hung, City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule; Honorable Mention, Joseph Esherick, Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China