Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago

The Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago Year-End Review is out! Check out AY 2025-2026 events including lecture recordings, music and performance snippets, a book talk write-up, and more!

READ HERE:
https://conta.cc/4gdfpL2

The Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 Asada Eiji B.A. Thesis Prize!

Congratulations to EALC's En Lei, and UChicago History's Alex Sung!

Read more about their theses, and their plans post-graduation!

https://ceas.uchicago.edu/news/ceas-announces-2026-asada-eiji-ba-thesis-prize-winners

Congratulations to new faculty, Yoonbin Cho (Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations) whose University of Pennsylvania's dissertation, “Transnational Affects Reprised: Korean Cinema’s Negotiations with Systems of World Cinema,” has been awarded The Timothy Corrigan Dissertation Award in Cinema and Media Studies.

MORE:
https://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/graduate/graduate-awards

Congratulations to the newly-announced Center for International Social Science Research Dissertation Fellows for the 2026-2027 year!

Among the Fellows includes UChicago History's Gabriel Groz whose dissertation, “The Politics of State Finance in Early-Modern China and England,” offers a comparative study of fiscal state formation in seventeenth-century Ming-Qing China and Stuart England, examining a period rarely featured in comparisons of Chinese and European political-economic development.

This grant provides funding, office space, and research support to outstanding doctoral candidates conducting innovative research on global topics. This fellowship reflects CISSR’s commitment to advancing rigorous social science scholarship at the The University of Chicago.

Read more about his dissertation here:
https://cissr.uchicago.edu/research/dissertation-fellowships/announcing-2026-27-dissertation-fellows

Congratulations to Ariel Fox (Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations) whose book, "The Cornucopian Stage: Performing Commerce in Early Modern China," has been awarded Best First Book in Ming Studies by the Society for Ming Studies, given for books published in 2023 and 2024!

With the generous support of the James P. Geiss & Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation, the Society for Ming Studies (SMS) has established this book prize (among two) which recognizes outstanding English-language monographs on Ming China (1368–1644) and its global connection.

LEARN MORE:
https://mingstudies.arts.ubc.ca/geiss-hsu-book-prizes-in-ming-studies/

Congratulations to Hoyt Long for being named one of two new Deputy Deans for the UChicago Division of the Arts and Humanities!

Professor Long is Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations. He served as EALC Chair in 2022-25 and Director of Graduate Studies in 2018-21.

He is the author of "On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan" (2012) and "The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age" (2021). The latter was informed by his Mellon New Directions Fellowship in 2016–19, which allowed him to pursue advanced training in quantitative research across the domains of network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, and statistical reasoning.

His new appointment will begin July 1st, 2026, and he will serve for a three-year term.