Recipients of the third Yu Ying-shih Humanistic Research Award on Thursday expressed their appreciation for the recognition conferred on them and said the prize money would help alleviate a shortage of funds for research in their fields.
One of the three recipients of the Monographic Book Prize was Lin Hsin-yi (林欣宜), an assistant professor of history at National Taiwan Normal University, whose project is to study the history of Taiwan around 1895 as documented by foreign nationals in the country.
Lin said she hoped her work would add to the understanding of history from a new angle.
Another awardee, Harry Wu (吳易叡), an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, is aiming to conduct epidemiological studies on psychiatry and psychiatric classification led by the WHO after World War II, an emerging subject on the history of global health.
The third recipient, Sasha Chen (陳相因), is an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, who is doing a comparative study of the works of three Chinese writers.
Chen is studying the writings of Lu Xun (魯迅), Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白) and Cao Yu (曹禺) to examine the effects of Russian and Japanese cultures on Chinese literature in the early 20th century.
The Yu Ying-shih Humanistic Research Award also presented three doctoral thesis prizes, worth NT$240,000 each, to three doctoral students.
Among the recipients were Lee Hsiu-ping (李修平), who is studying at the Costen Institute of Archeology at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Chan Yen-yi (詹晏怡), an art history student at the University of Kansas specializing in Buddhist culture in Japan.
The third recipient was Xiong Huei-lan (熊慧嵐), a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University in the Netherlands. Xiong’s studies are focused on the civil servant system of China’s Southern Song Dynasty in the 12th century.
The Yu Ying-shih Humanistic Research Award was created in 2015 by Chinese-American historian Yu Ying-shih (余英時), who won the first Tang Prize in Sinology in 2014.
According to the Tang Prize Foundation, the award, active from 2015 to 2019, aims to support promising researchers and academics in the humanities by granting them financial assistance to complete their dissertations and academic work.
Asked about his plans for the prize money, Wu said he hoped to be able to publish his study.
Chen said she plans to use the money to cover travel expenses to Russia and Japan to inspect rare written documents.
They both said that they had experienced difficulty sourcing funds for their research.
