Taipei, Dec. 28 (CNA) The recipients of the Third Yu Ying-shih Humanistic Research Award on Thursday expressed appreciation for the recognition conferred on them and said the prize money would help alleviate the shortage of funds for research in their field.
One of 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 in the period 1985 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 University of Hong Kong's Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, is aiming to conduct epidemiological studies on psychiatry and psychiatric classification led by World Health Organization after the WWII, an emerging subject on the history of global health.
The third recipient of the prize, Sasha Chen (陳相因), is an associate research fellow at the Academia Sinica's Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, whose work focuses on a comparative study of the literary works of three Chinese writers.
She will look at the writing of Lu Xun (魯迅), Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白), and Cao Yu (曹禺) to examine the effect of Russian and Japanese culture on Chinese literature in the early 20th century.
Meanwhile, the Yu Ying-shih Humanistic Research Award also presented a Doctoral Thesis Prize, worth NT$240,000, to each of three PhD students, including Lee Hsiu-ping (李修平) who is studying at the Costen Institute of Archaeology at University of California Los Angeles in the Unites States.
The second winner is Chan Yen-yi (詹晏怡), who specializes in Buddhist culture in Japan, is studying in the Department of Art History at University of Kansas in the U.S.
Xiong Huei-lan (熊慧嵐), a PhD. Candidate at the Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University in the Netherlands, was the third winner. 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 Tang Prize, the award, active from 2015-2019, is aimed at supporting promising researchers and scholars in the humanities, granting financial assistance needed to complete dissertations and academic works.
Asked about his plans for the prize money, Wu said he hoped to be able to publish his study.
Chen said she planned to use the money to cover travel expenses to Russia and Japan to inspect some rare written documents. They both said that they had experienced difficulty sourcing funds for their respective research.
(By Yu Hsiao-han and Shih Hsiu-chuan)
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