During the annual business meeting, held after 12 noon on Saturday, January 24, 2026, SEC-AAS announced the winners of its prizes. All of the committees were grateful to read the fantastic scholarship being written and published by Asia experts in the Southeastern US.
The 2026 undergraduate paper prize went to Nelia Binder (undergraduate at Wake Forest University) for her paper entitled “Dead Authors in My TV: Masks, Memory, and Murder in Bungo Stray Dogs.” She is also presenting this work as part of the annual meeting.
The 2026 graduate paper prize went to Daniel Zhang (student at Duke University) whose article "Shaping Minds Through Play" uses a curated museum exhibition framework to demonstrate how the traditional Japanese board game sugoroku functioned as a tool for nationalist indoctrination between 1894 and 1945. By analyzing game mechanics, aesthetics, and performative play through the theoretical lenses of Mosse, Arendt, and Butler, Zhang argues that these games sanitized war to mold children into imperial subjects. The paper’s five-hall structure illustrates how repetitive gameplay and scripted victories mirrored state propaganda, ultimately transforming militaristic education into a banal, everyday activity.
The 2026 article prize went to Dr. Xingming Wang (a postdoc at Duke University) for the article “Toward a Crematory Epiphany: Dark Ecological Responses to Two Post-socialist Crises in Li Yang’s Blind Shaft (2003)” published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. This article begins with a close reading of the closing scene of Li Yang's important 2003 film Blind Shaft and traces its significance across multiple levels of interpretation, from the visual adaptation of a contemporary novella, to a critique of a contemporary Chinese distortions of the family structure, to an ecocritical symptom of the China's exploitative relationship with nature and labor. Wang demonstrates how Li's film intertwines the crises of interpersonal relations and an ideology of extractivism, and offers a reading of the film that gets at the philosophical heart of the idea community.
The selection committee has put forward an honorable mention for the 2026 best book prize: Prof. Tadashi Ishikawa (University of Central Florida) for his book Geographies of Gender: Family Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan, published by Cambridge University Press. Ishikawa argues that marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships were critical sites where gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in colonial Taiwan. The competing norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary citizens transformed the Japanese empire into a gendered space, revealing the inherent instability of metropole-colony relations during the interwar period. The pathbreaking study is valuable for those interested in legal, gender, and colonial studies.
The 2026 book prize goes to Prof. Gennifer Weisenfeld (Duke University) for The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising, Design, Nation and Empire in Modern Japan, published by Duke University Press. A pioneering study of modern Japanese commercial art and empire building, the book is meticulously researched and crisply written and contributes significantly to the understanding of corporate branding and national identity from the early 1900s to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Its archival depth and conceptual clarity make the study an important resource for scholars and students alike, offering fresh insights into the fraught relationship between commerce, design, and politics during a period of rapid social and political transformation.
Congratulations to all four winners, and many thanks to the members of the SEC-AAS executive board which formed the committees to review the submissions.
For next year’s awards, the SEC-AAS executive board welcomes even more submissions—especially for the student prizes. We hope to have a full range of submissions representing the geographic breadth of Asia, the disciplinary breadth of our membership, and the wide range of institutions in our region, including R1 universities, state flagships, regional campuses, liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, and more. The committee chairs to receive submissions for the 2027 prizes will be announced in the presidential letter later this year.