Francis L. K. Hsu Book Prize

Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize: 2025 Call for Submissions

The Society for East Asian Anthropology invites submissions for the 2025 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize. A prize of $300 is given to the English-language book published in the previous calendar year (2024) judged to have made the most significant contributions to the field. The prize is named for the late Francis L.K. Hsu (1909-2000), renowned cross-cultural anthropologist and former president (1977-78) of the American Anthropological Association.

We welcome book submissions from all four fields of anthropology as they relate to ethnography and the span of East Asia and diasporic societies/cultures identified with East Asia. Nominations for the prize may be made by authors, publishers, or interested third parties (with the consent of the author). Reference works, translations, textbooks, edited works, and anthologies are not eligible. Both members and non-members of SEAA are eligible.

The submission deadline for this prize is May 1, 2025. 

Please send (1) a hard copy of the book to each of the five Committee members at the addresses listed below. (2) An electronic copy of the book (PDF or ebook) should go to the chair to share with fellow committee members at seaanthropology atgmaildot com. Books must be received by the May 1 deadline for full consideration.

Laurel Kendall
510 West 123rd St. Apt. #1
New York, NY 10027

June Hee Kwon
11276 Stanford Court Ln #502
Gold River, CA 95670

Lynne Nakano (Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize Committee Chair)
Room 411, Leung Kau Kui Building
Department of Japanese Studies
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, New Territories,
Hong Kong
Postal code: 10000

Tel. (852)3943 6568

Priscilla Song
Penn State College of Medicine
Department of Humanities, MC: H134
500 University Drive
P.O. Box 850
Hershey, PA 17033

Jun Zhang
Department of Public and International Affairs
Room Li-5501, Li Dak Sum Yip Yio Chin Academic Building
City University of Hong Kong,
Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon
Hong Kong
Postal: 10000

Tel: (852)3442 4482

Past Francis Hsu Book Prize Recipients:

2024: June Hee Kwon’s Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers. (Duke University Press, 2023).

2023: Heather Anne Swanson’s Spawning Modern Fish: Transnational Comparison of Japanese Salmon. (University of Washington Press).

2022: Chikako Ozawa-De Silva’s The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan (University of California Press, 2021).

2021: Silvia M. Lindtner’s Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020).

2020: Suma Ikeuchi’s Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in Brazilian Diaspora (Stanford University Press, 2019)

2019: Sasha Su-Ling Welland’s Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)

2018: Priscilla Song’s Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)

2017: Yukiko Koga’s Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute 2016).

2016: Jie Yang’s Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China (Cornell University Press 2015).

2015: Rian Thum’s The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Harvard University Press 2014).

2014: Manduhai Buyandelger’s Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia (University of Chicago Press 2013).

2013: Junko Kitanaka’s Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress (Princeton University Press) and Judith Farquhar & Qicheng Zhang’s Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (Zone Books 2012).

2012: Andrew Kipnis’s Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China (University of Chicago Press 2011).

2011: Li Zhang’s In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Cornell University Press 2010).

2010: Cathryn Clayton’s Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (Harvard East Asian Monograph Series 2009).

2009: Nicole Dejong Newendorp’s Uneasy Reunions: Immigration, Citizenship, and Family Life in Post-1997 Hong Kong (Stanford University Press 2008).

2008: David Palmer’s Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia (Columbia University Press 2007).

2007: Tamara Jacka’s Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (M.E. Sharpe Press).

2006: Susan Orpett Long’s Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life (University of Hawaii Press 2005).

2005: Vanessa Fong’s Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy (Stanford University Press 2004).

2004: Bonnie Adrian’s Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry (University of California Press 2003).