The Association for Asian Studies in Seattle

The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) is the world’s largest organization focusing on research on and teaching about Asia. Its annual conference, attended by over three thousand members, is our most important opportunity to recruit new book projects and make our new publications in Asian studies available to scholars. This year, AAS will meet in Seattle for the first time, from March 31 through April 3, at the Washington State Convention Center.

AAS’s members are academics and other professionals whose work involves East, South, Northeast, and Southeast Asia, and whose expertise spans across disciplines—history, anthropology, and literary studies, to name just a few. At the hundreds of themed panels scattered across several days, they will give oral presentations on their current research. Our acquisitions editors scan the program to identify topics that could be developed into books, and arrange in advance to meet with potential new authors and to follow up with authors whose manuscripts already are in development. A popular feature of the conference is the exhibit hall, in which dozens of book publishers introduce new titles published in the last year, as well as feature backlist highlights.

In addition to lining up the usual dozens of meetings with authors, other scholars, and publishing partners, this year our Seattle-based staff will have the opportunity to meet the many University of Washington Press authors attending the meeting. Come see us at booth 310-312! We will also celebrate several recent prize winners:

Harvard historian Xiaofei Tian’s book The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath, the translation of a memoir by Zhang Daye, who as a child experienced trauma during social turmoil in the mid-nineteenth century, will be the first recipient of AAS’s Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize for Translation.

University of California–Berkeley historian Michael Nylan’s translation of Exemplary Figures / Fayan, by the Chinese court poet-philosopher Yang Xiong (53 BCE-18 CE), recently won the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature.

University of Florida art and archaeology specialist Guolong Lai won an honorable mention for the Society for American Archaeology’s Book Award in the Scholarly Category for Excavating the Afterlife: The Archaeology of Early Chinese Religion.

Yunnan University anthropologist Jinghong Zhang’s book Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic won the biannual International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Social Sciences division. To celebrate the prize win, we will be distributing Puer tea bags.

The conference also will be the AAS debut of our new Classics of Chinese Thought translation series and our multidisciplinary Global South Asia series. We expect these initiatives to attract special attention, and we look forward to celebrating the publication of the first volumes in these series with authors and series editors.