Bayly Prize 2023 prizegiving ceremony

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Thomas Barrett has been awarded the Bayly Prize. The finalists included Dr.Mariano Errichiello, Dr. Kelsey Granger and Dr. Yui Lo.

Dr. Thomas P. Barrett is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle East Studies and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, who specialises in the international and diplomatic history of pre-modern and modern East Asia. Prior to taking up his current post at Cambridge, Thomas was trained in the Japanese Sinological tradition, completing his BA at Aichi University (the successor to the Shanghai-based Tōa Dōbun Shoin) and his MA at the University of Tokyo. In 2016, he began his PhD at the University of Tokyo as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science DC Research Fellow. In 2019, he moved to the University of Oxford, where he completed his doctoral project under the supervision of Professor Henrietta Harrison.

Thomas’ current book project explores the development of the professional Chinese diplomat through the lens of the foreign presence who worked in Qing and Republican China’s legations and consulates. Portions of the project have hitherto been published as articles in Japanese in Shigaku Zasshi and Tōyō Gakuhō, and also as a chapter in a French-language volume published with the École française d’Extrême-Orient. Thomas’ Shigaku Zasshi article was recently awarded the 10th Historical Society of Japan Prize, which was established in 2014 to celebrate the work of scholars under the age of 40 who have made a critical contribution to historiography in the Japanese language.

Dr.Mariano Errichiello is the Shapoorji Pallonji Lecturer of Zoroastrianism, Co-Chair and Executive Director of the Shapoorji Pallonji Institute of Zoroastrian Studies at SOAS University of London, where he earned his PhD in 2022. Mariano has presented his research on Zoroastrian social history, esotericism and ritual performance in international conferences in Asia, Europe, and the US earning two Honourable mentions by the Ancient India & Iran Trust (AIIT) and the inaugural Early Career Prize by the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies and the Journal of Persianate Studies. Prior to his current appointment, Mariano has been a Resident Fellow of the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities at Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, a Research Fellow of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany.

Since receiving her doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 2022, Dr. Kelsey Granger has been an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow affiliated with Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich. Working with Prof. Armin Selbitschka, her current research focuses on first-century BC excavated records of postal horses housed at the Xuanquan relay station, located on the fringes of China’s Han empire. As she is particularly interested in intersections between animal, gender, and commodities histories, she hopes to expand her doctoral research on the exoticised and highly-feminised practice of lapdog-keeping in medieval China by exploring the stark commercialisation of pet-keeping in Song China. Related canine research has been published in the Bulletin of SOAS and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, for which she received the 2023 Sir George Staunton Prize.

Dr. Yui Lo is Lecturer in Modern Chinese and East Asian History at the University of Oxford, where he teaches Chinese and global history. He is currently revising his doctoral thesis in preparation for its publication.  To this end, he will conduct additional archival research in summer 2024.