The Bayly Prize 2024 Winners
The Society is very pleased to announce the winners for the 2024 Bayly Prize for a distinguished thesis on an Asian subject from a British or Irish University. The prize was established to honour the work of Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (1945-2015). We would like to thank the judges for their careful consideration of each submission: Professor Benjamin Hopkins (George Washington University), Professor Magnus Marsden (Sussex), Dr Rian Thum (Manchester), and Professor Nile Green (UCLA).
First Prize: Dr. Luis Junqueria, University of Cambridge for his thesis: The Science of the Spirit: Psychical Research, Healthcare and the Revival of the Occult in a Modernising China, 1900–1949.
He is currently a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), University of Cambridge, where he is revising his PhD thesis for publication as a monograph, The Science of the Spirit: Psychical Research, Medicine and the Occult in Chinese Modernity. The manuscript is under review with the Cambridge University Press book series ‘Science in History’. Last month, his first edited volume, Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries, was published by Amsterdam University Press.
In the coming months, he will continue at HPS under a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, alongside a new appointment as Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. His next book project, Healing through the Mind: The Rise of Mind-Cure Movements in Modern East Asia, explores how laypeople in China and Japan reinvented their own traditions of self-cultivation by engaging with ‘mind-cure’: various popular, early 20th-century global movements championing self-care and mental healing.
Second Prize was awarded to Dr.Xiaoqing Wang, University of Edinburgh for her thesis: Bodyscapes of Modernity: A Post-Critical Sociology of Art and the body in republican China (1912-1937).
Xiaoqing Wang obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2024. She currently delivers courses on modern Chinese history and visual culture at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. A primary research project that she is currently undertaking builds on the findings of her doctoral research and continues to explore the paradoxical nature of Chinese modernity and subsequent developments in the contemporary period. A paper in progress examines the marginalisation of art in Chinese knowledge and its relationship to the process of rationalisation during the socialist era. Additionally, she is engaged in research exploring the contemporary transformation of aesthetics and visuality. Her recent papers examine the aestheticisation of cheerful faces of marginalised groups in contemporary Chinese visual culture, and the particularities of aesthetic experience in immersive exhibitions.
Third Prize was awarded to Dr Junda Lu, School of Oriental and African Studies, for his thesis: The State as the Celestial: Roots of Statism in Modern China, 1820-1893.
Dr. Lu is currently building upon his PhD thesis by currently preparing for a new research project that further develops one aspect of his opening chapters by delving into the underlying logic of intellectual transformations within Confucian scholarship from the 1780s to the 1820s. This project can be integrated with the former part of his thesis for the publication of a more well-rounded book, which historicizes the intellectual foundations of the modern Chinese state and re-examines ideas underlying Chinese statism apart from both the nationalist narrative of China as a unified nation and the essentialist understanding of the authoritarian character in Confucian political thinking. In this way, he wishes to situate the increasingly aggressive behavior of China’s current regime within a larger historical context to debunk the teleology in modern Chinese history wielded by political authority, which would help reveal a wider range of possibilities for multi-disciplinary research on China.
The Appeal for funds remains open to enable the Prize to be put on a sustainable long-term footing. Contributions can be made through the Royal Asiatic Society’s website at following page: