Three Duke Scholars Win Awards From Southeast Regional Conference of the Association for Asian Studies

Three Duke scholars were honored with prizes from the Southeast Regional Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (SEC-AAS). The SEC-AAS is a non-political, non-profit scholarly organization dedicated to promoting the study of Asian in the southeastern region of the United States. 

The 2026 graduate paper prize went to second-year East Asian Studies MA student Daniel Zhang, 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 postdoctoral associate Xingming Wang 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". His 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 distortion 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 2026 book prize goes to Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies Gennifer Weisenfeld 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.  

The 2026 SEC-AAS awards were presented during SEC-AAS' annual business meeting, held on January 24, 2026. Awardees were selected from submissions representing the geographic breadth of Asia, the disciplinary breadth of the association's membership, and the wide range of institutions in the Southeast, including R1 universities, state flagships, regional campuses, liberal arts colleges, HBCUs and more.