Submissions Are Closed

Deadline: May 15, 2024

Award Type

Award for Publications

The John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History is offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800.

The current prize amount is $1,000.

The general rules for submission are:

  1. Only books of high scholarly and literary merit will be considered. Anthologies, edited works, and pamphlets are ineligible for the competition.
  2. Books with a copyright of 2023 will be eligible for the 2024 prize.
  3. Nomination submissions may be made by an author or by a publisher. Publishers may submit as many entries as they wish. Authors or publishers may submit the same book for multiple AHA prizes.
  4. Nominators must complete an online prize submission form for each book submitted. Once you fill out the form you will receive an email with the committee’s contact information.
  5. One copy of each entry must be sent to each committee member and clearly labeled “Fairbank Prize Entry.” Print copies preferred unless otherwise indicated. If only e-copy is available, please contact review committee members beforehand to arrange submission format.

Please Note: Entries must be received by May 15, 2024, to be eligible for the 2024 competition. Entries will not be returned. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2024 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2025 AHA annual meeting in New York.

For questions, please contact the Prize Administrator.

John K. Fairbank
John K. Fairbank

John K. Fairbank, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and director of the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University, was president of the AHA in 1968.

Current Recipient

H. Yumi Kim, Johns Hopkins University

Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan (Oxford Univ. Press)

Yumi Kim’s Madness in the Family is an innovative study that skillfully uses both ethnographic and archival material to show how gendered notions of space, domestic labor, and family politics shaped the treatment of mental illness in Japan starting in the early modern period. In the Tokugawa period, women and their families were the main caregivers of mentally ill kin, and this continued to be true even after modern custody laws required that families register those confined at home with local officials and modern medicine focused on treating individual patients.