John K. Fairbank Prize
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. It honors the late John K. Fairbank, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and director of the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University, and president of the Association in 1968.
The current prize amount is $1,000. See the list of past recipients.
The general rules for submission are:
- Only books of high scholarly and literary merit will be considered. Anthologies, edited works, and pamphlets are ineligible for the competition.
- Books with a copyright of 2022 will be eligible for the 2023 prize.
- 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.
- Nominators must complete an online prize submission form for each book submitted.
- 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, 2023, to be eligible for the 2023 competition. Entries will not be returned. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2023 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2024 AHA annual meeting in San Francisco.
For questions, please contact the Prize Administrator.
2022 Fairbank Prize
Hwasook B. Nam, University of Washington, Seattle
Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea (Cornell Univ. Press)
Hwasook Nam’s Women in the Sky masterfully argues for the centrality of women industrial workers in the process of Korea’s economic and political modernization across the century from the colonial era through today. Nam reconstructs female workers’ activism, traces their transformative contributions to the movements for labor rights and democracy, and documents their erasure from the grand narrative of nation building. In making women workers visible, she shows how sexism and gendered power relations worked to perpetuate a deep social conservatism that haunts Korean society, constrains the labor movement, and distorts historical memory today.