2026 Grants

The Esherick-Ye Foundation is pleased to announce the results of its 2026 competition for grants to support project fieldwork in modern Chinese economic, social, and political history or archaeology. Congratulations to all recipients.

Zi-Qi CHEW, Ph.D. Student, UC San Diego.  "Fishing the China Seas: A 3,500-Year Record of Pre-Industrial Fisheries and Maritime Interaction at Hepingdao”

Amanda DeMARCO, Ph.D. Student, UC San Diego. “Renew and Reform: A Social History of Renewable Energy in Rural China Since 1979”

Jenna DITTMAR, Assistant Professor, Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine. “The legacy of adversity: Childhood health and its impact on long-term health outcomes and survival in Bronze Age China”

Yahui HE, Post-doctoral Scholar, Stanford University. “Long-term entangled ecologies: socio-politics of subsistence in the Neolithic north borderland, China”

David LI, Ph.D. Student, Northwestern University. “The Sea as the Field: Maritime Industries and Economic Life in South China, 1550s–1937”

Chi Kwan Vivian NGAN, Ph.D. Student, UC Berkeley. “From Veins to Value: The Elite, the Hakka, and the Moral Technology of Extraction in the Nanling Borderlands, 1895-1960”

Anne-Julie ROBITAILLE, Master’s Student, Université de Montréal. “Following the Traces of Music-Making : A Use-Wear Analysis of the Bone Mouth Harps from Shimao (2300-1800 BCE), Shaanxi Province”

Qier SA (Sachraa SERGELENG), Ph.D. Student, University of Washington. “Sex, Law, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Qing Mongolia”

Ka Shing SO, Ph.D. Student, SUNY Binghamton. “Shadow Economy: Smuggling, the Gold Trade, and Everyday Life in Cold War Hong Kong”

Wuyutong YAO, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Oxford University.  “From Collection to Cultivation: The Agro-industrial Transformation of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 1949-1978”

Xinyue ZHANG, Ph.D. Student, Yale University. “Storms, Spirits, and Sea Peoples: Mobilizing Climate Knowledge across the South China Sea, 1930s-1980s”

Yidan ZHANG, Ph.D. Student, Oxford University. “Culture Contact and Interregional Interaction Across the Eastern Rim of the Tibetan Plateau in the Third Millennium BC: Field-Based Ground-Truthing of GIS-Modelled Movement Corridors”

Yuting ZHANG, Ph.D. Student, UNC Chapel Hill. “Trapped in Liberation: Rural Women’s Everyday Lives in Jiangxi, China, 1950s-1980s”