Nathan Vedal, assistant professor of East Asian languages and cultures in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship.
Open to scholars in all disciplines of the humanities and related social sciences, ACLS Fellowships are intended as salary replacement to help recipients devote six to twelve continuous months to full-time research and writing. The goal of the fellowship is to support a major piece of scholarly work, which can take the form of a monograph, articles, digital publication(s), critical edition or other scholarly resources.
Vedal’s project, titled “The Category of Everything: Ordering and Circulating Knowledge in Early Modern China,” examines how early modern Chinese readers coped with an overabundance of texts and information following the 16th-century publishing boom. Drawing on a wide body of extant reference works, from encyclopedias to dictionaries, it traces the emergence of new scholarly working methods and analyzes how such texts were put to use by readers.
Vedal also recently won a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. In addition, he has been appointed to a one-year membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, part of the School of Historical Studies in Princeton, NJ, under the auspices of the Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors. Vedal will serve both the ACLS and Mellon fellowships concurrently during the 2020-21 academic year.
