History of Art and Architecture

Jeffrey Moser's Book, "Nominal Things" Awarded Bei Shan Tang Prize

Associate Professor Jeffrey Moser's 2023 publication, Nominal Things: Bronzes in the Making of Medieval China (The University of Chicago Press), has been awarded the Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). 

The Bei Shan Tang award honors an outstanding and innovative sole-authored monograph on Chinese art history of any historical period published in the English language.

Nominal Things centers eleventh-century China, where scholars were the first in world history to systematically illustrate and document ancient artifacts. Moser argues, the visual, technical, and conceptual mechanisms they developed to record these objects laid the foundations for methods of visualizing knowledge that scholars throughout early modern East Asia would use to make sense of the world around them.

You can read the AAS announcement here. To learn more about Nominal Things, you can visit UCP's website here.