Congratulations to HIAA PhD Candidate Dandan Xu who recently was awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange for the upcoming academic year. The award enables PhD candidates to dedicate their final year to dissertation research and writing. Dandan’s dissertation, titled "Tracing the Master in Words and Images: Illustrated Biographies of Wang Yangming (1472–1529) in Late Ming China”, seeks to recover an overlooked aspect of the study of the influential philosopher and Confucian thinker through analysis of two illustrated biographies. Her thesis seeks to deepen our understanding of how pictorial art interacts with text in developing systems of thought, at the same time that it serves as a powerful vehicle (perhaps more powerful than text) for the transmission of knowledge.