Six Harvard College seniors with ties to the Fairbank Center are among the 71 winners of the 2026 Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize. The Prize, administered by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, recognizes outstanding undergraduate scholarly work or research. It was established through the estate of Thomas T. Hoopes, Harvard College Class of 1919.
Francesco Efrem Bonetti was recognized for his thesis, “‘As Light as a Goose Feather’: Violence and the Public in Late Qing China,” supervised and nominated by Professor Mark C. Elliott and William Sack.
Kendall Edward Carll III received the prize for “Limits of Liberty: The United States, China, and the Rise of Democratic Taiwan, 1989–1998,” supervised and nominated by Professor Erez Manela.
Alexander Jacob Posner Gerstenhaber was honored for “Everything and Its Price: The World Bank, China, and Global Development, 1980–2000,” supervised and nominated by Professor Emma Rothschild and Professor David Yang.
Katy Yifan Lin was recognized for “When the Past Beckons: Colonial Memory and the Persistence of Japan in Taiwanese Life, 1971–1994,” supervised and nominated by Professor Jie Li.
Xinran Ma received the prize for “Voices of Ambition and Critique: Contrasting Historical Inquiry in Herodotus’ Histories and Sima Qian’s Shiji,” supervised and nominated by Professor Emily Greenwood.
Summer Anastasia Lin Tan was honored for “‘Goodbye to My Chinese Spy’: Affective Infrastructure, the TikTok Ban, and the Gen Z Countermyth,” supervised and nominated by Professor Moira Weigel and Gangsim Eom.
The Hoopes Prize recognizes not only student research but also the teaching and mentorship that make ambitious undergraduate scholarship possible. This year’s China- and Taiwan-focused winners were advised by faculty and instructors affiliated with departments, including anthropology, comparative literature, East Asian languages and civilization, economics, and history. Together, they highlight the broad network of mentorship supporting students interested in China and Taiwan at Harvard.
The six recognized projects also reflect the breadth of undergraduate research at Harvard: late Qing imperial public life; Taiwan’s democratization and international position; the role of the World Bank in China; the afterlives of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan; comparative approaches to classical historiography; and the affective and political dimensions of contemporary digital culture. Their projects underscore the interdisciplinary reach of the field, spanning history, international relations, political economy, memory studies, East Asian studies, classics, media studies, and digital culture.
Several of the projects received grant funding from the Fairbank Center, enabling students to pursue field and archival work abroad. Kendall Carll remarked that the Fairbank Center’s support for summer archival research in Taiwan “allowed me to access hundreds of previously declassified documents that reveal in new and illuminating detail how the democratization influenced the island’s foreign policy ambitions through the tumultuous 1980s and 1990s.” Katy Lin added that the Fairbank Center support for her travel to Taiwan “proved foundational” since “without the Center’s funding, access to primary materials at Academia Historica would have been out of reach.”
Efrem Bonetti noted that it was not just the Fairbank Center’s financial support, but also the experiences gained in courses, Center events, Tuesday Teas, and peer conversations that prepared him to conduct his project. “These experiences allowed me to apply what I learned in the classroom to independent research and gave me the confidence to pursue a thesis involving extensive work with primary sources.”
Five of the six Hoopes Prize winners also participated actively in the Fairbank Center Student Network, recently established to connect students interested in the region with one another. Alex Gerstenhaber reflected, “Potentially, the most important contribution the Fairbank Center made to my academic life, though, was in the community it fostered. Through events as well as the shared understanding that my peers and I were interested in similar questions, I gained a very strong community of like-minded students who could support my work as I supported theirs. Among the thesis cohort in the history department, this group was especially tight-knit. I had known Efrem and Kendall for years by virtue of taking the same classes or doing the same extracurricular activities, but the thesis process and the Fairbank Center brought us much closer. The three of us would discuss how our projects were going and offer guidance. We would send each other drafts of chapters and give feedback. Without this collaboration, my thesis would not have become what it ultimately did. As a result, it was incredibly rewarding to see that we all succeeded together, because it really felt like a team effort.”
For anyone interested in examining any of these research projects further, the Hoopes Prize-winning theses will be available in Lamont Library in the coming months.