The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) announced that Xin Wen (Ph.D. ’17), Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Princeton University, has won the Joseph Levenson Prize (China, pre-1900) for The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (2022, Princeton University Press). (The book also won the James Henry Breasted Prize from the American Historical Association in 2023.) Professor Wen was a Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate 2016-17. He graduated from the Ph.D. program in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard in 2017 and earned his master’s degree in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard in 2011. His Ph.D. advisor was former Fairbank Center Director Mark C. Elliott, the Vice Provost for International Affairs and Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Harvard University. Professor Elliott shared this message about his former student:
“I could not be prouder that this year’s Levenson Prize has gone to Xin Wen — the fifth of my students in the last eight years either to win or to receive Honorable Mention for this prestigious award. Amid all the talk of early globalization and the romanticization of the Silk Road, serious scholarship in this field remains scarce, especially in the English-speaking world. Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and solidly researched using sources in languages only Harvard can offer, Xin’s work sets a new and high bar for research on the history of China and Inner Asia in the pre-Mongol world. In recovering forgotten stories about medieval interstate diplomacy and the power struggles of the 9th to 11th centuries, he proves beyond a doubt that the “Silk Road” was real, but that it was about far more than just trade. At the same time, he has helped us see that modern day exchanges of the BRI variety, often characterized as mainly political in nature, in fact are quite in keeping with historical precedent.”