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Awards

Outstanding Achievement Award in Chinese Language and Culture

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Outstanding Achievement Award in Hindi-Urdu Language and South Asian Culture

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Outstanding Achievement Award in Japanese Language and Culture

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Outstanding Achievement Award in Korean Language and Culture

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Jock McLane Prize for Best Paper

This $300 award is given annually for the best undergraduate essay in the field of Asian Studies. The prize honors Jock McLane who, as a scholar, teacher, and colleague, played a key role in shaping Asian Studies at Northwestern. Jock McLane taught South and Southeast Asian history at Northwestern for 46 years, from 1961 to 2007, and stayed on for three more years as the Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs. His research focuses on India in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. His books include Indian nationalism and the early Congress and Land and local kingship in eighteenth-century Bengal.

Francis L. K. Hsu-John Henry Wigmore Senior Honors Thesis Award

This $400 award, which is named after two eminent Northwestern scholars and teachers, is given for the best Senior Honors Thesis on any Asian Studies-related topic.

Francis L. K. Hsu (1909-1990) was an anthropologist who specialized in psychological anthropology and the comparative study of large literate civilizations, with a special focus on China, Japan, India, and the USA. He taught at NU for 31 years and was chair of the anthropology department for 17. He served as president of the American Anthropological Association in 1978-79. His sixteen books include Under the ancestors’ shadow: kinship, personality, and social mobility in China; Americans and Chinese: passage to differences; and The challenge of the American dream: The Chinese in the United States.

 John Henry Wigmore (1863-1943) was a leader in election law reform and an expert in the law of evidence and Japanese and comparative law. He served as an advisor to the Meiji era Japanese government on legal matters and taught law at Keio University in Tokyo, 1889-1892. He taught at NU Law School upon his return to the US in 1893 and served as dean from 1901-1929. His sojourn in Japan led him to undertake detailed studies of the laws of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which grew to become the monumental fifteen-volume work, Materials for the Study of Private Law in Old Japan.