Mariana Zegianini awarded Geiss Hsu Foundation grant

22 February 2022

We are thrilled to announce that SOAS History of Art and Archaeology postgraduate research student Mariana Zegianini has been awarded a prestigious Geiss Hsu Foundation grant to present her research at the Society of Ming Studies Annual Meeting, which will take place at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference in Hawaii later this year.

Mariana is working under the supervision of Prof Shane McCausland (SOAS), Prof Ashley Thompson (SOAS) and Dr Esther Chadwick (The Courtauld Institute of Art). Her doctoral research, ‘The Global Portrait: Subject, Site and Temporality in Portraiture of the Long Seventeenth Century in China’, is supported by a SOAS Research Studentship. This work examines the different dimensions evidenced in portraits of men and women living in the late-Ming dynasty and Transition period in China's cultural and economic powerhouse, the Jiangnan region. Moving beyond the paradigm of the face to incorporate histories of calligraphy and landscape to the study of portraiture, this research challenges Eurocentric notions of selfhood that have defined the modern self as an 'invention' of the European Renaissance.