Announcing the winner of the 2026 Troost Prize

APSI is pleased to announce that Karina Lu (Trinity, ’26) is the recipient of the 2026 Troost Prize for an undergraduate project in East Asian Studies. The winning project was Lu's honors thesis, “Embodying the Revolution: Female Sent-Down Youth on the Yunnan Frontier, 1969-1980.” Lu's paper was one of several outstanding projects nominated for the Troost Prize that showcased the breadth and depth of East Asian Studies among undergraduates at Duke. 

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In addition to winning the Troost Prize, this paper was awarded the LaPrade Prize by the History Department's honors thesis committee; the award is the department’s highest honor for undergraduate students.

Asked to share some thoughts regarding her project and its contribution to Asian Studies, Lu noted, “The Rustication Movement still reaches us mostly through the state’s categories, even in scholarship that aims to push against them. This project shows how attending to a single life can reveal how much of the movement unfolded in registers ideology never controlled—the ecology of Yunnan, the gendered social worlds, the older cosmologies that survived beneath revolutionary language. Studying the body now, while people are still here to tell us what those costs felt like, let me ask what it means that a revolution demanding embodied transformation gave its people almost no power to enact transformation.”

At Duke, Lu majored in history with a concentration in law & governance and a minor in French. During her time at Duke, she competed in the American Moot Court Association Nationals, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, received a Fulbright Scholarship, and published research for multiple centers. Lu was also involved in the Duke History Union, Duke Students for Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (DS4TRHT), and Duke Ballroom. She studied abroad in France on two occasions. After graduation, she will begin her professional career as a legal analyst. 

Professor Nicole Barnes, who nominated Karina's senior thesis for this award, shared that, “whole sections of Karina’s thesis leave me in breathless awe. They are so beautifully written, so powerfully articulated, and so potent in their fresh analysis that they sing on the page.” 

A member of the APSI faculty committee who reviewed the nominations commented, “Karina Lu's deeply researched microhistory on the Rustication Movement is a compelling account of how ideological movements were inscribed on the bodies of Chinese urban youth during the mid- to late-twentieth century. Lu's careful synthesis of oral histories, published memoirs, government documents, and diverse secondary sources lays out a strong foundation for her conclusions. Her focus on the body as a site of ideological stakes, tensions, and contradictions provides a significant counterbalance to traditional historiographical approaches to labor and cultural learning in modern China.

This project is a testament not only to Lu's intellectual rigor, but to her willingness to work closely with faculty in developing the research skills necessary for such a deep study.”

About the award

Each year, an APSI faculty committee selects an outstanding project from among the nominees to receive this award in the spring semester. The project can take any form, including a substantial paper, visual art, film, application, program, or digital production. The prize was endowed by APSI in 2020 to honor Dr. Kristina Kade Troost, who had a distinguished career spanning 30 years at Duke.

A historian by training, Dr. Troost was Duke’s first Japanese Studies Librarian and headed the International and Area Studies Department in the Duke Library for 20 years. She also served as the much-beloved Director of Graduate Studies for the MA program in East Asian Studies at Duke and remains an active participant in the Triangle Forum for Japanese Studies. Through her various roles, Dr. Troost made invaluable contributions to East Asian Studies at Duke as well as other institutions in and beyond the Research Triangle of Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh.