Professor Gennifer Weisenfeld Receives 2024 Book Prize from SEC-AAS

The Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (SEC-AAS) first met in January 1962 at Duke University under the sponsorship of Duke University and the Duke Endowment. SEC-AAS is a non-political, non-profit scholarly organization dedicated to promoting the study of Asia in the southeastern region of the United States. To that end, the SEC/AAS holds an annual three-day meeting featuring scholarly panels, teacher workshops, and book exhibits; sponsors undergraduate and graduate student paper prize competitions. The organization's 63rd annual meeting “Regional and Global Flows,” was held on January 26–28, 2024, hosted by Wake Forest University. At each of these events, SEC-AAS presents annual awards for a book published within the past year, an article published in a scholarly journal, a graduate paper, and an undergraduate paper.

APSI is thrilled to share the news that Professor Gennifer Weisenfeld received the 2024 book prize for Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan published by the University of Chicago Press (2023). The committee representative noted that Weisenfeld’s book "creatively uses visual sources from across Japanese life in the 1930s and 1940s to bring to life the modernist cultural dimension of air defense. Looking at bombs, airplanes, gas masks, and other related themes in magazines, pamphlets, movies and every kind of public art, she presents a fresh take on Japan’s home front in the long Pacific War. This book speaks not only to art and art history, but also to cultural studies, history, and peace, war and defense."

Congratulations, Professor Weisenfeld! We look forward to seeing where your research leads.