2025 CDH Graduate Fellow Qiran Jin Wins Top China Times Young Scholar Award
9 October 2026
Qiran Jin, a PhD candidate in Princeton's Department of East Asian Studies and a 2025 Graduate Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH), has received the Founder Yu Chi-chung Scholarship (創辦者余紀忠先生獎學金), the top honor in the China Times Cultural Foundation's 2026 Young Scholar Awards. The foundation announced the results on October 1, 2026, ranking Jin first among this year's recipients. The award carries a prize of US$10,000.
Jin was recognized for his dissertation, "The First Age of Lexica: Lexicon Production and Information Management in Early China" (辭書的誕生：早期中國的辭書生產及其訊息結構). The project examines how early Chinese dictionaries were made and how they organized information.
Jin studies Chinese literature and history, with interests in early Chinese philology, the history of information, conceptual history, and digital humanities. His related work in digital philology applies computational methods to manuscript reconstruction and text mining.
The China Times Cultural Foundation was founded in the United States in 1986 by Yu Chi-chung, founder of one of Taiwan's largest newspapers, the China Times. Its highly competitive Young Scholar Awards support doctoral research about China at institutions in North America. This year marks the foundation's 40th anniversary. The 2026 jury was chaired by David Der-wei Wang.
Jin was named a CDH Graduate Fellow in spring 2025. The fellowship welcomes PhD students into Princeton's digital humanities community and supports them as they begin using computational and data-driven methods.
Congratulations, Qiran!
Read the China Times announcement (in Chinese).