On February 21, 2025, the Taiwan Studies Plus (“Taiwan Studies+”) Symposium, organized by Professors David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University) and Kevin Luo (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), convened top experts to discuss how scholars can incorporate a Taiwan perspective to the study of Taiwan’s history, culture, politics, and the environment to add breadth to discussions of regional and global interest.
Motivated by the heightened global attention toward Taiwan in recent years, the Taiwan Plus Symposium brought together Taiwan studies scholars of different generations, disciplinary training, and intellectual perspectives to expand the scope and scale of Taiwan Studies.
All four panels of the symposium showcased novel and exciting approaches in thinking of Taiwan from a global vantage point, opening up new possibilities for comparison and theory building and expanding Taiwan’s contribution to global scholarship on media, cultural history, geopolitics, and the environment.
The first panel of the symposium focused on media, and featured Sarah Plovnick, 2024-25 Hou Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Taiwan Studies, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Yedong Sh-Chen, Ph.D. Candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Chang-Min Yu, Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University, and 2024-25 Visiting Scholar, Harvard-Yenching Institute; and Dr. Chun-Cheng Hsu, Professor at the Institute of Applied Arts, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, and 2024-25 Visiting Scholar, Harvard CAMLab. The panel showcased how Taiwanese media products—such as computer games, puppet shows, and magazines—are embedded in technological and transnational networks, leading to discussion about modernity during the Cold War and Taiwan-China relations today.
The second panel, on cultural history, featured Hardy Stewart, 2024-25 Hou Family Pre-doctoral Fellow in Taiwan Studies, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Chia-wei Lai, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History, National Taiwan University; and Lei Ying, Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Amherst College (Ph.D. ’18). The panel explored the role of artists—poets, landscape painters, and novelists—from the late 19th century to the height of the cultural Cold War in Taiwan, and highlighted the ideological and spiritual underpinnings of their oeuvre.
The third interdisciplinary panel looked to geopolitics, and featured Will Sack, Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department and 2024-25 Graduate Student Associate, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Kevin Luo, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and 2021-22 Visiting Scholar, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Wei-an Tsai, S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School; and Josh Freedman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Study of Contemporary China, University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. ’24). The panel explored how geopolitical forces influenced and shaped dynamics of cooperation, contention, and claim-making in Taiwan, by examining historical issues such as rural development in the 1950s and democratization in the 1980s, as well as contemporary public debates on social media governance and vaccine policy.
The final panel turned to the environment: Richard Yu-Cheng Shih, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Mahindra Humanities Center; Dingru Huang, Assistant Professor of East Asian Comparative Literature, Tufts University (Ph.D. ’22); and Kyle Shernuk, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Georgetown University (Ph.D. ’20), concluded the conference with a multi-faceted approach to uncovering geopolitical and ideational tensions within ecological history and the cultural imagination of the environment. Focusing on examples ranging from the coral industry to the preservation of the Formosan Clouded Leopard and indigenous writing on the environment in Taiwan, the panel presenters showcased a multi-method and multi-scalar approach that embodied the spirit of the conference.
Hang Tu, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore (Ph.D. ’21), and Mingwei Song, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature, Wellesley College and 2005-06 An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, also served as moderators for the respective panels.
The symposium ended with closing remarks from David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, on the future evolution and directions of Taiwan Studies. Finally, attendees used the opportunity to commemorate Dr. Steven M. Goldstein, Director of the Taiwan Studies Workshop, who sadly passed away before the symposium.
Support for the symposium was provided by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University; the Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities; and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.