Speakers:
Chia-Chiun Shih Chen (陳嘉君), 2024-25 Visiting Fellow of Practice; Chairperson, Shih Ming-Te Cultural Foundation
Sarah Plovnick, 2024-25 Hou Family Post-Doctoral Fellow in Taiwan Studies, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Hardy Stewart, 2024-25 Hou Family Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Taiwan Studies, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Moderator: David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University

Join us for three presentations by Taiwan experts on new interpretations of Taiwan’s history and identity. David Der-wei Wang, Eric C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Culture, will join as discussant.

Rethinking Taiwan Identity—Chia-Chiun (Jessica Gina) Chen Shih

Shifting the Taiwan narrative in American public discourse—Sarah Plovnick

Phantom Routes, Phantom Roots: Diaspora Subjects of Provincial Taiwan (1885–1915)—Hardy Stewart

Chia-Chiun Shih Chen (陳嘉君) is the chairperson of Shih Ming-Te Cultural Foundation. Her research project examines how the widespread systematic deployment of informants and secret police during the Taiwanese White Terror Period (1949-1991) affected Taiwanese democratization and political culture

Sarah Plovnick received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley. Sarah uses ethnographic methods to study the role of communication media in contentious political environments. Her dissertation, entitled “Listening Through the Firewall: A Sonic Narrative of Communication Between Taiwan and mainland China,” examines the recent history of the Taiwan Strait (1949-present) from the perspective of sound and audio technologies, from loudspeakers and radio through social media and videogames.

Hardy Stewart Hardy Stewart is a Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Language at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on Taiwanese literature and poetry. Hardy asks how classical Chinese poetry traveled to Taiwan and changed or was changed by the island context. His doctoral dissertation, “Man Beyond the Sea 海外人: Hong Qisheng 洪棄生 (1866–1928) and Peripheral Poetics of Provincial Taiwan,” studies the influence of marginality on the genesis of cultural style and historical representation.

David Der-wei Wang holds a joint appointment in Comparative Literature. He is Director of CCK Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinological Studies, and Academician, Academia Sinica. His research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, late Qing fiction and drama; comparative literary theory; colonial and modern Taiwanese fiction, and Asian American and diasporic literature; plus Chinese intellectuals and artists in the mid-20^th century. Wang took his B.A. in foreign languages and literature from National Taiwan University, and his M.A. (1978) and Ph.D. (1982) in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Wang taught at National Taiwan University (1982-1986) and Columbia University (1990-2004). He first came to Harvard in 1986, serving as Assistant Professor of Chinese for four years. He rejoined the Harvard faculty in 2004, when he was named Edward C. Henderson Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Wang’s recent publications include Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule (co-ed. with Ping-hui Liao, 2007), Globalizing Chinese Literature (co-ed. with Jin Tsu, 2010),and The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (2014). He is Editor of Harvard New Literary History of Modern China (forthcoming, 2015). Wang received the Changjiang Scholar Award in the PRC in 2008. He was the 2013-14 Humanitas Visiting Professor of Chinese Studies at CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, at Cambridge University (U.K.), where he gave a series of three public lectures on the ‘Chineseness’ of Chinese literature.