Graduate Students

•  Hsiaowei Chen (Committee Member, Theater and Dance, MFA Design and Technology, 2021) – “Cafeteria Formosa”

• Doctoral candidate I-hsiao Michelle Chen is finishing her dissertation, entitled “Into-nation: Linguistic Dissonance in Sinophone Cinemas.” The work discusses the performed voices in commercial films produced in Taiwan, the PRC, and Hong Kong since the late 20th-century.

Taiwan Literature Translation Workshop at the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School 2021

• Jessica attended the Taiwan Literature Translation Workshop at the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) Summer School from July 20-24, 2021. Consisting of seven language-specific workshop strands, the summer school featured an intensive, one-week program of hands-on translation and creative writing practice.

Organization of the Texas Asia Conference 2022: Taiwan-Themed Keynote Speech

• Together with two other graduate students from the Department of Asian Studies—Michael Fiden and Cicely Bonnin, Jessica joined the organizing committee of the Texas Asia Conference 2022. The Texas Asia Conference (TAC) is a biennial and international graduate student conference organized by the graduate students of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The conference will feature a Taiwan-themed keynote lecture from Professor Jason McGrath, tentatively titled “What Does it Mean to Frame Taiwan as Southeast Asian or Settler-Colonial?”

Conference Presentations on Taiwan Literature: Case Studies on Wu Ming-yi

• Jessica attended the 26th North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) annual conference on May 20, 21 in 2021 to present her paper—“A Transcultural Performance of Affects: Affectivity in the Production, Translation, and Reception of Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes and The Stolen Bicycle.” The conference was held virtually due to the pandemic, and it attracted over 100 participants from different time zones.
• Jessica will attend the 4th World Congress of Taiwan Studies to present another paper on Wu Ming-yi, "Taipei as an Urban Palimpsest: The Case of Taiwanese Novelist Wu Ming-yi’s Fictional Universe." The congress will take place in Seattle between June 27 to 29, 2022.

• Published an article, “Family Matters: Education and the (Conditional) Effect of State Indoctrination in China,” in Public Opinion Quarterly 85 (1), 54-78. 
• Completed his Ph.D. degree in the Government Department with a dissertation titled “The Consequences of Political Persuasion in Greater China.” The dissertation was supervised by Professor Xiaobo Lu. 
• Recently joined the Department of Political Science of Loyola University, Chicago, as an Assistant Professor.

• Doctoral candidate Jeffery McElroy is currently in Taiwan completing his dissertation project, tentatively “Scientism & Rock’n roll Resistance.” One third of this dissertation is devoted to cases from contemporary Taiwan. 

• Invited to deliver an online talk, “The Development of Taiwanese Literary Style: A Comparative Perspective,” for the Taiwan & East Asia Studies Program (TEASP) at the Center for International Studies, at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, on December 3, 2020.
• Invited to present an online lecture, “Taiwan and the Alternative Aesthetic Regime in Post Socialist China,” for the International Scholar Lecture Series of the Sinophone Literature Studies Course at the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies, at National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan, on October 20, 2021.
• Invited to present a talk, “Autonomy and Heteronomy: On the Desire and Object of Literary Writing,” for the Writers Lecture Series of the Daonan Literary Award at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, on November 11, 2021. 
• Served as a Roundtable Discussant for the panel on “Cross-border and Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Taiwanese Literature,” at the 18th National Graduate Student Conference on Taiwanese Literature. The theme of the conference was “The Post-Pandemic Era and the Redeployment of Taiwanese Literature,” which was hosted by the Graduate School of Taiwanese Culture at National Taipei University of Education in Taipei, Taiwan, on November 26, 2021.

• Graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University
• Received his M.A. degree in Comparative Literature from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University
• Currently a first-year Ph.D. student in Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
• Ting-Chun is a recipient of the CTS Graduate Student Scholarship in Fall, 2021 

• Research Interests

• Ting-Chun Wang's research interests cover Chinese and Taiwanese Modern and Contemporary Literature and History in the Twentieth Century. He is particularly interested in the Cultural Production During the Cultural Revolution and in the Post-Socialist Era in China.

• Caleb Williams is currently working with Professor Luke Waring on his M.A. thesis, entitled "Imagining the 'Folk': Post-Martial Law Taiwan and the Invention of National Heritage." Earlier this year, he submitted a translation of four Taiwanese folk tales selected from The Anthology of Taiwanese Folktales by Chen Qing-Hao 陳慶浩 and Wang Qiu-Gui 王秋桂 to ALTA's Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. 

• Presented, with Tse-min Lin and Theodore Charm, a paper titled “Symbolic versus Pragmatic Politics in Taiwan” at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association on September 30-October 3, 2021.
• Completed his Ph.D. degree in the Government Department with a dissertation titled “Political Regimes and Minority Language Policies: Evidence from Taiwan and Southeast Asia.”  The dissertation was supervised by Amy Liu, with Tse-min Lin as a co-supervisor.
• Joined the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Spain, as a postdoctoral research fellow.
• Chun-Ying Wu (Committee Co-Chair, Government PhD Dissertation, 2021) – “Political Regimes and Minority Language Policies: Evidence from Taiwan and Southeast Asia”.