The Taiwan Studies Online Summer School is a collaborative, cross-institutional initiative to support the growth of Taiwan Studies abroad, particularly in North America. This annual online program offers graduate students and early-career scholars a focused and accessible platform to deepen their understanding of Taiwan-related topics, establish meaningful academic connections, and gain exposure to Taiwan-based research and methodologies.
Dates: Sep. 27-28, Oct. 4-5, Oct.11-12
Times: 9:30 AM -1:30 PM Eastern Standard Time
Hosted by Indiana University’s Taiwan Studies Initiative, the inaugural summer school will focus on the theme “Global Taiwan.” We invite leading Taiwan Studies scholars working on history, international relations, public health, gender and society, economics, geopolitics, culture, and literature to provide their expertise and explore with students how Taiwan Studies could be more than just another area studies— how the past, present, and future of the island are always global.
The summer school will be held over three weekends online. In addition to our esteemed speakers, we also invite four institutions in Taiwan to introduce their archival collections and research resources.
Please register to receive the online link for the sessions and the recommended readings.
Registration for this year's session of the North American Taiwan Studies Online Summer School has closed.
September 27th
9:15-9:30
Opening Ceremony/Remarks
9:30-11:00
Evan Dawley (Goucher College),
“Looking Beyond the State: A People-Centered History of Taiwan”
12:00-1:30
Wayne Soon (University of Minnesota)
"Coming to a Consensus: The Fraught History of Universal Health Care, Medicine, and Public Health in Modern Taiwan."
September 28th
9:30-11:00
Shelley Rigger (Davidson College),"Taiwanese Politics and Economy"
12:00-1:30
Sara Friedman (Indiana University), "Gender, Sexuality, and Family: Perspectives from Taiwan"
October 4th
9:30-11:00
Research Resources Session 1
12:00-1:30
James Lin (University of Washington),
"Taiwan and the World: Transnational, International, and Global Taiwan Studies"
October 5th
9:30-11:00
Research Resources Session 2
12:00-1:30
Howard Chiang (UC Santa Barbara),
“Taiwan and Sinophone Studies”
October 11th
9:30-11:00
Pei-Yin Lin (University of Hong Kong), "Worlding Modalities of Taiwanese Literature: Family Saga, Autobiographical Narrative, and Bildungsroman"
12:00-1:00
Fellowships and Funding Resources Session
October 12th
9:30-11:00
Concluding General Discussion
Moderated by Fei-Hsien Wang (Indiana University)
Evan Dawley is Associate Professor of History at Goucher College. He is the author of Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s, which was published in 2019 by the Harvard Asia Center Press, and of Taiwan: A People’s History, which is forthcoming from Reaktion Books. His current research project, titled “China, Chinese Abroad, and the International Construction of the Modern Nation-State, 1920s-1970s,” explores the ongoing creation of Chinese identities in the context of relations between the ROC government and communities of Chinese and Taiwanese abroad, and interactions with foreign governments around these communities, across the twentieth century. He is co-editor of Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment and a New Order in East Asia (Lexington Books, 2021) and The Decade of the Great War: Japan’s Interactions with the Wider World in the 1910s (Brill, 2014). He holds a PhD in History from Harvard University.
Wayne Soon is an Associate Professor in the Program of the History of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and the Program of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and previously taught at Earlham College and Vassar College.
Dr. Soon is a historian of medicine as well as modern China and Taiwan, with an interest in how international ideas and practices of medicine, institutional building, and diaspora have shaped Chinese East Asia’s interaction with its people and the world in the twentieth century. His book, Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford University Press, 2020), tells the global health history of Chinese East Asia through the lens of diasporic Chinese medical personnel, who were central in introducing new practices of military medicine, blood banking, mobile medicine, and mass medical training to China and Taiwan. Universal care, practical medical education, and mobile medicine are all lasting legacies of this effort on both sides of the Taiwan Straits.
His current research projects centers around the history of health insurance and medical practices in postwar China and Taiwan and the transpacific history of SARS and COVID-19. He is also the editor for a forthcoming special issue in the East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal entitled “Biogeopolitics of Health Insurance in East and Southeast Asia.”
Dr. Soon is a frequent contributor to The Diplomat, a Washington D.C. based current affairs magazine. He has also published scholarly articles in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Twentieth Century China, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal.
Shelley Rigger is the Brown Professor of Asian Studies at Davidson College. She teaches courses on East Asian Politics, including domestic politics of East Asian countries and the international relations of the region. Her research and writing focuses on Taiwanese politics and on the relationships among the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan.
In 2019-2020 she was a Fulbright scholar at National Taiwan University in Taipei, studying the political and social views of Taiwanese youth. She has also been a visiting professor at two universities in the People’s Republic of China: Fudan University (2006) and Shanghai Jiaotong University (2013 & 2015), and she was a visiting researcher at National Chengchi University in Taiwan in 2005. She is also a non-resident fellow of the China Policy Institute at Nottingham University and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). She also interacts frequently with US government officials, especially in the Taiwan policy field.
Sara Friedman is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) and Exceptional States: Chinese Immigrants and Taiwanese Sovereignty (University of California Press, 2015). She has co-edited several books and journal issues on marriage and sexuality, gendered migrations, and kinship and family law across East Asia. Her current research examines LGBTQ-parent families and their struggles for legal recognition and societal belonging in Taiwan and China. In January 2026, she begins her term as President-elect of the Society for East Asian Anthropology.
Session 1:
Archives, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinicahttps://www.ith.sinica.edu.tw/index.php?l=e
Archives, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinicahttps://archives.sinica.edu.tw/en/
James Lin is assistant professor of international studies at the University of Washington, Seattle and chair of the University of Washington Taiwan Studies Program. He is author of In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan (University of California Press 2025), which is available to read open access.
Session 2:
National Museum of Taiwan Literature
Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute
Howard Chiang holds the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-Liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies, and Affiliated Faculty of History and Feminist Studies. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021). Between 2019 and 2022, he served as the Founding Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies.
Dr Lin Pei-yin joined the School of Chinese, HKU in 2012. Prior to HKU, she was Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies, Cambridge, an assistant professor in the department of Chinese Studies of the National University of Singapore, and a part-time teacher and post-doctorate research fellow in modern Chinese literature at SOAS, University of London. She was selected as Chair of Taiwan Studies at Leiden for the fall semester 2020, and was a Harvard Yenching Visiting Scholar in 2015/2016. She has published widely on modern Chinese literature, with a focus on Taiwan. Her major publication is Colonial Taiwan: Negotiating Identities and Modernity through Literature (Brill, 2017).
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the North American Taiwan Studies Online Summer School, please get in touch with Prof. Fei-Hsien Wang (feihwang@iu.edu) or the IU Taiwan Studies Initiative (taiwansp@iu.edu).
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