News

 

The Initiative Conference, co-organized by National Taiwan Normal University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was held at UCLA from April 12 to 13. The theme of the conference was "Sinophone Studies：Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Critical Reflections" During the two-day conference, a total of 48 scholars from Taiwan, the United States, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, South Korea, Vietnam and Hong Kong published papers. More than 100 academics attended the conference, making it a major event for Chinese language studies.

 

NTNU signed an academic cooperation agreement with UCLA in 2017, and established the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative. With the management of Prof. Shih Shu Mei, a well-known scholar of UCLA, we have sent scholars and students to both universities and we also host academic conference and speech open to public. For two years, NTNU and UCLA have benefit from each other in resources, to cultivate the next generation of scholars and build a stage for Taiwan Studies. 

 

The topic of this year, Sinophone Studies, is a category that's been brought to the spotlight in recent years. The Chinese language community is the main research object. This is also one of the important research base for Taiwan Studies. The conference emphasized cross-disciplinary dialogue, which covers literature, history, linguistics, anthropology, art, music and dance, etc. The paper published also involves ethnic, immigrant, gender, queer, colonial, post-colonial issues and regional studies

 

Prof. Shih is one of the most important founders of Sinophone Studies. Therefore, many scholars from Harvard University, Berkeley University, Stanford University, Humboldt University of Berlin also attended this symposium.