Research Overview
As a critical scholar in the humanities, my research concerns with how literature and culture mediate reality. Literature and culture not only reflect reality but also intervene in it as a form of thought. My training in foreign literature and cultural studies has especially sparked my curiosity about how the flow of ideas across cultural, linguistic, and geographical boundaries interacts with social change. The Chinese idiom “橘踰淮為枳” (meaning “once oranges were planted in the northern part of Huai River, they became bitter oranges”) could best illustrate this notion, as the question, to me, is: after the orange surpasses the Huai River, “how,” if at all, does it “turn into a bitter orange?” That is to say, the “bittering” of oranges involves not only an understanding of different epistemologies and tastes but also the attempt to grasp local knowledge and historical changes, from which different disciplinary imaginations may become possible. For example, how do the literary and social actions of international students challenge and adjust the US-centric assumptions of Asian American studies? How does the development of Taiwan’s foreign literature studies incorporate and transform Western literary and theoretical trends to engage with and intervene in local academic and social changes? These questions are at the core of my two monographs to date. In short, how to begin with a specific issue in a transborder (linguistic, cultural, disciplinary) context and expand into a discussion that provides a multidimensional analysis of the interrelationships and interactions between various fields is an aspiration of my research.
With a transborder problematic, my research navigates and intertwines between American studies and Asian studies. The modern stories of trans-Pacific movements and intellectual exchanges are, after all, results of the intersection between the West and Asia. Both scholars of Western and Asian studies should not neglect the historical interpenetration between the two fields. Thus, my current research explores, on one hand, how the stories Asian American returning (to Asia) refract and rewrite narratives of globalization, and the historical interactions and cultural interference between Taiwan and the United States on the other, seeking to elucidate and deepen the study of the history of American imperialism. Globalization narratives, post/new Cold War geopolitics, and imperialism are central to my current research interests. Therefore, I am also deeply interested in issues concerning China, as it represents a global and contemporary challenge. At the International Center for Cultural Studies at Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, I organize a research cluster on the “Chinese Contemporary,” which aims to explore these topics and challenge the Cold War Orientalist narratives which are prevalent in Western mainstream media. At this historical moment of post-globalization and the new Cold War, I expect that my research, while engaged in academic discussion, will also contribute to the analysis and critique of real-world issues.
Inspired by cultural studies, I believe that knowledge production also possesses a social movement dimension. Therefore, beyond my research, I actively participate in editorial work for academic and intellectual journals (such as Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies and Reflexion) at home and abroad, as well as in the international academic societies (such as the American Studies Association and the International Institute for Cultural Studies). Through organizing conferences and curating special issues, I engage with a wide range of topics, connecting scholars from different fields to explore new research topics and critical discussions. I believe that the creativity of cultural studies lies in its transborder aspirations and intellectual curiosity, tracking the boundaries of and shifts in knowledge for the transformation of the society.
Representative Works:
Rearticulations: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan. New Taipei: Linking, 2021. (587 pp. in Chinese)
Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. (224 pp.)
PUBLICATIONS
Recent Publications (for complete publications, please see: CV (2025))
Edited Books
2025. On the Murky Boundaries of Good and Evil: An Anthology of Tsi-an Hsia's Work. Taipei: National Taiwan University Press. (392 pp.;
in Chinese)
2024. Faithful to Life: An Anthhology of Yuan-shu Yen's Work. Taipei: National Taiwan University Press. (374 pp.; in Chinese)
2023. Literary Debates and the Politics of Memory: Inter-Asian Perspectives (co-edited with Jui-hua Chen, Liyun Lin, and Yu-wen Song). Taipei:
Lianhe wenxue. (424 pp.; in Chinese)
Guest Editor of Special Issues
2025 “Field Trip: Movement Island: Taiwan and Global Asias” (co-edited with Lily Wong). Verge: Studies in Global Asias 11.1: 2-44.
2024. Reflections on Chinese Left. Reflexion 49. (in Chinese)
Journal Articles (*peer reviewed)
*2025 Forthcoming. "Cancel Culture: Debates on Race and Justice in R. F. Kuang's Yellowface." Reivew of English and American
Literature 45.
*2025 “Introduction: Taiwan and Global Asias” (co-written with Lily Wong). Verge: Studies in Global Asias 11.1: 2-9.
*2023 "Reading the Cold War: The Migrant South and Khaled Hosseini's Afghanistan Trilogy" (閱讀冷戰：流離南方與胡賽尼的阿富汗三部曲), Chung-wai Literary Quarterly (中外文學) 52.2: 21-63。(THCI)
*2023 “Retelling Chinese Stories in the Era of Global China: On Ha Jin’s Immigrant Novels.” Contemporary Literature 63.3: 399-423.
2023 “'The End of the Common World': Covid Anxieties, Bordered Lives, and Democratic Censorship in Taiwan” (co-written with Gong
Zhai). Cultural Studies 38.1: 123–148. (SSCI)
2021 “Arif Dirlik in Mandarin: Radical Interventions in China, Taiwan, and Global Entanglements." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 22.4: 543-554.
(SSCI)
2021 “Three Ways of Relating to Orientalism.” The Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities 52: 105-109.
2021 “Forum Introduction: Against Empire: Taiwan, American Studies, and the Archipelagic” (co-written with Wendy Cheng). American
Quarterly 73.2: 335-341. (A&HCI)
*2021 “When Asian Americans Return to Asia: Return Narratives, Transpacific Imagining, and the Post/Cold War.” Southeast Asian Review of
English 58.2: 95-112.
*2021 “Post/Colonial Geography, Post/Cold War Complication: Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as a Liminal Island Chain.” Geopolitics 29.2:
398–422. (SSCI).
Book Chapters
2025. “Introduction: Literary Thinking between Lightness and Darkness.” On the Murky Boundaries of Good and Evil: An Anthology of Tsi-an
Hsia's Work, edited by Chih-ming Wang. Taipei: National Taiwan University Press. pp 1-32. (in Chinese)
2024. “Introduction: Literature and Life.” Faithful to Life: An Anthhology of Yuan-shu Yen's Work, edited by Chih-ming Wang. Taipei:
National Taiwan University Press. pp 1-35. (in Chinese)
2023. “Introduction: ‘The Return of History’: Inter-Asian Perspectives and De-Cold War Imagination.” Literary Debates and the Politics of
Memory: Inter-AsianPerspectives, edited by chih-ming Wang, Jui-hua Chen, Liyun Lin, and Yu-wen Song. Taipei: Lianhe wenxue.
pp.1-30. (in Chinese)
2022. “Thinking about China and the World from the Shoulder of Bandung.” A Book in Action, edited by Shiming Gao. Shanghai: Shanghai
Literature and Art Publishing House. pp. 519-532. (in Chinese)
2022 “Refugee Migration through the Division System: On the Ethics of Copresence in Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean.” In Serena
Chou, Rob Wilson, and Soyoung Kim, eds., Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the
Anthropocene. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 115-136.
Commentaries
2021. “Van Jones’ Tears: the 1968’s Legacies and the Spectre of the Cold War.” Reflection 42: 103-111. (in Chinese)
Interview
2022. “The Missionary of Comparative Literature: Interview with Professor John Deeney.” Chung-Wai Literary Quarterly 51.4:183-214.
(co-interviewed with Te-Hsing Shan in Chinese).