Bringing Taiwan studies to wider audiences: publications, media, and public engagement
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- KLT
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to host a roundtable as part of this year’s Summer School on how Taiwan studies can reach wider audiences beyond the university.
In many ways, this is a remarkable moment for Taiwan studies, with growing numbers of centres, courses, publications, and public events. Yet one of the field’s central challenges remains how to build interest in Taiwan beyond specialist academic circles. This roundtable asks how Taiwan studies can engage broader audiences and readerships, and what kinds of writing, media work, programming, and outreach are most effective in doing so.
Drawing on different forms of public engagement, the speakers will reflect on concrete case studies from their own work. These include gender and policy-related outreach, people-centred history writing for non-specialist readers, academic editing and institution-building, and the use of screenings and cultural events to widen interest in Taiwan. Together, the roundtable will consider how Taiwan studies can remain intellectually rigorous while also becoming more visible, accessible, and publicly relevant.
Image credit: TangChi Lee via Unsplash
About the speakers
Cheng Ling-Fang is Research Associate at the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies and former Director of the Institute of Gender Studies at Kaohsiung Medical University. Her research specialises in gender and sociology, gender and science and technology studies, and gender and work. She holds a PhD from the University of Essex and an MPhil from the University of Leeds.
Evan Dawley is Associate Professor of History at Goucher College. He is the author of Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s (Harvard Asia Center Press, 2019) and of Taiwan: A People’s History (Reaktion Books, June 2026). 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).
Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley is Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London. She is founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies (2018 to present) and publishes widely in English and Chinese on cinema, media, and democratisation in Taiwan. Her recent co-edited book is Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media (2nd ed., 2025). She also co-edits book series with Anthem Press and Brill on Asian media, cinema, and screen studies.
Dafydd Fell is Professor in Comparative Politics with special reference to Taiwan at SOAS, University of London, where he also serves as Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies and Director of the NSTC Taiwan Studies Project at SOAS. His research focuses on Taiwanese politics, political parties, elections, social movements, and democratisation. Alongside his academic publications, including Party Politics in Taiwan, Government and Politics in Taiwan, Taiwan’s Green Parties, and The Twilight Years of Taiwan’s Sugar Railways, he has played a leading role in building Taiwan Studies as a field in the UK and Europe through teaching, public events, book series editing, and institutional development.
