Book Launch: Taiwan’s Economic and Diplomatic Challenges and Opportunities: Experiences of Publishing SOAS Postgraduate Student Research

Key information

Date
Time
12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
Venue
Virtual Event

About this event

Chen Nai-chia and Mariah Thornton

This event will be held online through Microsoft Teams .

To celebrate the publication of Taiwan’s Economic and Diplomatic Challenges and Opportunities in April 2021, we have invited two of the chapter authors to speak about their experiences of publishing on Taiwan. While Mariah Thornton graduated in 2017 with MSc Politics of China, Chen Nai-chia took the MSC International Politics 2017-18. In both cases their chapters were based on things they first wrote about as SOAS Postgraduate student term papers and dissertations. Additionally they both initially published shorter political blog style essays on the topics they addressed in their chapters. In this session we will first ask Thornton and Chen to briefly discuss how they adjusted their SOAS research to address a more general political blog readership. Later, after graduating both entered careers closely tied to their SOAS research, so we will discuss how this practical experience affected how they revised their work for the academic book chapters included in the book. Other topics that will be discussed include their experiences of book editing and co-authoring. In short this session should be useful for SOAS postgraduates interested in publishing research they have started as students.

Speaker Biographies

Chen Nai-chia is a research fellow of the ‘Taiwan Equality Campaign,’ an organisation advocating for LGBTQ+ rights including full marriage rights for same-sex couples, workplace equality, and the political representation of LGBTQ+ people. She was part of the NGO lobby platform during the marriage equality campaign in 2019 in Taiwan. She has a Master of Science in International Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and her thesis was about LGBT Rights and Tongzhi Diplomacy in Taiwan. Before working in LGBTQ+ movements, Chen served as Press Officer of New Power Party and parliamentary aid in the Legislative Yuan in 2016 and 2017.


Mariah Thornton is an enthusiastic researcher of Chinese politics with an undergraduate degree in Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford and an MSc in the Politics of China from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. From 2012 to 2013 she completed a year abroad at Peking University and later received the Huayu Scholarship from the Taiwan Ministry of Education to undergo intensive study of Mandarin at National Taiwan Normal University from 2015 to 2016. Mariah Thornton worked as a press and communications adviser at the Taipei Representative Office in the United Kingdom under Representative and former Foreign Minister David Y.L. Lin from 2018 to 2020.

Organiser: SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies

Contact email: df2@soas.ac.uk