According to the official website, “The Center for Taiwan Studies (CTS) at UT Austin, housed in the Department of Asian Studies, aims to promote interdisciplinary engagement with Taiwan’s history, culture, and politics.” The center was established in 2021, however, the story actually starts many years earlier.
Asian Studies and Comparative Literature Professor Yvonne Chang (張誦聖) actually established a Taiwan Studies Program at UT Austin in 2009 (one of the first in the United States of America). Originally focusing on the humanities, one of the great successes of the program was that Prof. Chang was able to establish a ‘Taiwan Studies Track’ undergraduate degree program under the ‘Asian Studies Major’. This track created a necessity for an increased amount of teaching on Taiwan and with a little experimentation, Prof. Chang was able to recruit faculty from across the university to offer courses each from their own discipline, but with a Taiwan focus.
The result was a huge success with an average of 4 courses being offered under this ‘Taiwan Studies Track’ per academic year. To date, over 60 courses have been offered in the 15 years that this has been running and the program is still ongoing! The diversity of topics is significant, from courses on Taiwanese film directors, Taiwanese literature, to the concept of decolonization in Taiwan and even nation building and modernization in Taiwan, China, and East Asia. Uptake from students has also been extremely good, and while the courses themselves have sometimes come and gone according to the availability of individual instructors, the cumulative result is that thousands of students have taken classes and gained deep knowledge about specific aspects of Taiwan.
As a specific case in point, Prof. Chang recounted her surprise when a course entitled ‘History of Food and Healing in China and Taiwan’ turned out to be so popular with students (over 60 students enrolled) that the university decided to increase the course to have two sections. It has now run for over 6 years!
In 2021, with funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Taiwan Studies Program at UT Austin was upgraded into a Taiwan Studies Center, meaning that more resources were made available to the Center for a five year period. Maintaining a strong ethos of investing in people, the extra resources were utilised to provide a full-time position for a post-doc scholar and one semester of full-time PhD scholarships. This has allowed them to build on the already successful focus that the Center has had on graduate student training in the areas of Taiwan literature and culture. Remarkably, there have been 8 students who have completed PhD degrees focused on these areas at UT Austin in the past fifteen years, with still more candidates midway through their PhDs.
Inspired by the stream of graduate students who were researching Taiwan literature and culture, Prof. Chang saw a need for a platform to facilitate the dissemination of this research and knowledge, something that led to the establishment of the e-Journal Taiwan Lit in July 2020. The e-journal is subscription-based, and its readership has grown to over 450 subscribers, far exceeding expectations and enabling the Centre at UT Austin to become a hub for scholars across the world to engage in knowledge exchange and research discussion, filling a key niche in this field.
Building on the success of this e-journal and looking to expand beyond the humanities, the Center for Taiwan Studies established a second e-journal in 2023: Taiwan Politics. This created another key avenue for expanding conversations and promoting research on Taiwan into wider areas.
Like many other Taiwan Studies Centres or Programs around the world, UT Austin have been able to host talks and conferences, workshops and film festivals, all of which have been beneficial and have enabled their students to be able to converse with Taiwanese experts. However, a trend that Prof. Chang has noticed over the past decade is that with such a huge range of academic events now offered online, including live streams and high-quality recordings, persuading students to attend in-person events has become more and more challenging. For Prof Chang, this is a continued encouragement to make sure that the Taiwan Studies Center at UT Austin continues to invest in people, be it through the diverse courses offered to students, the exchange opportunities for UT students to visit Taiwan, or the positions and scholarships that are offered to those who are continuing their research on Taiwan. In a society where ‘success’ and ‘impact’ are often defined by high numbers of views, likes, follows and shares on social media, this strong focus on investing deeply into a focused group of people ensures that the effects of these efforts will be deep and long-term. For her, what has marked the Center out ever since its inception as a Program in 2009, has been the ability to influence and inspire students, providing knowledge, experience and a perspective on Taiwan that will stay with them long after graduation, while simultaneously raising up a new generation of scholars who continue to bring Taiwan into conversations across fields, disciplines and nations.