UCSB East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies

Li-Ting Chang Awarded Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Fellowship

EALCS doctoral candidate Li-Ting Chang’s proposal, “Dear Darling”: The Love Letter as a New Cultural Sensation in Early Twentieth-Century China (親愛的愛人：二十世紀初中國情書文化熱潮), has been officially funded by the Board of Directors of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for a one-year fellowship (2026–2027). It examines the interplay between romantic love and the love letter, both of which underwent profound transformations from the 1910s to the 1930s. Focusing on the communicative genre of the love letter, her study aims to enrich our understanding of the literary and cultural histories of love by analyzing how literary discourse and romantic sentiment were channeled through everyday communication.

Congratulations, Li-Ting!

The Center for Taiwan Studies at UC Santa Barbara is honored to host over 20 distinguished speakers from across the U.S. and Asia for this landmark international conference. Join us as we explore the evolving landscape of Taiwan and Sinophone studies through various disciplines.

📍 Where: McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020) & SSMS 4315 (May 22 afternoon session)
📅 When: May 22–23, 2026

Don't miss this vital platform for interdisciplinary research and global collaboration! Please visit the website for conference program: https://taiwancenter.eastasian.ucsb.edu/the-future-of-sinophone-taiwan-an-international-conference-%e8%8f%af%e8%aa%9e%e8%aa%9e%e7%b3%bb%e8%87%ba%e7%81%a3%e7%9a%84%e6%9c%aa%e4%be%86%e5%9c%8b%e9%9a%9b%e7%a0%94%e8%a8%8e%e6%9c%83/

Announcing the next Takashima Talk in Japanese Studies:

Figuring (Out) the Famicon: Time, Boyhood, and the Domestication of Videogames in 1980s Japan

Keita Moore

Wednesday, May 13, 4–5:30pm, SSMS 2135

Prof. Howard Chiang recently won the 2026 Audre Lorde Prize for an Outstanding Article in LGBTQ History from the LGBTQ+ History Association, an affiliate of the American Historical Association, for his article, “Hide and Seek: Elmer Belt, Agnes, and the Battle over Castration in Tr*******al Surgery, 1953–1962,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 98, no. 3 (2024): 394–427.

The full citation, which can be found at https://lgbtq-ha.org/prizes/audre-lorde-prize, reads:

Howard Chiang’s deeply researched article makes an important contribution to trans history by shedding new light on the work of urologist Elmer Belt and the cryptorchidism surgical technique he practiced in the 1950s and early 1960s. Making revealing use of Belt’s correspondence, Chiang illustrates how developments in trans medicine were understood and negotiated between doctors and patients and between practitioners of different medical specialities in a particular moment of “transsexual science.” While Belt’s lack of publications later led to his being neglected by historians, Chiang convincingly uncovers “a largely forgotten surgical logic of trans embodiment” and carefully registers the agency of trans patients without obscuring the unequal power relations inherent to the medicalized setting.

Congratulations, Prof. Chiang!

📣 Upcoming Event | 2026 UCSB Symposium on Asian Indigeneity
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The Center for Taiwan Studies is pleased to co-sponsor the 2026 UC Santa Barbara Symposium on Asian Indigeneity, an interdisciplinary event bringing together emerging scholars whose work explores Indigenous communities across Asia and the Pacific.
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🎤 Speakers
• Yi-Yu (Larry) Lai (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)
• Maisnam Arnapal (UC Santa Barbara)
• Krisharyanto Umbu Deta (UC Santa Barbara)

🧭 Moderator
Dr. Maung Ting Nyeu (Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UCSB)
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Please RSVP by scanning the QR code.

A touching tribute to our late colleague.

Professor Fabio Rambelli shares this memorial statement for Professor Emeritus, Alan Grapard who passed December 8 at his home in Hawaii --

Professor Allan Grapard – In Memoriam

Allan Grapard, professor emeritus of Japanese religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the inaugural holder of the International Shinto Foundation Chair in Shinto Studies, passed away on December 8 in his beloved Hawai‘i. He was among the most influential scholars of Japanese religious history over the last half century.

Born in Normandy in 1944, after his studies at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) in Paris, where he received his Ph.D., he spent many years doing research in Japan, before coming to the United States. Here he held appointments at the University of Colorado Boulder, at Cornell University, and at the East-West Center at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa before joining UC Santa Barbara in 1985.

Grapard was one of the leading promoters in the West of new approaches to Japanese religions and intellectual history, developed in Japan by Kuroda Toshio (1926-1991) and others, which revolutionized the way in which we now look at religious phenomena. He was also one of the first to focus on the cultural and intellectual history of Shinto beyond wartime ideology and stereotypes.

Grapard was steeped in the French philosophical and intellectual tradition, and at the same time felt a profound affinity for Japan, which he visited often for fieldwork and conferences. He especially loved the mountains of the Kyushu region. Fueled by his immense erudition, Grapard’s research on Japanese religious history followed two main lines of inquiry: Shinto-Buddhist interactions and sacred geography (with his long-standing interest in Shugendō mountain religion), with a special focus on the relations between ideas, doctrines, institutions, and practices in a variety of contexts. Grapard was also one the first scholars to highlight the crucial importance of policies in the Meiji period that essentially terminated premodern religious beliefs and practices and brought about a radical transformation of the religious field, with consequences that are still felt today.

Grapard was always attentive to critical theory, cultural analysis, and methodological issues; indeed, he can be considered one of the leaders of the “critical turn” in Japanese religious studies. After his retirement, he continued to share his knowledge with students and scholars around the world and to write and publish original research, in particular on mountain religions in Kyushu and on the role of food in Japanese religions. Many scholars today work along agendas that are based on Grapard’s trailblazing scholarship.

His major publications include La vérité finale des Trois Enseignements (Paris: Poesis, 1982), The Protocol of the Gods: A Study of the Kasuga Cult in Japanese History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and Mountain Mandalas: Shugendō in Kyushu (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), in addition to many impactful articles and book chapters.

Allan Grapard was an adventurous and rigorous intellectual, a witty conversationalist, and an inspiring teacher. He will be sorely missed by his former students and the global scholarly community at large.

Title: Before the Wave: Art Film Culture in Cold War Taiwan

Speaker: Dr. I-Lin Liu (Chiu Research Fellow in Taiwan Studies, Oregon State University)

Time: November 20 (Thursday), 2:00 - 3:30 PM PST

Zoom Information: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84577849664

This presentation examines the reception of art cinema discourses and films in Cold War–era Taiwan—a postcolonial developing nation-state that both benefited from and was constrained by the postwar order of Pax Americana. Drawing on transnational and nontheatrical film and media studies approaches, it challenges the conventional historical narrative centered on the 1982 emergence of Taiwan New Cinema (TNC). Prevailing periodizations often dismiss pre-TNC Taiwanese film culture as a cultural wasteland dominated by propaganda, shallow writing, and middlebrow commercialism.

By tracing how Taiwanese critics, filmmakers, and bureaucrats engaged with international art cinema discourses, this research reveals that art cinema provided a vital framework for negotiating Taiwan’s postwar political and economic transformations. It highlights how an East Asian authoritarian state not only observed but also actively participated in the development of world cinema. At the same time, it explores how cineastes invoked the idea of art cinema as both aesthetic ideal and political instrument, deploying it to articulate modernity and critique authoritarian governance.

For more information, please see: https://taiwancenter.eastasian.ucsb.edu/cts-salon/

Meagan Finlay, a 5th year PhD candidate studying under Professor Katherine Saltzman-Li, has been awarded the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center‘s Dissertation Fellowship for the 2025-2026 cycle. Meagan’s dissertation, “From Early Modern Kabuki Stages to Modern Screens: Production Practice Legacies and the Crafting of National Identity in Japanese Television Period Dramas”, explores the development of the Japanese period drama genre on TV and the ways in which it has carried over certain characteristics and practices from early modern kabuki. In her work, Meagan is heavily engaged with interdisciplinary methods including archival research, interviews, and observation techniques, and draws upon frameworks from Theatre Studies, Media Industry Studies, and Performance Studies. She is looking forward to becoming an IHC Fellow in the fall!

We are delighted to announce that EALCS PhD candidate Wandi Wang successfully defended her dissertation, “Taste and Gastropoetics in Traditional China, Ninth to Seventeenth Centuries CE,” on May 30, 2025. She has also accepted an offer to take up a position as Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at Lehigh University.

Congratulations, Professor Wang!