Observatory: Asia Pacific

Joni Adamson is President’s Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University. She is the Secretary General of the Humanities for the Environment Network and Director of the North American Observatory. She is the author and/or co-editor of American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism (University of Arizona Press, 2001), The Environmental Justice Reader: (University of Arizona Press, 2002),m American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Ecology (Routledge, 2013), Keywords for Environmental Studies (New York University Press, 2016), Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies—Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (Routledge 2017) and Humanities for the Environment (Routledge 2017). She lectures internationally and has published over 80 articles, chapters, blogs and reviews. Her work has been supported by many awards and grants, including most recently, the 2019 Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. In 2012, she served as President of the world’s largest environmental humanities organization, The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).

Hsinya Huang is Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan. She is former Dean of Arts and Humanities and Provost of Academic Affairs and Faculty Advancement, NSYSU. She served as Director General of International Cooperation and Science Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, 2018-19. She is the author or editor of books and articles on Native American and Indigenous literatures, eco-criticism, transnational studies, including (De)Colonizing the Body: Disease, Empire, and (Alter)Native Medicine in Contemporary Native American Women’s Writings (2004) and Native North American Literatures: Reflections on Multiculturalism (2009), Aspects of Transnational and Indigenous Cultures (2014), Ocean and Ecology in the Trans-Pacific Context (2016), and Chinese Railroad Workers: Recovery and Representation (2017). She serves on the Advisory Board of The Journal of Transnational American Studies and Routledge series on Transnational Indigenous Perspectives and on the Editorial Board of Transmotion: A Journal of Vizenorian Indigenous Studies. Her current research project investigates the Anthropocene in trans-Pacific Indigenous and Arctic Writing.

Xiangzhan Cheng is a professor of aesthetics, a Chang Jiang Scholar, a deputy dean of the School of Literature at Shandong University, China, a deputy director of Shandong University Research Center for Literary Theory and Aesthetics, a deputy director of Shandong University Research Center for Ecological Civilization and Ecoaesthetics, a visiting scholar of Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University (2006-2007), the executive editor of Newsletter on Ecoaesthetics and Ecocriticism, and a member of International Advisory Board of Contemporary Aesthetics. His fields of research include the history of Chinese aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, ecological aesthetics (i.e. ecoaesthetics). His most recent books are A Study of Environmental Aesthetics in China (Zhengzhou: Henan People’s Press, 2009), Ecological Aesthetics and Ecological Assessment and Planning (Zhengzhou: Henan People’s Press, 2013) and An Introduction to Ecoaesthetics (Ji’nan: Shandong Publishing House of Arts and Literature, 2020). Eight of his work on ecological aesthetics is introduced in Allen Carlson’s “Environmental Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/environmental-aesthetics/).

Shiuhhauh Serena Chou (周序樺)​ received her Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Southern California in 2007, and is Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Her research focus on American environmental literature and theory. Her essays appear in journals including Concentric, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., Comparative Literature Studies, and Foreign Literature Studies. She is at work on a book manuscript on American organic farming literature and culture.

Eric Clark is a Professor in the Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden. Most of his work focuses on urban contexts, but some of his more recent research into historical political ecology and (sustainable) development focuses on islands. He is vice chair of the International Geographical Union Commission on Islands, and member of the advisory board of the International Small Island Studies Association.  His teaching includes supervision of theses, lectures and field trips in PhD and masters courses in human geography and human ecology. 

His research interests include island studies, geography, Area Studies, culture and economics, Development Studies, and Environmental Sustainability. He has published extensively on the political economy of space, urban sustainable governance, financialization, sustainability and the right to the island, models of island development, island cultural geography, and nature-society interactions on Islands.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is a professor in the English Department and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is co-editor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (Virginia, 2005), Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford, 2011) and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge, 2015). She is also the editor of special issues of the journals ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment on postcolonial ecocriticism (2007), New Literatures Review on island studies (2011) and co-editor of a special issue of the Australian journal Interventions: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific on militarization (2015). From 2015-2020 she was the co-editor of the international, interdisciplinary and open access journal Environmental Humanities. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Hawai‘i, 2007) and a book about climate change, empire, and the literary and visual arts called Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke, 2019).

Dr. Simon C. Estok is the recipient of the Shanghai Metropolitan Government “Oriental Scholar” Award (2015-2018) and resident during that period at the Research Center for Comparative Literature and World Literatures at Shanghai Normal University. Estok is also a Senior Fellow and Full Professor at Sungkyunkwan University, where he teaches literary theory, ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature. Estok’s research interests include ecocriticism, early modern European culture, and the relationships between theory and practice. His award-winning book Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia appeared in 2011 (reprinted 2014), and he is co-editor of a book entitled Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (forthcoming Routledge, 2016). Estok also co-edited International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013) and East Asian Ecocriticisms (Macmillan, 2013) and has published extensively on ecocriticism and Shakespeare in such journals as PMLA, Mosaic, Configurations, English Studies in Canada, ISLE, Concentric, Neohelicon, and others.

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) is an internationally recognized public speaker and writer of poetry, fiction, and essays. Her novel, Solar Storms, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the International Impact Award, as was her novel, Power. Her most recent awards have been the 2016 Thoreau Prize from PEN, and the Native Arts and Culture Award. Recent publications include her new poetry volumes,  The Radiant Lives of Animals (2020), A History of Kindness (2020), DARK. SWEET. New and Selected Poems (2014), Indios (2012) and Rounding the Human Corners (2008, Pulitzer nominee). In 2007, Linda Hogan was inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame for her writing.

Jasper Rong-feng Hsieh is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan. He holds an MA in arts administration and a DBA with strategic management concentration, both from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, California. Prior to joining the academic community. He has been a senior arts administrator for different cities’ cultural agencies and professional arts organizations in Taiwan. Hsieh teaches arts management in graduate program and conducts research in the areas of strategic management and entrepreneurship in arts and cultural sectors. He engaged students in a series of experimental projects and action research related to the incorporation of tourism entrepreneurship and community development in the historic harbor district of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, local communities, and arts institutions. He has also been engaged in arts entrepreneuring and the sphere of innovation incubation, providing counseling on the establishment, management, and marketing of cultural and creative micro-enterprises in local communities.

Rose Hsiu-li Juan is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan. Her academic service includes Board Member of English and American Literature Association in the Republic of China and Board Member of The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in ROC (ASLE-Taiwan). She was the Deputy Dean of the College of Libral Arts (NCHU), Director of the Humanities Center (NCHU), and chairperson of DFLL. She does research on indigenous literature in English, indigenous culture, World Literatures and ecocriticism. Her current project is ‘Indigenous Australian Literature and Culture.’ Her major areas of research are global indigenous study of literature and culture, Native North American literature, ecocriticism, multiculturalism, and cross-cultural communication. Her creative writings won literary prizes and were anthologized in prose selections of the year.

Woosung Kang is Professor of English Literature, a Chair of Comparative Literature Program, and a Director of American Studies Institute at Seoul National University, Korea. He is now working as an Advisory Board to Asia Theories Network and an organizer of Deleuze Studies in Asia. His research area includes early American literatures, the politics of aesthetics in literary theories, and Asian cinemas. 

He is the author of The Birth of a Style: Emerson and the Writing of the Moment in the American Renaissance (2003), Literary History of American Literature (2008), University and Intellect (2009), Painting as the Gaze of Philosophy (2014), and Translated Poe (2014). He has also translated many articles on American writers, Japanese films, Jacques Derrida’s Life. After. Theory (2007), and Avital Ronell’s Stupidity (2015) into Korean. He is now working on two books, Freud, the Humanist and Literary Derrida.

Ikue Kina is Professor at the International Institute for Okinawan Studies at the University of Ryukyus. Her fields of research focus on U.S. Women’s Literature, Native North American Literature, Chicano/a Literature, Ecofeminist Criticism, and Border Cultures, and has recently been extended to comparative reading of Okinawan Literature. She is an author of the book Kokyo no Topology [Topology of Home: Ecocriticism of Location and Place] (Suiseisha Publishing) and has her essays anthologized in such books as Encyclopedia of American Culture by Otsuki Shoten Publisher, Kyoiki no Bungaku [Literatures of Borderlands] (21st-Century Literature Series by Iwanami Publisher, Tokyo) and Kokan no Poetikusu [Poetics of Environmental Correspondences] (Suiseisha Publishing Company, Tokyo). She has also co-authored Native American no Bungaku [Native American Literature], the first collection of critical essays on Native North American Literature in Japanese published by Minerva Publishing Company in Kyoto.

Szu-Hsien Lee, Associate Professor in Music Department at NSYSU, received her Ph. D. in Music Composition and Theory from University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. She has received honors and recognition for her original compositions. Her compositions have been performed in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, USA, Germany, and many cities in China. She also has a diversity of interests in musical expressions, including dance, theatre, film, and multimedia performance. She is currently the resident composer of Baroque Camerata, the resident chamber orchestra of NSYSU. Her music album Splendor— When Western Baroque Meets Taiwanese Folk Songs, the arrangements of Taiwanese folk songs, written for Baroque Camerata, the resident chamber orchestra in National Sun Yat-sen University, was nominated in Taiwan Gold Melody Award, 2007. The arrangement Toy Airplane Canon was also nominated as the best arrangement in Taiwan Gold Melody Award, 2010.

Yu-lin Lee is Professor and Director of the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies, the Director of the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan. His research interests include literary theory, modern Taiwan literature and cinema, translation studies, environmental studies, and Deleuze studies. His recent publications include Writing Taiwan: A Study of Taiwan’s Nativist Literature (2008), Liminality of Translation: Subjectivity, Ethics, and Aesthetics (2009), and The Fabulation of a New Earth (2015). He is co-editor of Cyborg and Posthumanism (2013) and Deleuze and Asia (2014); he is also a Chinese translator of Ronald Bogue’s Deleuze on Literature (2006) and Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (forthcoming). He is now working on a book project on digital archiving and historical memories. [E-mail: taiwanlit@gmail.com]

Iping Liang received her Ph. D. in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is currently professor of English and American Studies at National Taiwan Normal University. Her research interests include Herman Melville, Asian American Studies, Ecocritical Visual Representations, and Global Indigeneity Studies. She is the author/editor of I’m Migrant: New Perspectives in the Studies of Oversea Chinese (2016), Asia/Americas: Asian American Literatures in Taiwan (2016), Storytelling Survivance: A Critical Reading in Native American Fiction (forthcoming), Asia/Americas: Asian American Literatures in Taiwan (2013), Ghost Dances: Towards a Native American Gothic (2006). She’s also a board member of Multiethnic Studies of Europe and the Americas (2012-2016); Association for the Studies of Literature and Environment in Taiwan (2015-2017); Executive Editor of Translocal Chinese: The East Asian Perspective (2015-2018); as well as Director of International Cooperation at NTNU, where she overlooks global partnership, student mobility, and study abroad programs.

Yih-ren Lin is Director and Associate Professor of Graduate Institute of Humanities in Medicine at Taipei Medical University. He received his Ph.D. at University College London’s Department of Geography. His principle research interests are as follows, Socio-cultural Analysis on Nature, Cultural Geography, Political Ecology, Action Research, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Peoples, Ecological Medicine. He has been engaged in numerous indigenous community projects and is currently working with the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI) to promote self-sufficient management of agricultural and natural resources within local communities.

Chiahua Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is the recipient of 2018 Fulbright Graduate Study Grant as well as the 2020 Government Scholarship to Study Abroad (GSSA) from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. Her research interests include Trans-indigenous Studies, Ecopoetics, Hawaiian Literature, and Pacific Literature. She currently the secretary for the Asia Pacific Observatory of Humanities for the Environment. She is the co-editor of Chinese Railroad Workers in North America: Recovery and Representation and Pacific Literature as World Literature.

Li-ru Lu is the Chair and Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature in National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. Born in Nantou, a small city in the middle of Taiwan, Lu obtained her doctorate in English and American literatures from National Taiwan University, Taiwan.  Her areas of specialization include Early American Literature, American Poetry, English and American Nature Writings, Environmental Humanities, Ecological Discourse, and Travel Writing. Currently, She is the author of two books, Writing the Wilderness Environment: The Discourse of Wilderness Preservation in the Texts of American Environmental Writers (Bookman Books, 2005) and Uncovering New Ground for American Nature Writing: Discourses of Natural History from John Bartram to Wilson Flagg (Common Ground Publishing, 2014). She is also the co-author of a chapter in Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature (Lexington Books, 2015).

Syaman Rapongan is a prominent Tao aboriginal writer residing on the Orchid Island (Lanyu). He received his B.A. in French, M.A. in Anthropology and Ph.D. candidacy in Taiwan literature from National Cheng Kung University. He is productive and received many major literature awards. His works include The Myths of Badai Bay (1992), Cold Sea, Deep Feeling: The Ocean Pilgrims (1997), Black Wings (1999), The Face of a Sea Voyager (2007), The Eyes of the Sky (2012), Floating in the Sea (2014), and his most recent work The Death of Anromien in 2015. Some of his novels are translated into English, French, Japanese, Spanish, and German. Currently he works as Associate Research Fellow at the National Center for Marine Technologies in Taiwan.

Syaman Rapongan is a prominent Tao aboriginal writer residing on the Orchid Island (Lanyu). He received his B.A. in French, M.A. in Anthropology and Ph.D. candidacy in Taiwan literature from National Cheng Kung University. He is productive and received many major literature awards. His works include The Myths of Badai Bay (1992), Cold Sea, Deep Feeling: The Ocean Pilgrims (1997), Black Wings (1999), The Face of a Sea Voyager (2007), The Eyes of the Sky (2012), Floating in the Sea (2014), and his most recent work The Death of Anromien in 2015. Some of his novels are translated into English, French, Japanese, Spanish, and German. Currently he works as Associate Research Fellow at the National Center for Marine Technologies in Taiwan.

Neqou Soqluman is born in the East Valley of Yushan of Bunun tribe. With a master’s degree in ecology, he have founded ‘hunter’ schools, as they are known locally, which teach Indigenous outdoor skills, but more importantly emphasize traditional values. He establishes “The Son of Yushan—the Bunun Mountain Guide Tour” to promote tribal eco-turism of mountain hiking. He is also a writer, and his novel The Legend of East Valley Shafei is regarded as Taiwanese version of The Lord of the Ring. Neqou seeks to establish himself as a member of the Bunun tribe to share to the world its enchanting culture from language, ethnic literature, folk tales, ethnic ecological wisdom and traditional ballads.

Karen Thornber is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of three major scholarly monographs. Most recent is Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care (Brill 2020), which draws on literatures from 20 languages and close to 50 nations, across six continents. Thornber’s two previous major scholarly monographs both won multiple international awards: Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Michigan 2012) and Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese Translations of Japanese Literature (Harvard 2009).  Thornber’s fourth single-authored monograph, Gender Justice and Asian Literatures, is under preliminary contract with the Modern Languages Association Publication Program. In addition, Thornber is (co)editor of several volumes including one on Global Indigeneities and Environment, and the award-winning translator of Japanese literature. Thornber has held many leadership positions at Harvard, including the Harvard Environmental Humanities Initiative.

Huei-min Tsai is Professor of Environmental Education at National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. She also acts as Executive Secretary for IHDP National Committee- Taipei (a transition team to Future Earth –Taiwan), Executive Secretary for the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Islands, Executive Committee Member of International Small Islands Studies Association (ISISA), and Coordinator for Northern Taiwan Environmental Education Regional Center. Her research interests mainly focus on human-environment interactions as well as island resilience and sustainability issues in various types of environments, particularly in small islands, Indigenous communities, and coastal sea areas. The aspects of her research include environmental history, bio-cultural diversity, social-ecological systems, historical political ecology, sustainability science, resilience theory, nature-society co-evolution, and local & Indigenous knowledge systems.

Robin Chen-hsing Tsai received his Ph.D. from National Taiwan University. Currently he is Chair and Professor of the English Department at Tamkang University. His areas of specialization include ecocriticism, climate change fiction, and environmental science fiction. His recent publications include Gary Snyder, Nature, and Ecological Communication (2010), “(Post)Modernity in the Penal Colony: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish” (2011), “Memory in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake” (2012), “Climate Change, Nature, and Ecological Communication in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy” (2012), , and Ecological Crisis and Literary Studies (2019) and an edited book entitled Introduction to Ecoliterature (2013), and “Technology, the Environment and Biopolitics in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis” (2014), co-edited work (with Serena Chou and Guy Redmer) Key Readings in Ecology (2015).

Sharon Yi-hsuan Tseng is a masters student at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University. She is also a research assistant of Professor Hsinya Huang, the convenor to Asia-Pacific Observatory. Her interests of the research are on ethical diaspora and ecocriticism, which may also be the focus of her master thesis. In the program of designing the Asia-Pacific HfE Observatory, she made contributions by collecting and organizing the Contributor List and proofread the contents of the projects.

Rob Wilson is Professor of Literature, Creative Writing and Cultural Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz (rwilson@ucsc.edu). He is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English in 1976 and was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in English Department at University of Hawai’i at Manoa (which proved formative to his own development as scholar and poet of Asia/Pacific becoming) and at Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright professor of American Lit, and was twice a National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan as well as MOST Research Scholar resident in the IEAS unit at Academia Sinica in  Taipei.  In 2001, he became professor of transnational/ postcolonial literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he still teaches at grad and undergrad levels. In summer 2009, he team-taught a summer seminar (with Chadwick Allen) at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan on Pacific Cultural Production, counter-conversion, and the ecological framework of “Oceania.” Advisory editor for boundary 2 and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journals among others, his earlier works include Waking In Seoul, American Sublime, Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific, and Reimagining the American Pacific: From ‘South Pacific’ to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. His study Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics appeared with Harvard University Press and was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication. A collection of cultural criticism from Asia/Pacific (co-edited with Christopher Connery) The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization appeared with New Pacific Press/ North Atlantic Books, and Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press and will be reprinted as an Amazon Kindle book. He is also co-editing a collection called Worlding Asia with Kim Soyoung of Korea and Serena Chou of Taiwan for Palgrave Macmillan Press.  In addition to a transpacific  poetry collection Late Capitalist Weather Along the Pacific Rim to be co-published in Taiwan and California, he is finishing a study called Pacific Beneath the Pavements:  Worlding Poesis and Oceanic Becoming.

Fanren Zeng, former president of Shandong University (1997-2000), director of Shandong University Research Center for Literary Theory and Aesthetics and director of Shandong University Research Center for Ecoaesthetics and Ecoliterature, a leading professor in the field of aesthetics, with research interests in theory of aesthetic education, the history of Western aesthetics and ecoaesthetics. He has published many books recently including An Introduction to Ecoaesthetics (2010), Ecoaesthetics in the Dialogue between China and the West (2012), Exploration and Dialogue in Aesthetics in the Era of Ecological Civilization (2013), Fifteen Lectures on Aesthetic Education (2012).