Local Organiser

The conference is co-organised by Dr Dafydd Fell and Dr Bi-yu Chang.

Dafydd Fell is Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at SOAS. His interest in Taiwanese politics began after a year as a language student in Taipei in the late 1980s. He joined the SOAS Politics Department as a PhD student in 1999 and has been teaching here since 2003. His main research focus has been on Taiwan’s political parties and electoral politics. Over the last few years he has been working on a project on the politics of migration and Taiwan’s social movements. His current research projects include looking at Taiwan’s Green Party, party switching and candidate selection within parties. He has been active in developing the field of Taiwan studies at SOAS and beyond. He helped establish the European Association of Taiwan Studies in 2004 and was the Association’s Secretary General for eight years. At SOAS he has helped develop the world’s most extensive Taiwan Studies teaching and academic events programme.

Bi-yu Chang is Deputy Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies and Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS. Her research interests are in the areas of identity politics, nation-building, cultural politics, and theatre. In recent years, the focus of her research has taken a spatial turn, including place identity, spatial construction, and cartographic representation. Since 2016, she has been researching the politics of Taiwan’s tourism, unpicking the intricate relationship between identity, place, and power. She has twice been awarded Taiwan Fellowship (2016, 2019) and is now working on a new project on the relationship between textbooks after education reform and Taiwan’s identity politics. She is co-editor of, and contributor to, many books and has published articles in journals both in Chinese and English. In recent years, she published her monograph Place, Identity, and National Imagination in Post-war Taiwan (2015) and co-edited a book Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (2019), both by Routledge. In 2021, her chapters appear in Taiwan: From Language to Identity and Ideology (edited by Chris Shei), Taiwan’s Contemporary Indigenous Peoples, (edited by Dafydd Fell, et al.), and in Italian Journal di Limes (il numero 9/21, special edition “Taiwan, l’anti-Cina”).