Editorial

A NEW YEAR AND NEW CHALLENGES

With only seven months of 2018 behind us, we already have many Taiwan Studies events to inform about in this issue of EATS News.

It opens with a report from the 2018 EATS annual meeting, hosted by the University of Zurich. Apart from being a valuable and highly enjoyable academic forum, this year’s conference was especially significant as it witnessed the launch of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies, whose first issue was presented by its Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley. Three Young Scholar Awards were announced during the conference, and the three winners (Chen-Yu Lin, Jess Marinaccio and Magdaléna Masláková) share with us here their research interests and experience as members of the EATS community.

2018 was also a year of great changes within the EATS Board. We said goodbye to three old friends: the EATS Secretary-General, the indefatigable and always cheeful Ming-Yeh Rawnsley, to Astrid Lipinsky and Niki Alsford, and welcomed three new Board members: Isabelle Cheng, who joined us again as Secretary-General, Jens Damm and Beatrice Zani.

Taiwan Studies is thriving as a field for teaching and research, and new institutions are joining an already vibrant global community. Edward Vickers outlines the Kyushu Taiwan Studies Programme, sponsored by the ROC Ministry of Education and established in 2017 at Kyushu University. New research perspectives and possibilities for academic dialogue are emerging as well: Lara Momesso and Sojin Lim report on a recent international workshop at the University of Central Lancashire, which juxtaposed Taiwan Studies and Korean Studies. It spurred interdisciplinary intellectual exchange and invited discussion on the potential for establishing a comparative framework between the two disciplines.

Ti-Han Chang introduces the French Association for Taiwan Studies, an already long-standing presence in the field (since 2010), in an article that supplements the information provided on Taiwan Studies in France in one of our previous issues.

And, last but not least, this issue concludes with a review of Wu Ming-Yi’s novel, The Stolen Bycicle, selected to contend for this year’s edition of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize. The review, written by Darryl Sterk, offers precious glimpses at the linguistic challenges posed by Wu’s prose, the hardships and the creativity inherent in a translator’s work, which would have otherwise remained behind the scenes.

Please do not miss the various announcements included in this issue: on forthcoming conferences, open calls for papers, recent publications by EATS members, as well as reports of Taiwan Studies events no less significant than the ones discussed in full-length articles.

Dr Adina Zemanek is Assistant Professor, Institute of Middle and Far Eastern Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She is also an EATS Board member, 2016–2020.