Profiles of New EATS Board Members

INTRODUCING TWO NEW EATS BOARD MEMBERS: SIMONA A. GRANO & ADINA ZEMANEK

After completing my PhD in the Department of Chinese Studies, Ca'Foscari University of Venice, on the subject of private property in Mainland China, I became research assistant at the Department of Sinology, University of Zürich. Since 2012 I have been Senior Lecturer in Greater China Studies at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zürich. I am also a research fellow of the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan (ERCCT) in Tübingen.

Between 2011 and 2012, I spent 14 months in Taiwan for post-doctoral research. I was based at Chengchi University, but I conducted fieldwork all over Taiwan. This research visit was possible thanks to two scholarships, one by the Swiss National Foundation (SNSF) and one by the Center for Chinese Studies of Taiwan's National Library.

This research, Environmental Governance in Taiwan, published in 2015 by routledge, analyses environmental governance mechanisms and actors in taiwan through a multi-disciplinary approach. based on extensive and original research, the book includes four different case studies which have occurred since 2011.

At the University of Zürich I teach several courses related to China as well as Taiwan's social and political transformations in the past 30 years (BA level). I also teach several courses at MA level in which I make extensive use of Chinese language materials.

Simona A. Grano is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sinology, Institute for Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich.

I graduated in sinology at the University of Bucharest (2000) and completed my PhD at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow (2010).

I started out with an interest in the Chinese language, which I always perceived from an applied perspective and in a broader context. I drew upon my experience in teaching Chinese for writing a two-volume textbook of Chinese grammar targeted at Polish university students and the general public. My graduation thesis at the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures in Bucharest was devised as a case study in language planning and concerned the process of implementing the standard Chinese language in Chengdu. My PhD dissertation marked a turn towards popular culture and discourse analysis, which is a methodological framework I have employed ever since. It examined the image of women as constructed in article texts from two PRC editions of international fashion magazines – Elle and Cosmopolitan. The outcome of my research was published as a monograph.

My current research project retains a focus on texts of popular culture but expands in scope towards the visual. In 2014, as a Taiwan Fellowship recipient, I started exploring a discourse of Taiwaneseness seen as recurrent themes concerning ethnicity, everyday life, national history and geography, articulated across a variety of contemporary texts: tourist souvenirs, comic books and films.

I have been working at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow since 2001. I am presently Assistant Professor at the Institute of Middle and Far Eastern Studies; I am also in charge of the Taiwanese Studies Centre, established in May 2016 with the aim of promoting Taiwan-related academic research and exchange and enhancing Taiwan's visibility among the general public in Poland.

Adina Zemanek is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Middle and Far Eastern Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.