Published: April 19, 2026; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 420 West 118th Street Room 918, New York, NY 10027, United States
Phone: +1 212-854-2592
Web: https://weai.columbia.edu/For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering, you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 4:00 pm on Apr. 23 for campus access.
Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days before the event. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event. NOTE: You cannot access the campus using the QR code from Eventbrite.
Speaker: Nicolai Volland, Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Penn State University
Moderator: Ying Qian, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Columbia University
What does it mean to think and act across ethnic lines? Over the past decade, some of Taiwan’s most critically acclaimed writers have proposed to understand Indigenous histories and identities not in isolation from each other, but as evolving, intertwined, and dialogic processes. In this presentation, Dr. Volland will focus on recent work by Syaman Rapongan and Wu Ming-yi and show how their writing pushes discourses of/about Indigeneity, in Taiwan and beyond, in new and unexpected directions.
Speaker’s Bio: Nicolai Volland’s work focuses on modern Chinese literature in its transnational dimensions, Sinophone literature, Taiwan literature, and archipelagic/oceanic studies. He is the author of Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945-1965 (Columbia UP, 2017), and he is currently completing a monograph called Modern Chinese Literature and the Sea. He serves as executive editor for Taiwan Lit and the Global Sinophere, and is a past president of the Association for Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL).
This event is part of the Andrew J. Nathan Taiwan Lecture Series and hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Time: 12:00 pm EST
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.