Archive

On Shamanism, Positivism, and Shifting One’s Frame of Reference

     An important skill that I have adopted for living overseas in a different culture is shifting my frame of reference to accommodate new experiences or ideas.  Living in Taiwan for the last six months has certainly challenged me to do so in refreshingly unexpected ways.       Since new

Read More »

Seeing the Coral for the Reef

     According to research by the Kenting National Park (KNP), more than 80% of Taiwanese people will visit the park at some point in their life, and of those, 70% will go to one of the park’s coral areas. Over 400,000 international and domestic tourists visit the area each

Read More »

Mathematical Modeling: The Formosan Landlocked Salmon

In recent decades, dam removal has become a frequently-used strategy for restoring natural stream habitats because dams deteriorate river channels and often lead to decreased diversity of species. Taiwan has many short and steep rivers in the high mountains, where strong rainfall creates high water velocity. As a result, the

Read More »

Robert Anthony Siegel: An American Novelist in Taiwan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7p2201fvRI    Robert Anthony Siegel is an associate professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of two novels, All the Money in the World and All Will Be Revealed. His awards include O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the

Read More »

This Invitation

“It began with an invitation from the Fulbright Program to spend a year in Taiwan and now an invitation for the audience to enter into the choreographer’s world: an invitation to dream, to wonder, to be innocent, to feel pain…to sacrifice, learn, re-learn, let go…to die, to live…” Created as

Read More »

Smart Sensors for Safer Bridges: An International Collaborative Effort

Bridge Scour      The erosion of soil, sand, and riverbed materials near bridge foundations due to flowing water (or wind in some cases) is a phenomenon known as bridge scour. Despite our awareness of its occurrence, bridge scour remains one of the deadliest causes of overwater bridge failures worldwide,

Read More »

Chinese Buddhist Poetry and Academic Lineages in Taiwan: Part Two of Two

     In this two-part essay, I survey two important academic lineages in Taiwan and their contributions to the study of Chinese Buddhist poetry. In the first part, I focused on the cohort of scholars that worked and trained at National Chengchi University. In this second part, I examine the

Read More »

Chinese Buddhist Poetry and Academic Lineages in Taiwan: Part One of Two

     Chinese Buddhist poetry and literature remains largely unstudied in Western academia. The study of Buddhist poetry requires facility with the disparate fields of Chinese literature and Buddhist studies. These demands are a formidable challenge even for native speakers of East Asian languages. Nonetheless, several generations of East Asian

Read More »

Personal Experiences and Reflections at University of Washington

     This article aims to share my (academic) experiences at University of Washington, Seattle during the autumn quarter 2014. For 1st year PhD students in the Economics department, it is typical that almost all our efforts are invested in taking core courses and preparing for the qualifying exams. In

Read More »

Brief Thoughts on Living and Travelling in Taiwan

My wife and I moved to Taipei with a certain amount of trepidation. The benefits were clear: she could take time off work to learn Chinese and all the materials that I would need to finish my dissertation were available. Yet it was a nerve-wracking prospect to spend nearly a

Read More »