Research & Reflections

fulbright Taiwan online journal

Research & Reflections

fulbright Taiwan online journal

Tag: English

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

Jason Protass, Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University February 24, 2015

     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 scholars have made significant inroads into this field of inquiry. In this two-part essay, I will briefly outline two important academic lineages in Taiwan and their contributions to the study of Chinese Buddhist poetry.        Thanks to the generosity of Fulbright Taiwan, this past year I have had the honor of working at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy (ICLP) under the supervision of Professor Liao Chao-heng (廖肇亨). My interest in the intersections of Chinese Buddhism and literature has been nurtured by the large and active community of scholars at Academia Sinica.         When I had the opportunity to participate in conferences, attend lectures, or visit campuses and Buddhist temples, I was impressed by the breadth and depth of scholarship around Taiwan. The island, with its close connections to Japan and the West, is particularly well-suited to scholarship on Buddhist literature. Taiwan’s academic legacy

Read More »

Personal Experiences and Reflections at University of Washington

An-Tsu Chen 陳安祖 February 12, 2015

     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 other words, it’s good to have a research agenda, but students are encouraged to fully concentrate on core courses and exams. Therefore, I will take this opportunity to share my personal experiences and reflections, and will not discuss my research in this article.        The first thing that required a period of adjustment was food. Unlike Taiwan, the cost of living in Seattle is high, giving funded students such as myself, who typically try to make the best use of their stipends, greater incentives to cook by ourselves instead of eating outside. However, cooking for oneself also takes a lot of time and, for a Ph.D. student, time constraints are an important issue. To avoid cooking every meal, thus crowding out my time to study and spending an unreasonable amount of money, I finally decided to cook about once or twice a week and portion out the food

Read More »

Brief Thoughts on Living and Travelling in Taiwan

Paul Vierthaler 李友仁 February 10, 2015

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 year away from our dog, whom my father-in-law is looking after, in a place where only one of us spoke the language and neither of us had been. Now, ten months later, it was proven to be one of the best choices we could have made. We had heard Taiwan was an easy place to live, but had not realized it would be easier than anywhere we had lived before. Between the friendliness of the people, the ease of transportation, the cost of living, and the abundant access to work materials, it has been more pleasant than we could have imagined. Most of my time this year has been spent working on my dissertation. The wide-ranging and easily accessible materials at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica allowed me to go from just two chapters to a full dissertation. The desk they provided and my extremely

Read More »

Computer-aided detection and analysis of early cancer region in gastrointestinal endoscopy magnified narrow-band images

Hsuan-Ting Chang 張軒庭 February 2, 2015

Introduction Gastric cancer is the fourth most-common cancer worldwide and is also the second-largest cause of cancer death. Early detection and prompt treatment remain the best measure to improve patient survival rates. Recent advances in endoscopy technologies, including magnification and narrow-band imaging (NBI), provide clinical doctors with new tools for the early detection of abnormal lesions in the stomach by demonstrating abnormal mucosal surface morphologies. However, the current practice of endoscopy magnification and NBI rely heavily on clinical doctors’ own experiences. Moreover, the meticulous examination of each frame of magnified images in the whole stomach can be very time-consuming. As a result, significant interpersonal variability in the performance of endoscopy diagnosis between individual endoscopy doctors is likely. This semester, we have collected sample images of both the normal mucosa and the abnormal lesion in the stomach from various patients provided by Dr. Noriya Uedo in Department of Gastrointestinal Oncology in Osaka Medical Center for Cancer and Cardiovascular Diseases, Osaka Japan. Currently, there are 10 normal gastric corpus, 10 normal gastric antrum, and 100 abnormal lesion images in our database. Two of the computer-aided diagnosis algorithms in endoscopy for automatic detection of high-risk lesions on the magnified NBI endoscopy images are

Read More »

My Fulbright Experiences

Michael C. Yu 尤俊欽 January 20, 2015

I was delighted and honored to learn that I had been named a Fulbright Senior Scholar while on sabbatical leave from SUNY-­‐Buffalo -­‐ not merely on account of the award’s prestige or the actual monetary support it entails, but most importantly because it represented a golden opportunity to deepen my knowledge in the field of pre-­‐mRNA splicing by learning from an international expert in the land of my birth, which I had left thirty years ago. This paper contains reflections on my stay in Taiwan as a Fulbright Senior Scholar over the past 6 months. Cultural Experiences: It has been over 30 years since I left Taiwan for the United States and in the intervening time, I have managed a handful of short visits. While I am as familiar with the language as anyone who lives here – meaning I can read the local newspapers, watch the local television, and on the whole lead my daily life without difficulty here in Taiwan – there is still a bit of disconnect in term of idiomatic word usage and appropriate situational responses. On reflection, I would rank the lack of personal space and/or distance as the most important adjustment I had to

Read More »

Taiwan: An Ideal Place to Conduct Research on the Qing Dynasty

John Gregory, Ph.D. Candidate, Georgetown University September 4, 2014

     As a PhD candidate in late imperial Chinese history, already four months into a ten-month Fulbright grant period in Taiwan, I have two goals for this brief essay. First, I want to set forth the reasons why Fulbright Taiwan has provided an ideal environment for my research. Second, I want to suggest that Taiwan is an excellent place to do in-country research on the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Given the vast trove of archives now open to scholars in mainland China and given that various Taiwanese institutions have digitized many of Taiwan’s archival collections and generously placed them on-line (in some cases, accessible from anywhere), some scholars may no longer consider Taiwan a worthwhile destination for in-country research on Chinese history. To the contrary, my experience has been that the combination of nearly unrestricted access to superbly curated archives, a vibrant and welcoming intellectual community, an incredible system of libraries and research centers, close proximity to mainland China, the concentration of excellent scholars and academic institutions in one place, a clean and modern environment, and Taiwan’s own history as a Qing frontier combine to make Taiwan an ideal location for in-country research on the Qing. After four months, I

Read More »

My Neighborhood Park

Kimberly Wilson 金貝利 April 13, 2014

There is a small park near my apartment in Taipei where I like to go running.  The park has a track, so most nights there are a fair number of people running or walking their dogs. The park is something I’ve always loved about my neighborhood.   I see the same people and dogs frequently, and it’s nice to feel like part of the community. One recent night, I was walking home from dinner with a friend. For weeks it has been pouring rain day and night in Taipei, but this night the rain finally let up. The crisp feeling in the air after weeks of rain made me eager to get out and take advantage of the weather. I only planned to stop at home long enough to put on my running shoes. However, my plans quickly changed as our walk home from dinner took us by my park, where I was a bit dismayed but mostly confused to find large crowds of people heading toward the entrance. With a run now out of the question, my friend and I agreed to follow the crowd and find out what was happening. What we found surprised us: a full concert stage

Read More »

Teaching Philosophy in Taiwan

Brian Bruya 柏嘯虎 April 29, 2013

     I am writing this while on a teaching Fulbright in the Department of Philosophy at National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei, during the 2012-2013 school-year. My duties are to teach one graduate class each semester. The first course was American Pragmatism and the second course Comparative Moral Psychology. In this essay, I will discuss how the content in these courses has been modified from similar courses I have taught in the States and what has happened as a result.      There are two basic things that distinguish my Taiwan students from my previous American students. The first is their bilingual abilities. In addition to their native Chinese ability, they can all read English with great facility and have an adequate level of competence in both speaking and listening. The second distinguishing mark is their background in Chinese philosophy. The Department of Philosophy at NTU is divided into two tracks, the Eastern Philosophy track and the Western Philosophy track. Regardless of the track, all undergraduate students are required to take the same basic courses in the history of philosophy, which include thorough introductions to Chinese philosophy. These two characteristics of Taiwan students have allowed me to tailor my

Read More »
Tags
Archives

Research & Reflections

fulbright taiwan online journal