Associate Professor Chien-Ting Lin
Principal Luo, Jia-Lun Outstanding Youth Research Award
<This article is proffered by Associate Professor Chien-Ting, Lin>
I received my Ph.D. in literature and cultural studies from University of California, San Diego. I am now an associate professor of English at National Central University in Chungli, Taiwan. My research interests lie in the fields of literary and cultural studies of science and medicine; inter-Asia cultural studies; critical race and gender/sexuality studies; studies of empires, militarism and neocolonialism; and transpacific (post) cold war studies. I have published my research in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Review of International American Studies, and Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies.
I am currently working on two projects: 1) In Fugitive Subjects of “Secret Doctors”: Politics of Life and Labor in Taiwan’s Medical Modernity, I investigate transpacific colonial and neocolonial formations of knowledge, labor and life politics within different periods of Taiwan’s medical modernization; 2) Transpacific Undisciplined is a collection of essays on renewed methodologies and theorizations of transpacific in relation to un/disciplinarity, indigeneity, and neo/coloniality that I co-edit with Dr. Lily Wong (American University), and Dr. Christopher Patterson (University of British Columbia).
Specifically, my research traces the genealogies of “secret doctors” in Taiwan and reads them in conversation with the historical trajectories of both post-1980s inter-Asia care labor migration and the parallax histories of Chinese barefoot doctors. My research identifies often-obscured genealogies of power, and contributes to the discussions of race, the Cold War, capitalism, medical modernity and inter-Asia referencing. It looks at how these genealogies inhabit knowledge production, history, and methodology. In other words, my research interrogates Taiwan’s medical modernity as characterized by a “lack of knowledge” about US Cold War epistemological and socio-political violence. I identify this violence as an unacknowledged racialized militarism in the displacements that are inherent within medical humanism and capitalist modernity when the latter are mobilized for developmental historical narratives. This research contributes to contemporary understandings of transpacific historical formations of Cold War modernity and how these formations articulate neocolonial governance of life; Cold War developmental narratives of Asian nations; and the coordinated medicalized modernizing conditions of labor migration and hierarchical reproduction of life-in-differentiations.
Over the past few years, I’ve consistently successfully applied for research funding from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) in Taiwan. My research has also garnered international recognition and won me two international research awards: the 2015 Emory Elliott Award of International American Studies and the American Studies Association Yasuo Sakakibara Prize in 2016. Three years later in 2019, I was also selected as the recipient of WU Ta-You Memorial Award by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.