International Symposium on Agricultural History and Literature



Call for Papers

This international symposium seeks to bring together historians, literary scholars, and farm activists to explore the entangled histories and imaginings of agriculture across time and regions. Farming has long been more than a mode of food production——it is a site of imagination, knowledge-making, and human-nonhuman interaction and negotiation. As such, farming offers a rich terrain for investigating how we remember, envision, and contest our relationship with land, labor, and the living world. This interdisciplinary conference invites reflections on the narratives, metaphors, and materialities that shape both small-scale as well as commercial agricultural knowledge and experience.


Bringing scholars from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the United States, this conference  will adopt a transnational framework, encouraging innovative comparative or interdisciplinary approaches that understand farming not merely as a local or national enterprise, or within a colonizer-colonized frame, but as a global-local practice of cultural, ecological, and economic exchange. Through such dialogues, we aim to illuminate how agricultural practices, narratives, and knowledges circulate, adapt, and resonate across borders and historical contexts, producing shared visions of agroecological resilience and planetary coexistence.


Themes may include, but are not limited to, the following:


Presenters


Organizers

Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment-Taiwan