International Symposium on Agricultural History and Literature

• Time: December 11-13, 2026

• Venue: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

• Program:  more

• Registration: coming soon
  ※AI-powered simultaneous interpretation will be provided. Due to limited seating, priority will be given to scholars and experts in relevant fields (including writers and agricultural professionals), as well as students. The organizers reserve the right to review and approve registrations.

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:

• farmers, crops, and the environment

• land, labor, and community

• crops, food, and cuisine

• farm/rural disease, medicine, and well-being

• agricultural practices, technologies, and science

• agricultural rituals, spirituality, and human-land relationships

• famine, scarcity, and productivity

• climate change, environmental hazards, and agricultural adaptation

• colonialism, empire, and transnational (seed, crop, and knowledge) exchange

• organic farming, regenerative practices, and resilience

• food literacy, agricultural pedagogy, and environmental citizenship

• rural lives, everyday practices, and place attachment

• writing agricultural history and literature

Presenters

• Michael Ableman｜Farmer, author, photographer, urban and local food system advocate, Canada

• Chen, Yu-jen 陳玉箴｜Professor, Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

• Chou, Shiuhhuah Serena 周序樺｜Associate Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

• George Handley｜Professor, Department of Comparative Arts and Letters, Brigham Young University, United States

• Iijima, Wataru 飯島涉｜Professor, School of Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nagasaki University, Japan

• Eva-Lynn Jagoe｜Professor, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada

• Low, Bjorn 劉悅｜Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), College of Design and Engineering, Department of Architecture and Co-Founder and Chief Urban Farmer of Edible Garden City, Singapore

• Lu, Shao-li 呂紹理｜Professor, Department of History, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

• William Major｜Professor, Department of English, University of Hartford, United States

• Miyagawa, Takuya 宮川卓也｜Associate Professor, Faculty of Human Environmental Studies, Hiroshima Shudo University, Japan

• Scott Slovic｜Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Idaho, United States

• Tsuru, Shuntaro 都留俊太郎｜Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Moderators

• Chen, Huang-Hua 陳皇華｜Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

• Chen, Wei-Chi 陳偉智｜Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

• Chen, You-Ting 陳宥廷｜Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan

• Chung, Shu-min 鍾淑敏｜Director, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

• Hu, Hsin-Yu 胡心瑜｜Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

• Ku, Ya-wen 顧雅文｜Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

• Teng, Y. Norman 鄧育仁｜Director, Institute of European and American History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

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