International Symposium on Agricultural History and Literature
Time: Dec. 11-13, 2026
Venue: Institute of Taiwan History & Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
Registration: coming soon
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
Field Trip coming soon
Organizers
Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan