Contributors

Chris Berry is the Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths College. His research is focused on Chinese cinemas and other Chinese screen-based media, with a particular interest in gender, sexuality, and the postcolonial politics of time and space. His publications include (with Mary Farquhar) Cinema and the National: China on Screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (Routledge, 2004); (edited with Feii Lu) Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (Hong Kong University Press, 2005); (editor) Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (British Film Institute, 2003); (edited with Fran Martin and Audrey Yue), Mobile Cultures: New Media and Queer Asia (Duke University Press, 2003); and (translator and editor) Ni Zhen, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Origins of China’s Fifth Generation Filmmakers (Duke University Press, 2002).

Stephan Feuchtwang is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Asia Research Centre, at the London School of Economics, University of London, where he also acts as the Director of the Taiwan Culture Research Programme. He was the Chair of the London Taiwan Seminar during 2000–3. He was the President of the British Association for Chinese Studies, 2000–4. In 2002 he was a member of the international peer review panel evaluating the research of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has published books and articles about Chinese geomancy, popular religion in Taiwan and the Mainland, and is currently working on terror and social memory.

Mark Harrison is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Tasmania. He completed his PhD at Monash University in Melbourne and was Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster in London. He is the author of Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Henning Klöter is assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of International Sinology Studies of National Taiwan Normal University (Taipei). He studied sinology and linguistics in Trier, Münster, Leiden, Beijing and Taipei. His PhD dissertation Written Taiwanese (Leiden, 2003) was published in 2005. In 2003–5, he held positions at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany), followed by two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at Leiden University in 2005–7. His sociolinguistic research focuses on politics of language, language ideologies and changing language regimes in Taiwan. Another area of his research interests is missionary linguistics. He currently works on a monograph on the earliest descriptions of Chinese regional languages by Western missionaries.

Felix Schoeber is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Studies of Democracy, Westminster University, and his thesis is entitled ‘Entering the biennials game: curating contemporary art in China and Taiwan’. He earned his ‘laurea’ with special honours at Ca’Foscari, Venice University, with a thesis on ‘The transformations of Taiwanese contemporary art in the period of the abolition of martial law’. He has been a research student at Taiwan’s Taipei Normal University, Arts Education department. He has presented a number of papers on art exhibition in Taiwan and on the biennial exhibitions of Venice, Shanghai, and Taipei. He is also an experienced art curator (Masterpiece Art Center, Taipei; Lothringer13/LADEN, Munich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; collaborations with IT Park and Bamboo Courtain Studio, Taipei; Gasteig, Munich), and he has worked as the art and entertainment editor of the Taipei China News, where he also had a column, entitled ‘But is it art…’. Among other publications, he has written for Yishu (Canada/ Taiwan), and is presently writing for artists (Taiwan, in Chinese).

Fang-long Shih is Research Fellow at the Asia Research Centre at the London School of Economics, University of London, where she is also the Convener of the Taiwan Culture Research Programme. She is co-author of the monograph I-Lan Xian Minjian Xinyang (Local Religion in I-Lan County) (I-Lan County Government, 2003), and author of several articles on the anthropology of religion in Taiwan; religion, gender, and modernity; and religion, state policy, and tourism. She is a part-time Lecturer at SOAS teaching Anthropology of religions in Taiwan and among Chinese-speaking diaspora; and Taiwanese society and issues relating to religion, family, gender, death, and modernity. She is also co-editor of the eJournal Taiwan in Comparative Perspective.

Scott Simon has lived and done research in Taiwan for seven years. He specializes in the political anthropology of indigeneity and development in the Austronesian communities of Taiwan. He has done ethnographic research on this topic in both Hualien and Nantou counties since 2004. In addition to his research, he serves as a consultant to the Taroko Nation Autonomy Promotion Team. In collaboration with Dr. William Hipwell of the Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), he is involved with the Aboriginal Sustainability Network that has facilitated networking between the indigenous nations of Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia. He is also co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies and is author of two books on the social and political dimensions of development in Taiwan. His most recent book, based on two years of field research in Tainan, is Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies and National Culture (Westview Press, 2005).

Stuart Thompson is Research Associate and was formerly Lecturer in Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also a committee member of the LSE Taiwan Culture Research Programme, where he has been the Chair of the London Taiwan Seminar since 2003. He taught a variety of courses, but focused on Chinese culture and society, and devised courses on the anthropology of education. He was also Convener of, and a teacher on, the interdisciplinary MA Contemporary Taiwan course. He has been researching Taiwan since his initial fieldwork in 1980. He specializes in the study of education, cultural literacy, social aspects of food, and death-related rites and representations. He is co-editor of Consuming China (Routledge, 2006).

Paul-François Tremlett is a Research Fellow in the Department of the Study of Religions at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. He has published a number of articles on local religion in the Philippines, death, place and belonging in Taiwan and Philippines and he has books forthcoming on Claude Lévi-Strauss and the study of religion (Equinox, 2008) and religion and modernity (Continuum, 2008). He is also Assistant Editor of the Journal Culture and Religion and co-editor of the Journal Taiwan in Comparative Perspective.

Edward Vickers is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. He is Course Leader for the MA in Comparative Education, and his main research interest is history education and the politics of identity in the Chinese societies of East Asia. He is the author of In Search of an Identity: the Politics of History as a School Subject in Hong Kong, 1960s–2005 (University of Hong Kong, 2005), and co-editor of History Education and National Identity in East Asia (Routledge, 2005). He is currently researching the role of museums in identity politics across Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.