About:

Li-Ting Chang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include Chinese literature, print media, affect theories, gender studies, Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, and popular culture. Her dissertation project, “Dear Darling: Love Letters as a New Cultural Sensation in Early 20th Century China,” explores the interplay between the conception of romantic sentiments and the love letter as a literary genre and an everyday practice. 

Li-Ting’s side project, “A Club of Laughter: Expanding Notions of Taiwaneseness through Humor,” examines how humor and laughter entail a more nuanced understanding of Taiwan and Taiwaneseness in the 1930s under Japanese colonial rule. This paper won the Graduate Student Paper Prize from the ASPAC, a regional affiliate of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), in 2023. She is also an advisory member of the Center for Taiwan Studies (CTS), one of the organizers of the Taiwan Studies Workshop (TSW), and a co-convenor of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s 2024-2025 Research Focus Group (RFH), “Interdisciplinary Sinophone Studies.” From 2023 to 2024, she served as a program commissioner for the North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA).

Academic History
M.A., East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2018-2021.
B.A., Philosophy (Chinese Literature Minor), National Taiwan University, 2013-2018.

Advisors
Xiaorong Li (Chair)
Hangping Xu
Thomas Mazanec

Awards
– Winner of the 2023 ASPAC-Mori Graduate Student Paper Prize in Asian Studies for the article “A Club of Laughter: Expanding Notions of Taiwaneseness through Humor (1930-1935)”
– Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in Comparative Literature, 2024
– Center for Taiwan Studies Fellowship, 2021-2024
– Mainstreaming Taiwan Studies Research Grant, 2022
– Nominated for the Distinguished Teacher Award, 2019

Publication
– M.A. Thesis. “Self-representation in Selected Poems of Gu Taiqing (1799-1877)” (2021)
– “(Re)Writing Taiwan Studies History” in Taiwan Insight
– “The Spring of the Marginalised: Fostering Conversations between Czech and Taiwanese Literatures,” in Taiwan Insight