Howard Chiang

Howard Chiang
Ph.D., Princeton University

Professor

Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies

Office: HSSB 2257

Email:howardchiang@ucsb.edu
Personal Website: https://howardchiang.faculty.eastasian.ucsb.edu

Howard Chiang, Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, holds the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies. He has written two award-winning monographs on China, forming a duology of queer Asian Pacific history through the lens of knowledge production. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (2018) analyzes the history of sex change in China from the demise of castration in the late Qing era to the emergence of transsexuality in Cold War Taiwan. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (2021) proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (2019), a landmark 3-volume reference compendium. He is currently completing Trans Without Borders (under contract).

Chiang’s recent work centers on the historical and conceptual foundations of the human sciences, especially psychoanalysis, cultural psychiatry, and racial science. This will culminate in a book called Mind Hunters (under contract), which explores the history of psychoanalysis and transcultural reasoning across the Pacific. A podcast on this project is available here. He edits the “Critical Perspectives on Taiwan” book series from Columbia University Press and coedits the “Global Queer Asias” book series from the University of Michigan Press.

From 2019 to 2022, Chiang served as the Founding Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the Tang Prize Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. Prior to joining UCSB as the Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies, he taught at NYU, the University of Warwick, the University of Waterloo, and UC Davis. At Waterloo, he was nominated for a Canada Research Chair in Transnational History.

Publications

Courses Taught

  • Critical Taiwan Studies: History, Literature, and Cinema
  • History of Sexuality in China
  • Medical Humanities in East Asia
  • Sinophone Studies