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Projects 計畫 Kè-uē

Taiwan als Pionier

The German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has awarded a grant to four post-doc researchers to conduct the joint research program TAP (Taiwan as a Pioneer) for a duration of four years.

Bochum is one of the participating centers for Taiwan studies in Germany, next to Trier and Tübingen. It started on 1 February 2022. In Bochum, Hsu Yu-Yin 徐郁縈, Ph.D., is directing the subproject "Education as a motor of modernity in Taiwan" since 1 December 2022.

Broadening the Horizon for Taiwan Studies through Visualization - Database Project

The Taiwan Research Unit of the Ruhr University Bochum, the East Asia Department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SBB), and the National Taipei University of Education (NTUE) will join forces to work on a publicly accessible photo database project. NTUE is the oldest modern educational institution in Taiwan and has produced many images in its 127-year history, which record various aspects of student life and teachers’ education. In the late 2000s, these pictures were digitalized and are stored in the Alumnus Service Center but lack a public portal to access them. With the generous support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (CCKF), we are now able to create an image database with cross-references to existing databases (CrossAsia, etc.) through keywords and extensive annotations for each keyword.

Teaching Program for History, Culture, and Languages of Taiwan

Since spring 2019, the project "A Teaching Program for History, Culture, and Languages of Taiwan" is being conducted at the Faculty of East Asian Studies of Ruhr University Bochum. The project is being generously supported by the Taiwan Ministry of Education. In this program, scholars from universities and research institutes in Taiwan are invited to teach courses on the anthropology, social and economic history, linguistics and languages of Taiwan at the Faculty of East Asian Studies of Ruhr University Bochum. The Research Unit for Taiwanese Culture and Literature coordinates the curriculum. For further information, please see our annual reports or click on this box.

Suwenxue Congkan 俗文學叢刊 (Digital Database)

The library also holds a complete volume set of Suwenxue congkan 俗文學叢刊 / Folk Literature: Materials in the Collection of the Institute of History and Philology (Taipei: Shin Wen Feng, 2002–2006). For further information on the ongoing indexing project, please see Database.


Dissertation Project: In Meditation of a Small State: Joshua Wen-Kwei Liao and His Reflection on Stateshood

Wu Kuan-Wei (Curriculum Vitae) is a current Ph.D. student who works on Taiwanese intellectual history and focuses on studying Joshua Wen-kwei Liao 廖文奎 (1905–1952), including biographical research and social and political thought.
He is also the co-author of Liao Wenkui wenxian xuan 廖文奎文獻選 (Selected Papers of Joshua Wen-Kwei Liao, 2021) with Wu Rwen-ren, published by National Taiwan University Press. For his preliminary finding, see Joshua Wen-Kwei Liao (1905–1952): A Founding Theorist of Taiwanese Independence (2021) on Taiwan Insight.


Mediating Between Historical Experience and the Construction of Identity: Ego-documents of Taiwanese Elites (1925–1965)

  •     Researcher: Dr. Ann Heylen 賀安娟
  •     Sponsoring organization: Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange

Ego or personal documents of Taiwanese modernizing intellectuals who lived throughout the Japanese colonial period are valuable research material in furthering our understanding of Taiwan history and its historiography. Subject matter of the proposed research is a selection of the ego-documents of Cai Peihuo and his contemporaries, such as Wu Sanlian, Ye Rongzhong, Xie Chunmu, and Lin Xiantang, amongst others. The intention is an analysis of these ego-documents not so much as a record of the events of the time but as a reflection of a particular kind of consciousness or mentality. More specifically, the research is interested in exploring what these documents reveal about the social and mental context of Taiwanese colonial society during the 1920s and 1930s. In a first part, it provides an analysis of Cai Peihuo’s writings, with special reference to his diary (1929–1936). The second part looks at the autobiographies and memoirs of his contemporaries. As a literary genre, diaries are ‘momentary glimpses’, autobiographies are reflections on events that are not in close chronological proximity but written some time later. It intends to produce a detailed analysis of these ego-documents to evaluate their usefulness as complementary historical sources and how they reflect on the interconnections and interdependencies between a postulated past and an experienced present. Special reference will be made to the use of language, ideas, and key terms in unraveling the complexity of the Taiwanese collective memory. This research project aspires to illuminate methodological approaches of reading a historical narrative that describe the uniqueness of individual experience and, at the same time, draws out a portrait of a community and its mentality with respect to the particularities of specific historical contexts. It will be complemented by a discussion of the postwar nationalist discourse in the context of Asian nations.