How does the history of displacement and the field of critical refugee studies enable a more comprehensive understanding of Taiwan? This talk will examine the links among several aspects of the island's modern history that resonate with Southeast Asian experiences and research methodologies: space, place, and belonging; property rights and preservation; and transitional justice. Such an analytical framework may help lift Taiwan's post World War II story out of the realm of politicized Cold War history and into both a longer-term Taiwanese context and a more capacious set of regional coincidences, correlations, and connections.

Rebecca Nedostup is a historian of twentieth-century China and Taiwan at Brown University. She works on displacement and emplacement; the social and political roles of the living and the dead in times of disruption; and the relationship of transitional justice and historical consciousness. Her book Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity looked at the modern categorization of religious practice and its social and political ramifications. She is writing Living and Dying in the Long War, on the making and unmaking of community among people displaced by conflict across China and Taiwan from the 19305 through the 1950s. More broadly, she is interested in ritual studies, historic preservation, critical archive studies, and digital ontologies. She is faculty director of the Choices program, and in spring 2023 was Visiting Chair of Taiwan Studies at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IAS) and Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS).