Spring 2022

Texas Asia Conference (TAC) 2022

The Texas Asia Conference (TAC) is a biennial and international graduate student conference organized by the graduate students of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The upcoming conference will take place on February 25th and 26th, 2022, at the University of Texas at Austin’s LAITS Studio in Burdine Hall (BUR 124). The conference provides a space to present and engage with graduate research work centered on Asia as a regional focus from various disciplinary perspectives. The conference will be held in hybrid format (Zoom link: https://utexas.zoom.us/s/95949048077). 

With this year’s conference theme, Transitions and Transformations, we invite proposals for individual papers and/or panels that explore various approaches to this topic. The last two years have made precarity a widespread condition. Faced with constant changes and conflicts, we are reaching an inflection point from which political institutions, public health, and ecosystems are taking unpredictable turns. Instead of returning to what has previously been considered the norm, it is high time for us to anticipate and adapt to the new normal. A time of crisis is also a time of opportunity, as we are witnessing new directions and conversations emerging from academia, ranging from reconsiderations of time and space to reassessments of asymmetrical geopolitical relations. Standing at this threshold moment, we propose a colloquium where important dialogues on the shared future of Asia and the world can be initiated. How do we reimagine Asia in a time of transitions and transformations? What are some possible contributions that scholarship on Asia can make to help us better cope with the challenges of the Anthropocene?

The conference will include keynote lectures from two prominent scholars in East Asian and South Asian Studies, Professor Jason McGrath (Associate Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota) and Professor Gil Ben-Herut (Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of South Florida). 

Professor Jason McGrath teaches in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, where he also serves on the faculty of Moving Image, Media, and Sound Studies. He is the author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age, published by Stanford University Press in 2008. His new book Chinese Cinema: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age will be published in 2022 by the University of Minnesota Press. His current research interests include media archeology, ecocriticism, and Taiwan film history.

Professor Gil Ben-Herut is an Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department, University of South Florida. His research interests include pre-modern religious literature in the Kannada language, South Asian bhakti (devotional) traditions, translation in South Asia, and programming in Digital Humanities. His book, Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragaḷegaḷu (Oxford University Press), is the first study in English of the earliest Śaiva hagiographies in the Kannada-speaking region. He is currently co-translating selections from the Ragaḷe hagiographical collection for a separate publication.