edited by Zhan Min-Xu, Chang Ti-Han and Hsieh Hsin-Chin

Isle of All Beings: Changing Ecologies in Taiwan explores how natural disasters and ecological disturbances have shaped Taiwan’s environments, societies, and cultural imagination. Bringing together scholarly essays and literary works, the volume examines earthquakes, mudslides, floods, droughts, and tsunamis, tracing how different forms of environmental disruption are experienced, represented, and understood in Taiwan. Together, these texts illuminate the complex relationships between geological forces, everyday life, Indigenous communities, family and social relations, agriculture, cultural memory, and transnational disaster governance. Rather than treating natural disasters simply as exceptional events or environmental crises, Isle of All Beings reveals how they become embedded in everyday experience while also exposing wider questions of identity, resilience, mobility, and global interdependence. Moving from Taiwan’s local environments towards the transnational consequences of ecological disaster, the volume ultimately reimagines the island as an “isle of all beings,” connected through shared vulnerabilities and responsibilities to an increasingly interconnected world.

About the Editors

Zhan Min-Xu is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies at National Chung Hsing University. His research interests include contemporary Taiwan literature, Sinophone literature, and migration and race studies. He is the co-editor of The Southern Discourse in Sinophone Literature: Moving Borders (with Wu Chia-Rong, Alison Groppe, and Yenna Wu, 2025) and The Afterlives of Taiwan Literature (with Chen Chih-Fan, Hsieh Hsin-Chin, and Wang Yu-Ting, 2023). He has also served as guest editor for special issues of Chung-Wai Literary Quarterly and Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities. He is currently working on a monograph titled In Pursuit of Literary Value: Millennial Writers in Taiwan.

Chang Ti-Han is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Taiwan Studies at SOAS, University of London, and Deputy Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies. Her teaching and research centre on contemporary Taiwan, with particular interests in eco-literature, postcolonial literature, cinema and cultural studies in regional and global contexts.
Before joining SOAS, she was a Lecturer in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Lancashire. Alongside her teaching and research, Ti-Han plays an active role in the Taiwan Studies community. She currently serves as General Secretary for the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS), and has previously served as Treasurer for the Francophone Association of Taiwan Studies (AFET). She has co-edited several scholarly works and translation anthologies on Taiwan’s literature, identity, and cultural politics.

Hsieh Hsin-Chin is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Taiwan University. Before joining NTU, she taught at Wesleyan University in the U.S. and at the National Taipei University of Education in Taiwan. She has served as Secretary-General of the Association for Taiwan Literature and was a visiting scholar at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan at the University of Tübingen in Germany. She is also a member of the editorial board for The Cambria Sinophone Translation Series and has guest-edited issues for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and Taiwan Lit. Her research interests include contemporary Taiwan literature, film and documentary studies, migration studies, and transmedia narrative. Her work particularly examines the relationship between contemporary cultural production and migration—both inbound and outbound—in the context of Taiwan. She is the co-editor of The Afterlives of Taiwan Literature (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Press, 2023).

Published in collaboration with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Science and Technology Council, National Museum of Taiwan Literature, and National Taiwan University.

ISBN: 978-1-913891-67-1
Imprint: Balestier Academic
Publication date:  16 September 2026
Format: Paperback 229mm x 152mm
Pages: 144 pp

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