Eury Colin CHANG (University of British Columbia)
Eury Colin Chang is a Vancouver-born scholar and current PhD Candidate in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. He obtained his first degree in the School of Communication at SFU (B.A., Dean’s List) and second degree at UBC (M.A.) before embarking on a doctoral dissertation. His current research—A History of Asian Canadian Theatre: 1971-2018—is being funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, UBC’s Four Year Fellowship, and the Public Scholars' Initiative. Eury brings to his academic career a rich background in the non-profit sector, having worked as a writer, editor, arts manager and dramaturge. As a pedagogue, Eury has declared teaching specialties in Early Modern (Shakespearean) Tragedy and Western Theatre Theory, though his research and publishing are decidedly contemporary with a focus on 20th and 21st century theatre, performance, and cinema. Eury is excited to be teaching the first course on Asian Canadian Theatre at UBC (THTR 325B), beginning in 2019. His academic writing can be found in journals (Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Literature) and anthologies published by Playwrights Canada Press, the University of Wisconsin Press, and Arsenal Pulp Press.

Novia CHEN (Simon Fraser University)
Novia Shih-Shan Chen received her BFA from National Taiwan University, her MFA in Film Production from Ohio University and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Novia has worked as a filmmaker and a film and video instructor both in the US, Canada, and Taiwan. Her short documentary film titled Now He is a She, which explores the subjectivity, sexuality and familial relationships of a male-to-female transgendered teacher, has screened at several international queer and women’s film festivals from Taiwan, South Korea, Japan to France. Novia’s background as a female filmmaker and an international doctoral student informs her mobile position both as a creative artist and a diasporic scholar negotiating gender politics, filmic representation and feminist film criticism and theory. Her research project examines the positionality of contemporary female documentary filmmakers, the historical fluctuation associated with the production of their documentary films and the implications of independent filmmaking in the context of Sinophone cinema. Aside from writing, she also teaches in the Asian Studies Program at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and serves on the programming committee at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

Yiwen LIU (Simon Fraser University)
Graduating from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with the degree of MPhil, Yiwen Liu is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Shifted from Western canonic literature, her current research interests include Postcolonial theory, literary and cultural studies, Marxist feminism, and intersectionality. Her MPhil thesis discusses the anxiety as a contemporary collective mentality in late socialist China. She has presented on Hong Kong activism and contemporary Chinese and Canadian literature at several conferences. In the doctoral project, she intends to take Hong Kong and Vancouver as two nodal points in the transpacific flow and examine the various land issues in these two places. By looking at how the literary and cultural representations of land, the forms of land activism, and land policies—both governmental (e.g. socialist and/or capitalist) and non-governmental (e.g. Indigenous and indigenous) have taken shape in the late twentieth century, she wants to examine the position of the un-flowable land that drives the desires of the flow of the people (diaspora) and the flow of capital (globalization).

Szu SHEN (University of British Columbia)
Szu Shen is a third-generation Han Chinese settler from Taiwan.  She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish peoples.  She has published in West Coast Line and her translation work has appeared in Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies as well as Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Her dissertation project explores the difficult legacies of uranium by tracing its transnational routes and impact on Indigenous communities in Canada and across the Pacific.  Her project does so by reading narratives of uranium mining at Port Radium in the Northwest Territories alongside stories and cultural texts that represent two additional sites: Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the US government conducted a series of nuclear weapon tests from 1946-1958; and Orchid Island in Taiwan, where Indigenous Tao people have been living in proximity to the nation’s nuclear waste since 1982.  By reading and discussing stories about the transnational movements and management of uranium, her research aims to help us understand how unexpected forms of global relations might take shape across Indigenous and other racialized communities.

Yuan WEI (Simon Fraser University)
Yuan Wei received his B.A. in International Politics from Fudan University, China, and his M.A. in Anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently a second-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at SFU. His research interests include gender and sexuality, queer and transgender studies, anthropology of body, and post-socialism. His doctoral research intends to delve into the emergence of diverse trans feminine subjects and culture in contemporary China (PRC). By this he aims to understand how their formation is embedded in China’s post-socialist landscape of gender, sexuality, and body politics, and meanwhile shaped by the trans-national circulation of queer culture and knowledge both within Asia and transpacifically. Outside of the academia, he has been involved with the feminist and queer activism in China in the past few years, and keeps exploring how his research could benefit the local community there.