Prof. Guy Beauregard｜College of Liberal Arts－Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures｜Canadian

For Prof. Guy Beauregard, one of the defining features of Taiwan’s higher education environment can be summarised quite simply: research here feels possible.

Originally from Canada and now at National Taiwan University (NTU), Prof. Beauregard works at the intersections of postcolonial studies, Asian American studies, and transpacific studies. Across these overlapping fields, his research explores how stories emerge from histories shaped by colonialism, migration, displacement, extraction, and political violence, and how literature and culture continue to grapple with those legacies across generations and borders.

While his research spans the Pacific and beyond, Taiwan itself has become central to the way he thinks, teaches, and works. When he first arrived in Taiwan in 2003, what struck him was the seriousness with which research was supported. He describes Taiwan’s commitment to research as ‘extraordinary’, pointing in particular to the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), whose support for academic work fundamentally shaped his decision to remain in Taiwan long-term.

For faculty working in the humanities and social sciences in Canada, external research funding approval rates can hover around ten percent. In Taiwan, however, the likelihood of securing support is dramatically higher. The difference, he suggests, changes the atmosphere of academic life itself. Ideas develop into projects, collaborations, and sustained intellectual inquiry in ways that have become increasingly difficult for faculty working elsewhere.

Before arriving in Taiwan, his academic journey had already taken him through varied educational and cultural environments. Educated in Canada (with his PhD granted at the University of Alberta), he has taught in the high school system in Japan and conducted postdoctoral research in the United States, with research appointments at the University of California, Berkeley as well as at the University of British Columbia. These experiences shaped the ways he understood humanities scholarship and the kinds of stories that deserve attention.

Much of his early education, he explains, remained heavily centred on Europe and North America. Over time, however, he became increasingly interested in narratives emerging from elsewhere, particularly stories shaped by colonial histories and their aftermaths across Asia and the Pacific. Trained in postcolonial studies, he knew he wanted to work in a post-colonial society.

Taiwan stood out through the strengths of its research environment and the innovative work produced by scholars already working here. Seeing academics in Taiwan publishing groundbreaking work in postcolonial studies convinced him that this was a place where critically engaged humanities research could thrive.

That intellectual community has remained one of the defining aspects of his experience over the past two decades. While based at NTU since 2009, he describes Taiwan’s intellectual life as extending far beyond a single institution. Collaborations with researchers at Academia Sinica, National Taiwan Normal University, National Tsing Hua University, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, and other institutions have all shaped and energized his work over the years.

Access to major research resources, including Academia Sinica’s libraries and collections, has also played an important role in supporting that work.

At the same time, Taiwan itself has increasingly become central to his research perspective.

Much of his work examines how literature responds to difficult histories: the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the Cambodian genocide and its diasporic legacies, and Taiwan’s reckoning with the legacies of White Terror and the limits of transitional justice initiatives. Rather than approaching these subjects solely as isolated national experiences, he is interested in tracing how their impacts reverberate across communities, generations, and transnational spaces.

Living in Taiwan, he says, has fundamentally changed the kinds of questions he asks. ‘This place is teaching me’, he reflects. Over the years, he has observed Taiwan’s ongoing efforts surrounding memorialisation, museumization, and the declassification of previously inaccessible archives. He has been especially interested in how literature and film have sought to engage with difficult histories in Taiwan and beyond.  Watching these debates unfold in real time has deepened his understanding of how societies continue to negotiate historical traumas long after formal political transitions have taken place.

Humanities research, in this context, becomes a way of thinking through ethical relationships across societies and histories. The questions that emerge extend outward into wider networks of memory, connection, and responsibility.

These broader concerns have also informed some of the newer areas of his work, including collaborations connected to the emerging field of the energy humanities. Through NTU Office of International Affairs’ bilateral seed funding initiatives — part of a wider portfolio supporting international research collaboration and academic exchange — Prof. Beauregard recently began working with researchers at the University of Toronto, including leading energy humanities scholar Imre Szeman.

The partnership brings together different forms of expertise: Toronto researchers with deep experience in energy humanities, including in the field of ‘petrocultures’, alongside Prof. Beauregard’s own work in transpacific studies and the NTU research team’s expertise in East Asian cultural politics. This collaboration, he explains, emerged from a recognition that each side was approaching related global questions from different vantage points, and with different and potentially complementary strengths.

The project also reflects a broader shift within the humanities toward engaging more directly with questions traditionally associated with science, technology, or policy. In the case of the energy humanities, this includes examining how histories of extraction, fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and environmental crises profoundly shape communities, identities, stories, and lived experiences alongside economic and political systems.

Taiwan provides an important vantage point from which to think through these questions. Prof. Beauregard points to the continuing presence of Taipower Corporations’s low level nuclear waste storage site on Pongso no Tao / Orchid Island (Lanyu), as well as the literary and cultural responses that have emerged around these issues, including newly translated writing by Indigenous Tao author Syaman Rapongan.

The humanities, he emphasizes, will not solve the crisis of climate change alone. Humanities research may nevertheless be essential to understanding how societies narrate these crises, how people relate to them emotionally and ethically, and how forms of awareness and responsibility have taken—and may potentially take—shape.

That emphasis on dialogue and critical engagement also shapes his teaching.

Prof. Beauregard describes teaching as intellectually demanding in the best possible sense. NTU students, he says, continually challenge him to rethink how he communicates ideas and approaches the classroom. ‘I can’t just show up and expect them to follow’, he says. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

As NTU’s student body has become increasingly international, that dynamic has only intensified. Having now taught students from more than thirty countries, he sees the classroom less as a site of one-directional instruction and more as a shared space of intellectual exchange.

Students, in turn, have reshaped aspects of his own thinking about literature, history, and the contemporary world. They ‘keep me on my toes’, he says, describing teaching as an ongoing process of attentiveness, adaptation, and dialogue rather than a simple model of information delivery.

That openness to change also extends to the university itself. Reflecting on NTU over the past two decades, he believes the institution has become significantly more international, collaborative, and globally connected. The increasing diversity of the student body, in particular, has transformed the kinds of conversations taking place both inside and outside the classroom.

Beyond campus, he sees similar changes unfolding across Taiwan. Improved transportation systems, growing international visibility, and increasing global attention toward Taiwan studies and Taiwan literature all reflect, in his view, a society that has become more connected, confident, and internationally engaged.

For a scholar whose work explores histories that move across oceans, borders, and generations, Taiwan has become more than simply a workplace. It has become an intellectual environment that continues to generate new questions, new collaborations, and new ways of thinking.

For Prof. Beauregard, that sense of possibility remains, after more than twenty years, very much alive.