Teaching Pre-Modern British and European History in Taiwan
- Catherine Chou
- Apr 24
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
This piece is the first in a series of essays on teaching British history outside the Anglophone academy, a topic that challenges our preconceptions of where British history is being taught and who it is for. As higher education in the US undergoes systematic attack by the federal government, this series also gives insight into how and under what circumstances it is possible for US-trained academics to find work elsewhere.
In 2024, after nearly fifteen years teaching and researching pre-modern European history in the Anglophone academy, I found myself beginning again in early middle age as an assistant professor of world history at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan.
In some ways, this was the logical endpoint of a long personal and intellectual journey. I am the child of Taiwanese immigrants to the US, raised by highly political parents but, like most second-generation Americans, lacking full fluency and literacy in my heritage languages. Because of a study abroad at Pembroke College in Cambridge, I gravitated towards pre-modern British and European history. Studying the Eighty Years’ War in graduate school, I saw for the first time how Taiwan had been pulled into a new age of European empires, as a site of proxy conflict between the Low Countries and Spain, both of which established short-lived colonies on the island, in the south and north respectively. My work in pre-modern European history taught me new ways to talk about Taiwanese history and gave me the tools (self-starting a research project, improving my foreign language skills, absorbing the existing literature in a field) to carry out a long-standing dream of co-writing an accessible, readable book introducing Taiwan to a western audience.
It was ultimately the difficulty of having a personal and family life as a single woman in rural Iowa, however, that led me to consider an academic career in Taiwan, where my now-husband had moved to. Coincidentally, this move just preceded the beginning of the second Trump Administration in the US and its warp speed assault on the rights of international students, federal funding for institutions of higher education, and the professional-managerial class more broadly. I have spent a lot of time contemplating the strangeness of beginning my career anew at a public university in Taiwan, a country my father left 40 years ago when he was a dissident student threatened with having his medical school diploma revoked and reported on during his mandatory military service - all for speaking out against the one-party dictatorship in place from 1945 until the late 1980s. Today, consensus around the value of democracy, a basic social welfare state, and the value of higher education all seem more secure in Taiwan than in the US, even as Taiwan remains existentially threatened by the annexationist desires of the People’s Republic of China. It is hard to know how to help and what to do from afar, watching the schools and institutions and students I worked for being treated by this administration as the class enemy. I am so grateful for initiatives by We Are Higher Ed, Education for All, and the American Association of University Professors, as well the leadership displayed by university administration at schools like Princeton and faculty senates at schools like Rutgers to rapidly build solidarity and stand in legal, moral, and practical defense of our students in whatever ways are possible.
It was not so easy to find a job outside the American and especially Anglophone academy with my particular limitations. Last fall at age 40, I gave up tenure at Grinnell College and restarted in an academic system that I had never attended as a student myself, working in languages and scripts that I had only very recently begun to improve in and knew that in all probability I would never learn to speak and write at a native level. Like most places outside the Anglosphere and Western Europe, Taiwan is a net exporter of graduate students and academics; the pathways for the very few academics who have never lived in Taiwan but want to are comparatively obscure. As grateful as I was that my new university was willing to take a chance on me, I knew that there were many other Taiwanese academics who had been studying English from a young age and completed graduate work in relevant fields in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, who would be better equipped to teach British and European history to Taiwanese students and international students studying in Taiwan. There is a small but thriving world history community in Taiwan carrying out research in Mandarin, English, and a host of other languages.
Still, I was determined to do the best I could at this new job, and to this end tried out a number of compensatory and pedagogical strategies in the classroom, including:
Attracting Taiwanese students to my classes: As with other East Asian countries, Taiwan has below-replacement birth rates, and as a consequence, has turned to international students to try to fill the gap. At the same time, it is government policy for primary and secondary students to achieve English fluency by the year 2030. Taiwanese universities therefore now offer an increasing array of so-called EMI classes (English Medium of Instruction). My new department chair mentioned, however, that Taiwanese students are often shy about taking English-taught courses, and that I should officially offer my classes in Mandarin Chinese if I wanted to attract them.
What this meant in practice: I hired translators so that I could produce bilingual slides and practiced twice a week with a tutor to learn to deliver the Mandarin out loud. Our readings were in English, excerpts of the same readings I had assigned to my students at Grinnell College in Iowa, while my students spoke to me and to one another in Mandarin when discussing the texts in class. Some students seemed to read directly in English, others relied on screen readers and automatic translators, but in general, I was humbled by the breadth of their vocabularies in English and their level of reading comprehension. Still, as my students were working in their second and often third language, I was limited in the amount of reading I could assign and ended up deciding to forgo primary sources almost entirely.
Adjusting to a very different rhythm of the semester and set of cultural norms:
For years, Taiwanese university semesters ran to 18 weeks, with no fall or spring breaks in the middle, accounting for about six to eight extra weeks of instruction compared to US institutions. My university is one of the last to switch over to a 16-week semester (starting Fall 2025). What would be a four-credit course at a US college only counts as a three-credit course in Taiwan, meaning that students must take 7-8 courses a term to graduate within four or even five years. The typical undergraduate class meets for three hours at a time, once per week. All this feeds into a tough cycle: it is very difficult to find time to meet with students to discuss assignments and more class time must be spent on lecture and background, since we are limited in the amount of reading, preparation, and deeper thinking we can expect our students to do outside of class, and everyone is tired all the time. In general, Taiwanese students tend to be shyer in class and less willing to volunteer to open or continue a discussion. Luckily, I had nine years of teaching in liberal arts settings to fall back on, when it came to deploying class activities and strategies for participatory reading and analysis.
Cultivating Interest in Anglophone and Western History More Broadly
I benefit from teaching a relatively unusual subject here in Taiwan; students are hungry for and interested in topics that they might not have had access to at an earlier stage of their schooling. Still, I find myself confronting a general lack of context about Christianity and British and European history due to the ways that Taiwan’s history differs from that of other places in East and Southeast Asia. After the brief stints of Dutch and Spanish colonialism (and the end of a dozen-year period in the late seventeenth century when the British East India Company operated a factory here), there was relatively little entanglement with European powers and European people, their cultures, religions, and languages. Instead, Taiwan was drawn into successive Asian empires (the Qing, the Japanese, and the Republic of China) and then entered into a complicated, ambiguous relationship with the postwar American empire. Students in the US may have positive or negative impressions of Christianity and European empire, but they do often have impressions; by contrast, one of my Taiwanese students enrolled in my Global Reformations course, expressed to me that he felt no emotional or intellectual resonance when he thought about Christianity, which made him realize just how truly new and unfamiliar the topic was to him.
Finally, teaching pre-modern British and European history in a geopolitically marginalized place like Taiwan is one way I hope to connect Taiwanese students to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world to Taiwan. In this way, offering classes in Taiwan outside of Chinese and Taiwanese history, and Asian history more generally, is a way to help students understand that they can be internationally-minded even within an international system that often denies their identity and personhood. That has been more than worth all the hours of language study, awkward moments of fumbling for the right vocabulary word, and the nervousness and excitement of starting over.
Catherine Chou is assistant professor of world history at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. With Mark Harrison, she is the co-author of Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order (Cambria Press, 2024). Her monograph Parliament in the British Political Imagination, 1550-1600 is under contract with Manchester University Press.
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