In partnership with the Calgary Public Library, UCalgary Alumni, and the Calgary Foundation, and as part of Calgary Pride Week, the Calgary Institute for the Humanities will host Dr. Howard Chiang, University of California, Santa Barbara, who will be giving a talk titled “Decolonizing Transgender History: The View from the Asia Pacific.”
Dr. Chiang’s work asks: Does Asia have a trans history? What does it mean to scrutinize the politics of transness in Chinese-speaking societies? This lecture challenges both the assumption that gender nonconforming figures did not exist historically and the idea that the Western category of transgender delivers the best framework for understanding their experience. To remedy some of the most salient flaws of historical inquiry, this talk analyzes key exemplars from the Sinophone Pacific in decolonial terms.
Dr. Howard Chiang holds the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies (by appointment), Professor of History and Feminist Studies (by courtesy), and Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies. He is the author of two award-winning monographs: After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021). He is a laureate of the 2026 Dan David Prize in History.