My CCS Summer Research Grant supported nearly a month of archival research in Taipei from the middle of June to the middle of July. This research built on work that I did during six months of fieldwork in Taiwan during the 2021-2022 academic year. It was crucial in helping me track down sources that I had missed during my initial stay, but that I came to realize would be necessary for the project during my first year of dissertation writing. In particular, I worked in Academia Historica, Academia Sinica (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Collection), and two collections held at National Chengchi University’s library: the Kuomintang Party Archives and the collection of documents related to the Central Political Institute (中央政治學校) from the 2nd Historical Archives in Nanjing. The most significant set of materials that I collected during this summer trip was a set of personnel files (人事調查表) for teachers and students from the Central Political Institute during the 1930s, the subject of my dissertation work. I had already collected some of the relevant forms on my previous trip, but the scope of the dissertation project has grown since then and, in addition, the forms require a lengthy declassification process at Academia Historica due to Taiwanese personal privacy laws, so I was not able to collect all the necessary documents during my fieldwork year. These personnel files contain invaluable demographic information about the students, but they also help place their subjects within professional and political networks by indicating who their bosses, mentors, and party sponsors were. This research was crucial for my dissertation and I am profoundly grateful to the Center for Chinese Studies for supporting the trip.
- Anatol Klass
Department of History
CCS Summer 2023 Grant Report