Flora Chuang arrived at Hope College in 2015 to develop the college’s program in Mandarin Chinese. In addition to the modern Mandarin she grew up speaking in Taiwan, she is a fluent reader of Japanese and of classical Chinese. She teaches Mandarin to beginning, intermediate and advanced students. Her other courses include the first year seminar From Confucius to Kung Fu and the Cultural Heritage course Visualizing China in Transition.

One of Dr. Chuang’s great interests is film as it relates to culture. In her doctoral dissertation, she explored how New Taiwanese Cinema shapes audiences’ vision of East Asia and Sinophone as imagined communities.

She is a member of ASIANetwork, the Modern Language Association, the Association for Asian Studies and the Chinese Language Teachers Association.

AREAS OF expertise

• Chinese literature and film
• Taiwan New Cinema
• East Asia popular culture
• Cultural theory

EDUCATION

• Ph.D., comparative literature, University of Texas at Austin, 2015
• M.A., comparative literature and cultural studies, University of New Mexico, 2008
• B.A., English, National Sun Yat-sen University (Taiwan), 2005

Selected Publications & Presentations

• “Rediscovering New Taiwan Cinema in and outside of Greater China: Wei Te-sheng’s Cape No. 7 and Chang Tso-chi’s Soul of a Demon,” ASIANetwork Exchange, 2022
• “How to De-sequence Chinese Language Classes, ” presentation to Great Lakes Colleges Association Chinese Language Faculty Meetings, 2022
• “Finding a Way Home: ‘Magic’ and ‘Realism’ in Chang Tso-chi’s The Best of Times,” presentation at the ASIANetwork conference Mindful Connectivity: Asian Perspectives and Influences, 2018
• “An Audience’s Close Reading of Chang Tso-Chi’s Films: From Cuts to Fades into Black in Ah Chung and Darkness and Light,” Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities, 2016
• “An Inquiry into the Reception of Taiwanese Cinema in the New Millennium,” presentation at Watersheds Conference, University of Barcelona (Spain), 2014
• “The Legacy of Taiwan New Cinema and Beyond: Newcomers in the 1990s, Cinema in and outside China,” presentation at University of Manchester (UK), 2013

Outside the college

Dr. Chuang is a mother of two daughters. She enjoys cooking, jogging, doing yoga and exploring West Michigan.