Graduate Student Conference on East Asia

Please note: The information below pertains to the AY2025–26 conference and is provided as a reference for what to expect. Information for the upcoming conference will be posted when it becomes available.

General Information

March 27th and 28th, 2026

Graduate students are invited to submit abstracts for the 31st Annual Columbia Graduate Student Conference on East Asia, to be held on March 27-28, 2026 at Columbia University. Applications are due December 16, 2025. Successful applicants will be notified of acceptance in late January. Final Papers are due February 26, 2026.

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Joanna Waley-Cohen (Julius Silver Professor of History at NYU and Provost Emerita, NYU Shanghai)

As the Columbia EALAC community reckons with the ongoing process of rebuilding C.V. Starr Library, the 2026 Graduate Student Conference adopts “Rebuilding” as its generative theme. We envision this conference as a vital site for both intellectual exchange and community restoration.

Our theme, Rebuilding: Sites/Sights of East Asia, serves as a critical lens to explore the interplay between physical locations (sites) and the complex acts of seeing, documenting, and representing (sights). Rebuilding is to reimagine: light filtering through scaffolding, sounds traveling through time and distance, visions transforming rubble into meaning. Rebuilding is to remember the need for renewal, walking the distance between self and other, then and now, home and exile. Rebuilding is to unsettle the foundations of inherited narratives and conventions embedded over the long course of history.

In this crucial moment of reconstruction, EALAC Gradcon 2026 welcomes all submissions in research on all fields in East Asian Studies, especially those that engage with the multiplicities of rebuilding. We invite scholarship that navigates between permanence and impermanence, reality and representation, interruption and continuity. We seek voices daring to envision new architectures of thought and reshape East Asian studies.

Presenters deliver a talk no longer than 20 minutes based on an academic paper that summarizes research in progress. Presentations may take three possible forms: a standard academic research paper, a PowerPoint presentation accompanied by a talk, or a work of documentary filmmaking. A documentary work should be 20 minutes or less. Those interested in proposing research in alternative forms should directly contact us at [email protected].

The committee also encourages applications from pre-arranged panels of three to four presenters organized around a specific research topic, such as a region, discipline, or theme. If you are applying as a pre-formed panel, please make sure to include a tentative title for your panel on the application form. Preference will be given to such applications; we encourage panels to include participants from multiple institutions.

  • Applications are due December 16, 2025. 
     
  • Successful applicants will be notified of acceptance in January 2026.
     
  • Final Papers are due February 26, 2026.

Housing will be available on an extremely limited basis. We encourage everyone to arrange their own accommodations in advance. The conference runs from Friday afternoon to late Saturday evening. Travel and lodging information will be available soon.

The committee will provide funding to cover travel expenses, but on an extremely limited and competitive basis. Preference will be given to international travelers. Participants are strongly encouraged to apply for funding from their home institutions or other sources.

We are committed to holding an accessible conference. Please let us know what accommodations you require.