2026 HEAS Conference
The 29th Annual Harvard East Asia Society Conference
Register Here
Welcome to the 29th Harvard East Asia Society (HEAS) Conference!
Please register in advance before you join as an audience member.
The Harvard East Asia Society Graduate Student Conference is an annual event that provides an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students to exchange ideas and discuss current research on topics related to Asia. The conference invites young scholars to present their research to their peers and renowned scholars in relevant fields. Participants will also meet others in their research area and forge new professional relationships.
This year's conference is entitled “Delineations: Temporality, Boundaries, and Imaginaries of East Asia.” What do we do when we draw the line? We delineate to describe, to trace, to portray, and to mark out the vagueness and ambiguities that find purchase in scholarship. How does navigating between liminalities inform our understanding of East Asia? This year’s conference theme, Delineations, asks scholars to re-examine how a world created entirely of ascriptions reveals intrinsic and extrinsic connections among subjects, space, borders, history, and time. We invite scholars to consider lines of inquiry that make (or unmake) our past and future understandings of a global East Asia. The Program Committee of the Harvard East Asia Society is pleased to welcome proposals from scholars whose interests and methods reflect and build upon these themes.
The 2026 HEAS conference will be held in person from Friday, February 13, to Saturday, February 14, 2026. Participants should plan to arrive on or before February 13, 2026. The HEAS Conference Committee regrets that it cannot provide travel stipends for participants and encourages participants to seek funding from their own departments.
Questions or concerns can be directed to heasconference@gmail.com. Please also check our Frequently Asked Questions and Answers Page for more details.
We look forward to seeing you at the conference!
Sincerely,
The 2026 HEAS Conference Committee:
Co-chairs: Pauline Hamilton, Xiyun Wu
Treasurers: Rachel Hsu, Harry So
Secretaries: Elli Ahn, Finn Kirkpatrick
Readers: Isabel Cai, Yutao Chen, Ben Hales, Seiyoung Jang, Shangbo Jing, Yijin Li, Mingxuan Liu, Ruyi Liu, Yang Liu, Jeffrey Ma, Shuyi Ma, Elsie Qiu, Ziyu Qiu, Yingying Rao, Jenny Shan, Meitong Song, Jamie Tang, Jiahe Wang, Jieyan Wang, Ocean Wang, Wilson Wang, Leo Xie, Xiaolong Yang, Brian Zhang, Yihang Zhang, Yinan Zhang, Weiting Zhao, Scofield Zou
HEAS would like to thank Harvard Griffin GSAS Student Council, Committee on Regional Studies East Asia, and several other Harvard University centers co-sponsoring the Conference: Asia Center, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Min Young-Chul Memorial Fund at the Korea Institute, Mahindra Humanities Center, the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.