Department Linda Gail Arrigo, Ph.D. Sociology 1996, is currently traveling Europe.

She is best known for her writings on the social and political development of Taiwan, much of which stems from her participation in the Taiwan democratic movement of 1978-79 and the subsequent human rights campaign for those on trial in 1980. Her articles were translated and compiled in a volume in Chinese in 1997 that has become standard reading for graduate students in history in Taiwan. Together with co-author Lynn Miles, in 2008 she completed a book in English documenting the participation of foreigners in Taiwan human rights efforts, 1960-1980, entitled A Borrowed Voice. Now past 60, she has recently completed a popularized version of her biography, which will be published in Chinese in November 2011 with the English title A Beautiful View from the Brink.

Within Taiwan Linda is better known by her Chinese name, and she has been associated with the labor and environmental movements. In 1975-79 she carried out anthropological fieldwork and occasionally lived in the dormitories with young women factory workers, the source of some of her articles on family change and industrial control of workers. In the 1990’s she became alarmed at pollution and environmental destruction, and worked with Green Party Taiwan for several years.

In the last five years at TMU she has attempted to make Taiwan history concrete to the younger generation with tours through the nearby Liuzhangli public cemetery, where remnants of the Qing dynasty tea trade, Japanese-period acculturation and resistance, the refugee and military influx from mainland China in 1949, and the subsequent White Terror executions can be found.

However, her 1996 Ph.D. thesis dealt with basic social science, “the agrarian question”, and involved a quantitative analysis of 1930’s Chinese farm surveys, to explicate the logic of the underlying inequality of landownership in traditional Chinese society, and the demographic mechanisms that maintain it, including female infanticide.

Linda regularly helps graduate students from America and Europe who are taking on Taiwan projects to focus their research and make relevant contacts.

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