The Taiwan Studies Program is honored to host the North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) annual meeting this year at the University of Washington.  NATSA was established in 1994 and is run by North America-based faculty and PhD students who are interested in Taiwan Studies. The NATSA annual conferences are the largest academic events on Taiwan Studies in North America. They not only provide scholars and students of Taiwan Studies with a regular forum to meet and exchange intellectual ideas, but also allow researchers on East Asia and beyond to receive dynamic feedback and broaden their academic horizons.  NATSA believes Taiwan is not just an area to be studied, but also a way to expand the current understandings of human societies and enable a more complex reflection on changing global conditions. In particular, as a in-between region that receives and channels cultural and economic influences from China, Japan, the United States, and other East and Southeast Asian countries, studies on Taiwan may broaden the perspectives of researchers in these countries by offering new ways to look at how they perceive and interact with one another.