29th Harvard East Asia Society (HEAS) Conference

This year's HEAS Conference, entitled “Delineations: Temporality, Boundaries, and Imaginaries of East Asia” was held Friday, February 13th and Saturday, February 14th, 2026. 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? The conference theme, Delineations, asked scholars to re-examine how a world created entirely of ascriptions reveals intrinsic and extrinsic connections among subjects, space, borders, history, and time. Scholars were invited to consider lines of inquiry that make (or unmake) our past and future understandings of a global East Asia.