Nathan W. Novak (李漢聲)
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Industry | Education |
| Occupation | Student, writer, editor, research assistant, and occasional educator |
| Location | Kaohsiung, Taiwan |
| Introduction | Hailing from St. Cloud, MN (USA) and graduating with a BA in English (Writing and Literature Concentrations) and History-Political Science from Jamestown College, Jamestown, North Dakota (USA), Nathan has spent the last seven years in southern Taiwan. He currently resides in Kaohsiung, where he met his wife of three years; she is a resident of Kaohsiung and a Taiwanese national. Their first child, Ian Richard (李勝元), was born on January 9, 2013. Currently a Master's student at Kaohsiung's National Sun Yat-sen University in the Institute of China and Asia-Pacific Studies and the Center for Japanese Studies, he specializes in international relations, security studies (with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region), and foreign policy analysis. Other scholarly interests include comparative politics; history (particularly the modern history of East Asia); the governments, politics, and economics of East Asia (particularly China, Taiwan, and Japan); Sino-U.S. relations; Sino-Japan relations; and cross-Strait relations. Nathan possesses a working proficiency in Mandarin Chinese and has begun dabbling in the Taiwanese (Hoklo) dialect as well as Japanese. |
| Interests | History, security studies, international relations, political science, comparative politics, economics, economic history, foreign policy, sociology, political economy, philosophy, foreign (mostly Asian) languages, literature, traveling, writing, reading, music, exercising, spending time with family. |
| Favorite Movies | The Last of the Mohicans, Braveheart, Red Cliff (I and II), Warlords, The Last Samurai, The Hunger Games, the Saw movies, and many more. |
| Favorite Music | Brahms, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Puccini, Verdi, Chopin, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner. Love Corelli and Pavarotti. Although I prefer classical music and opera to most other genres, more popular groups and performers I also enjoy include Led Zeppelin, Credence Clearwater Revival, Tool, Nirvana, Guns 'n' Roses, and many more. I also have to admit that I have had a strange fascination with Meatloaf for at least a decade. |
| Favorite Books | Too many of the books I've read for professional purposes are influential and, hence, cannot be written here without slighting at least one of them. Let's just say "many" and leave it at that. Philosophically I consider myself an eclectic, although I share a deep connection with many of the stoics, cynics, skeptics, existentialists, and transcendentalists. Among my favorite writers in this genre are Marcus Aurelius, Hume, Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Foucault. As far as novels are concerned, Hesse's _Steppenwolf_, Joyce's _Ulysses_, Faulkner's _The Sound and the Fury_ have all fascinated me. I also have soft spots for Dickens, Orwell, and Nabokov. My favorite poets include T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. |