Dissertation Reviews is seeking dynamic scholars in the humanities and social sciences to develop new fields within our innovative scholarly network. Dissertation Reviews (www.dissertationreviews.org) is a web platform featuring reviews of recently defended PhD dissertations in the humanities and social sciences. We have grown by leaps and bounds since our founding five years ago: from only 1 field to more than 20, from 10 reviews per year to over 550, and from a handful of editors to a team of more than 30 talented early-career scholars across the globe. As we look ahead to the 2014-15 season, we are seeking dynamic, early-career scholars...

A review of (Re)Producing Ethics and the Ethics of Reproduction: Reproductive Ethics among Haredi Women in Jerusalem, by Michal S. Raucher. This dissertation explores the ways in which Haredi, ultra-orthodox Jewish, women in Jerusalem claim authority in decisions regarding their bodies and reproductive lives. Focusing on actual pregnancy and birth experiences of Haredi women, Michal Raucher underlines the importance of ethnography in bioethical discussions. She offers a new definition of ethics, “lived ethics” as she calls it, based on ethical practices of individuals. The book reveals that any ethical discussion, which is solely based...

A review of The Public Eye: Celebrity and Photojournalism in the Making of the British Tabloids, 1904-1938, by Ryan Linkof. Ryan Linkof’s dissertation is a thoughtful and detailed analysis of the origins of photojournalism within the British press, particularly focusing on the inclusion of photographs in tabloids such as The Daily Mirror and Daily Express. The tabloids were the world’s first daily newspapers to make widespread use of the snapshot photograph as a vehicle of mass communication. By focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, Linkof successfully illustrates the early development and production of photos,...

A review of the Central Archive of Nizhnii Novgorod Region (Центральный архив Нижегородской области) (Nizhnii Novgorod, Russian Federation). Lying on the banks of the Volga and Oka Rivers, Nizhnii Novgorod is one of the most picturesque of Russian cities. Perched on a cliff, the eastern side offers a collection of historical sites, hubs of cultural activity, and an assortment of architectural styles dating from the fourteenth century to the present day. In contrast, the lower, western side is a thriving center of retail, replete with modern western shopping centers in addition to traditional-style bazaars...

A Review of The Envelope of Global Trade: The Political Economy and Intellectual History of Jute in the Bengal Delta, 1850s to 1950s, by Tariq Omar Ali. Tariq Omar Ali’s dissertation synthesizes material and intellectual history, recasting the role of global markets in shaping the local history of the Bengal delta. The dissertation traces the ripples of the global production of jute on the delta’s social, economic, and political life. In the late nineteenth century, jute interwove the local space of the delta with markets worldwide. The cultivation and circulation of the fiber transformed the delta’s spaces and peasant politics in...

A review of State and Power after Neoliberalism in Bolivarian Venezuela, by Donald V. Kingsbury. Contemporary Venezuelan politics have been the center of world attention for their role in the so-called reemergence of populism and debilitation of neoliberalism in Latin America, as well as for their oppositional role in the international arena. Much of the attention paid to Venezuelan politics, however, has concentrated on the figure of former president Hugo Chávez and the influence of his leadership. There is little doubt that the dominant political discourse in Venezuela since the late eighties has aggressively recast the figure and legacy...

A review of ”‘Friends and Foes on the Battlefield’: A Study of Chinese and U.S. Youth Literature about the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945),” by Chen Minjie. Youth literature is a powerful form of inter-generational storytelling, whereby one generation can pass along experiences of traumatic events to younger generations born into considerably different circumstances. In this capacity, youth literature also functions as a conduit of national myth-making and social reproduction, transforming a diverse multiplicity of individual lives into the recognizable types and tropes of desirable historical narratives. In her ambitious and...

A review of Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period: The Composition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, by Elias I. Muhanna. Elias Muhanna’s 2012 dissertation Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period takes as its object of study the Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, a 31-manuscript-volume encyclopaedia written in the early fourteenth century by the Mamluk Egyptian bureaucrat Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333). By examining the text through a sophisticated methodological lens, Muhanna’s study reminds us of the literary merits of compilatory texts like the Nihāya while also...

Listening to Postcolonial Sounds: Fieldwork on Bagpiping in the Indian Himalayas It’s a hot morning in September, 2013, and I’m sitting in a music studio in the town of Srinagar, Garhwal (not the one in Kashmir). Garhwal is a relatively sparsely populated region in the central Himalayas, roughly north-northeast of New Delhi, that comprises the western part of the state of Uttarakhand. At the southwestern edge of the region, the Himalayan foothills rise from the populous North Indian plains and continue to ascend in range after range of rugged ridges and deep river valleys until they culminate in snowy peaks exceeding 20,000 feet in...

A review of Becoming Bodhisattvas: Practices and the Popular Discourse of Kuan-Yin in Kuala Lumpur, by Arthur Chia. It has often been noted that the concept of the bodhisattva – the Buddha in the making who defers enlightenment in order to alleviate the suffering of others – is both a spiritual ideal and the basis for engagement with a broader society. With its attendant values of compassion and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, the notion of the bodhisattva sits at the interface between individual spiritual striving and the imperative for social transformation. However, these individual and social aspects may find themselves in...

A review of Ceramic Production and Craft Specialization in the Prehistoric Philippines, A.D. 500 to 1600, by Lisa C. Niziolek. Lisa C. Niziolek’s dissertation continues the long line of scholarship in the Central Philippines initiated by Karl Hutterer (1979) in the late 1970s. This work, which focuses on political transformations, builds on previous investigations carried out in the region and provides another dimension in understanding archaeological processes in the Philippines. Following in the tradition established by Laura Junker (1999), Niziolek’s work in the Central Philippines provides prehistoric correlates for William...

A review of Globalization and Communications Policy: The Role of the Media in Communications Policy Development in Kenya between 2002 and 2009, by Vanessa Malila. The role of the media in politics and democracy in African countries has been and is an important research field in Media and Communication Studies as well as African Studies and Political Sciences. Vanessa Malila’s dissertation contributes to this research area and introduces a new perspective with her subject and research question. She analyzes the role of the press in communications policy development in Kenya in the years 2002 to 2009 and focuses on the role of the press in...

A review of The Aftermath of Aid: Medical Insecurity in the Northern Somali Region of Ethiopia, by Lauren Carruth. In The Aftermath of Aid, Lauren Carruth draws on historical and contemporary experiences of recurrent but temporary humanitarian endeavors in the Somali region of northern Ethiopia to highlight the multiple, and often novel, ways that these fleeting engagements impacted sociality, citizenship, and expectations of biomedicine. This nuanced study brings the experiences, logics and concerns of Somalis into conversation with the practices and imperatives of humanitarian aid institutions and their employees. Importantly, Carruth...

A review of Installationskunst in China. Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen (Installation Art in China. Transcultural Spaces Reflecting a Genealogy of the Performative), by Birgit Hopfener. Installation art has been an important medium for contemporary artists in China to critically reflect upon shifting socio-political and art historical frameworks. In her dissertation, “Installationskunst in China. Transkulturelle Reflexionsräume einer Genealogie des Performativen,” Birgit Hopfener presents the first comprehensive survey describing the development of installation art in the People’s Republic of China...

A review of The Uses, Meanings, and Values of Natural Objects: University Earth Science Objects and Collections as Material Culture, by Hannah-Lee Chalk. As scholars sorted through the meaningful mess of biological and paleobiological collections over the last few years, they’ve “taken for granite,” as Hannah-Lee Chalk puts it, museums’ ubiquitous collections of earth science materials, dismissing them as too dull to bother with (p. 29). Chalk’s thoughtful dissertation on the geological collections of university museums may just reverse this trend. Chalk uses thing theory and ethnographic research in five institutions to...

A review of Secrets of the Vajra Body: Dngos po’i gnas lugs and the Apotheosis of the Body in the Work of Rgyal ba Yang dgon pa, by Willa Blythe Miller. Willa Miller’s dissertation focuses on Yang dgon pa Rgyal mtshan dpal’s (1213-1258) Explanation of the Hidden Vajra Body (Rdo rje lus kyi sbas bshad), and provides Buddhist and Tibetan studies scholars a rare portrait of a tantric soteriology that positions the human body from its coarse to subtle levels as the basis, path, and fruit of Buddhist enlightenment. Buddhist doctrine normally places the mind as the primary basis for cultivation, but in an important move, Miller focuses on...

A review of Creole Citizens of France: The Trans-Atlantic Politics of Antillean Education and the Creole Movement Since 1945, by Sarah Moon McDermott Thompson. Through French Antillean engagement with national education programs, Sarah Moon McDermott Thompson’s dissertation explores the struggle to define a national French identity following the departmentalization of Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1946, when two of France’s oldest colonies theoretically became integral parts of the French nation. At a time when assimilation and the grand civilizing mission had failed across the French empire, republican officials renewed their attempts to...

A review of The Abū Ḥanīfah of His Time: Islamic Law, Jurisprudential Authority and Empire in the Ottoman Domains (16th-17th Centuries), by Guy Burak. This dissertation examines how jurisprudential authority was constituted in the Ottoman Empire during the 16th and 17th centuries. The author studies the discussions between muftīs, both those who were appointed officially by the Ottoman state and ‘unofficial’ muftīs, and how these religious scholars established their juridical authority through their fatwās. These debates, which took place during the integration of the Arab lands into the Ottoman administrative matrix, illuminate...

A review of Homoeopathic Families, Hindu Nation and the Legislating State: Making of a Vernacular Science, Bengal: 1866-1941, by Shinjini Das. Homoeopathic Families, Hindu Nation and the Legislating State: Making of a Vernacular Science, Bengal: 1866-1941 by Shinjini Das is a fine work on the colonial career of homoeopathic medicine in Bengal. Framed within critical debates on South Asian historiography, this dissertation makes a valuable contribution to history of medicine. Das studies the processes that constituted homoeopathy as a “vernacular science” in British Bengal. In Das’s words, “In mapping homoeopathy’s...

A review of Colonialism and Patterns of Ethnic Conflict in Contemporary India, by Ajay Verghese. This important dissertation asks why ethnic violence in multiethnic states tends to revolve around one salient identity, given the multiplicity of potential identity fault lines that theoretically could serve as the focus of conflict. Ajay Verghese examines ethnic conflict in India, determining that the legacies of British rule determine major differences in contemporary conflicts, and particularly whether they are organized mainly around caste/tribal cleavages or religious differences. In short, he finds that in those areas of the Raj that were...

A review of materials on the Cham minority of Cambodia at the Bophana Audio Visual Archives (Phnom Penh, Cambodia). Across the world, economics and war are critical factors that constantly threaten scholarly production. For example, in Cambodia, decades of twentieth century civil conflict, including the worlds’ seventh largest genocide, left the country with few precious scholarly resources by the time of reconstruction in the mid-1990s. Subsequently, the inability of the Ministry of Culture to provide sufficient funds for institutions such as the National Library and the Buddhist Institute have resulted in these collection being further...

A review of Timescapes: The Production of Temporality in Literature and Museums, by Jennifer Walklate. Part 1 of Walklate’s dissertation, ‘Literary Temporalities,’ begins with an introduction that explores the compelling question of “museum time” as something transcendent.  While this may be true, it is noted that this is due to the manipulation of the museum space to create this effect. The author’s research is based on how the tools of literature can be successfully applied to understand temporality in the museum setting. Various concepts about time are contextualized and effectively presented. Of particular interest are the...

Bioethics, Critical and Clinical; or, Literature, that is to say… Timothy F. Murphy’s review (2004) of Being Human: Readings from the President’s Council on Bioethics (2003) is scathing to say the least. The anthology itself consists of “95 excerpts from the past five thousand years. It draws from poetry, short fiction, philosophy, novels, and religious writing” (Murphy 125). In Murphy’s words, Leon R. Kass, Chairman of the Council (2001-2005) affirms the value of the anthology in terms of the Council’s charge to “facilitate a greater understanding of bioethical issues” (Murphy Ibid), and in the latter’s own words,...

A review of Art in Everyday Life: Department Stores as Purveyors of Culture in Modern Japan, by Younjung Oh. Since the turn of the twentieth century department stores have played a critical role in the production, circulation, exhibition, and consumption of modern art. Yet, in spite of their profound and lasting impact on the development of Japanese art and visual culture, department stores have not been valued as cultural arbiters worthy of significant scholarly study. Indeed, the very nature of the department store – its commercial interests, promotion of conspicuous consumption, and unapologetic practice of putting aesthetics in...

A review of the Inner Mongolia Regional Archives (Hohhot, China). 内蒙古自治区呼和浩特市南二环路60号 内蒙古自治区档案局 
tel: +86-47-1481-1482; website In the cavernous, marble lobby of the Inner Mongolia Regional Archives, an LED screen blinks in red with foreboding: “Put our country’s interests above all. The responsibility of keeping information classified weighs heavier than Mount Tai. Protecting state secrets is every citizen’s duty” (国家利益高于一切，保密责任重于泰山。保守国家秘密是每个公民的义务).” This pithy saying only begins to describe the mafan of using the...

A review of Making Nature Modern: Economic Transformation and the Environment in the Soviet North, by Andy Bruno. Did the Soviet Union perpetrate ecocide to an unprecedented degree? Was communism more egregious than capitalism in its degradation of nature? Are human activities decisive, or does the natural world shape and defy human behavior? These questions have loomed large in debates about the relationship between people and the environment in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In his ambitious study, Andy Bruno offers answers that are both empirically substantiated and theoretically engaged. Bruno makes the case that the Soviet...

A review of The “Sent-Down” Vision: Poetics and Politics of Zhiqing Literature in Post-Mao China, by Yanjie Wang. Zhiqing 知青 writers are often considered by literary critics as a generation who express a profound sense of nostalgia in their writing. Yanjie Wang’s dissertation The “Sent-down” Vision: Poetics and Politics of Zhiqing Literature in Post-Mao China is an insightful and probing study that challenges this conventional yet still prevalent view of zhiqing literature. Defining the zhiqing generation rather as rootless and displaced, Wang skillfully investigates what she calls the “sent-down” vision of the zhiqing...

A review of The Measure of Empire: Crisis and Responsibility in Postemancipation Jamaica, by Christienna Fryar. Is it possible to write a history of nineteenth-century Jamaica in which slavery and emancipation become supporting players rather than leading roles? This history could not ignore race or class divisions, nor could it neglect the ongoing post-slavery labor debates. But what if these issues became an ever-present backdrop for a study spotlighting other aspects of Jamaican politics and society? Or a history that foregrounds Jamaica’s knotty relationship to the British Empire? Christienna D. Fryar’s dissertation, “The...

A review of Social Transformation from the Longshan Period to the Erlitou Period: Songshan and Beyond 從龍山到二里頭──以嵩山南北為中心, by Li Zhang 張莉. For many anthropologists and archaeologists, the origin of early states and civilizations is one of the most intriguing topics in both local and global perspectives. In the field of Chinese archaeology, many archaeologists focus on the transition from the late Neolithic Period to the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2,500-1,600 BC), arguing that it was during this period that the state formation process in China began. Being an archaeologist, Li Zhang explores this key issue...

A review of A Textual Study of Tongp’ae Naksong: Problems of Oral Storytelling, Genre and the Vernacular in Late-Chosŏn Yadam, by Si Nae Park. Si Nae Park’s dissertation painstakingly examines questions of literary genre in Korea through vernacular influences in yadam (野談 or 野譚), which is perhaps best translated as “unofficial talks.” This body of literature employed the Chinese script but sat outside the canon until the second half of the twentieth century, when it was rehabilitated by scholars keen on highlighting its putatively oral origins. The idea that these written stories originated in popular oral stories was at...

A review of Embedding the Personal: the construction of a ‘fashion autobiography’ as a museum exhibition, informed by innovative practice at ModeMuseum, Antwerp, by Jeffrey Horsley. The curation of fashion has been receiving increased critical interest lately, concurrent with the expansion of fashion exhibitions (historic and contemporary) across museum and gallery venues worldwide. This dissertation contributes to that discourse by laying out a methodology for evaluating the key components of fashion exhibition-making and examining how they contribute to the construction of narrative and meaning. The author goes further than a mere...

A review of Forming Dōrasamudra: Temples of the Hoysaḷa Capital in Context, by Katherine E. Kasdorf. Despite more than two hundred years of systematic documentation and analysis, southern India’s rich corpus of temple architecture remains a wide-open field of research. Previous studies have tended to treat their subjects as isolated monuments, dissociated from the wider built and social contexts in which they were produced and functioned. One exceptional inquiry challenging this trend is the multi-disciplinary, decades-long investigations of the Vijayanagara Research Project, which succeeded in considering that medieval capital’s...

A review of Gender, Ethnicity, and Infrastructure, and the Use of Financial Institutions in Kalimantan Barat, Indonesia, by Christina Dames. In her dissertation, Christina Dames examines the use and growth of microfinancial institutions in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The research focus on West Kalimantan is timely considering the significant performance of the microfinance institutions, primarily of credit unions, and the participation of the Dayaks in this regard. The author looks at variables such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location and development of the physical infrastructure that may influence the decision of the population to...

A review of The Administration of Addiction: The Politics of Medicine and Opiate Use in Soviet Tajikistan, 1924-1958, by Alisher Latypov. Alisher Latypov’s dissertation breaks significant new ground in assessing an important and sensitive topic in modern Central Asian history. Despite what the title suggests, the research does not only address Tajikistan but also brings other Soviet Central Asian republics into the picture. During the Soviet state’s period of existence, the Party and the government exhibited a strong will to fight the consumption of opiates. The Bolshevik authorities presented their use as the persistence of...

A review of Revelations of a Modern Mystic: The Life and Legacy of Kun bzang bde chen gling pa 1928-2006, by Amelia Hall. Amelia Hall’s dissertation, Revelations of a Modern Mystic: The Life and Legacy of Kun bzang bde chen gling pa 1928-2006, translates and reflects upon the life story of the Tibetan Buddhist visionary Kunzang Dechen Lingpa in light of questions Hall poses about the assimilation of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary North America. Hall engages Kunzang Dechen Lingpa’s biography and legacy to consider how Tibetan Buddhist traditions are being adapted to meet the particular interests, sensitivities, and cultural expectations...

A review of Ema: Display Practices of Edo Period Votive Paintings, by Hilary Katherine Snow. This dissertation by Hilary K. Snow examines the diversity of large-scale ema (votive paintings) and the practices of donation and display that attended them in the Edo period (1603-1868). Ema represent an understudied genre of Japanese painting, perhaps because they are most often understood in their votive context. Snow’s dissertation, which focuses on ema in the Kantō region in the latter half of the Edo period, views these objects as exemplars of the intermingling of the secular and the sacred in early modern Japan. Her study of ema through...

A review of Threatening Lives: Controlling Avian Flu in Vietnam’s Poultry Economy, by Natalie Porter. Since its appearance in 1997, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has infected millions of commercially raised birds, compelled the mass culling of flocks, and inflicted costly losses for poultry farmers and regional economies. In 2003, the H5N1 strain of HPAI was identified in Vietnam; the new strain was infectious to humans, among whom it has since inflicted fatalities at alarmingly high rates. Despite the efforts of national and global health workers to contain the novel malady in Vietnam, it is now endemic among the country’s...

A review of Career Women in Contemporary Japan: Pursuing Identities, Fashioning Lives, by Anne Stefanie Aronsson. Drawing on ethnographic research, literature reviews and surveys, Aronsson’s thesis explores the career paths and motivations of white-collar professional women and the ways in which they are reconfiguring notions of selfhood. Based on interviews with 120 women, she presents in-depth data of 16 individuals aged from their 20s to their 90s giving us a compelling view of professional women’s careers throughout the postwar period. She organizes her thesis along two axes: when they entered the workforce and the sectors...

A review of Ideas of Books and Reading in Literature, 1880-1914, by Dewi Evans. Dewi Evans’ dissertation begins with a quotation from Tess of the D’Urbervilles in which the fallen heroine accuses her mother of failing to warn her of “danger,” especially through failing to provide “novels that tell them of these tricks.” Evans uses this moment to explore the debate over controlling women’s purity through restricting novels, the notion of “the book” as both an idea and a material presence within fiction, and the changing conditions of the book at the end of the nineteenth century in...

A review of Undocumented Lives: A History of Mexico-U.S. Migration from 1965 to 1986, by Ana Raquel Minian Andjel.  Simply put, Ana Raquel Minian’s “Undocumented Lives” is a tour de force. With this work, she masterfully weaves an untold history of Mexico-U.S. migration in the post-1965 period. This is socio-political history at its best. In part, Minian’s work is so successful because she is a skilled and engaging writer who is deeply attuned to the multilayered lives of her characters. Whether she uncovers the emotional distress of leaving a family member behind, the agony of loss immortalized in song, or the economic incentives...