A review of the National Palace Museum Library 國立故宮博物院圖書文獻官, the National Central Library 國家圖書館, and the Grand Secretariat Archives 內閣大庫檔案 One of the great stories in the history of archival preservation is the removal to Taiwan of a huge number of historical documents and rare books at the end of the Chinese civil war. The losing KMT carted much of this archival material from Beijing to Nanjing and then to Chongqing before beginning evacuation to Taiwan in the 1940s. Given the meticulous preservation of all these materials, and the complete open access, the scholar of late imperial China often...

A review of Causality in Medicine with Particular Reference to the Viral Causation of Cancers, by Brendan Clarke. Brendan Clarke tackles one of the main and most controversial issues both in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of medicine, that is causation. His remarkably clear and detailed analysis takes cancer research as a privileged standpoint, focusing on how we are to conceive the modeling of a causal nexus when dealing with the viral etiology of cancer. Reflections in philosophy of science are here substantiated by specific examples, described with great historical and medical precision. Clarke’s doctoral thesis is...

A review of Post-Industrial Engineering: Computer Science and the Organization of White-Collar Work, 1945-1975, by Andrew Mamo. How might historians contextualize the way that the differently constituted groups of society conceive of computers and computing, without falling into the trap of understanding the development of computing machines as the culmination of our search for pure rational thought from Plato to Descartes to Leibnitz to Babbage — as several computing pioneers themselves did? One way might be to simply follow the money, akin to Paul Forman’s work on post-War physics, namely showing that the money for most computing...

A review of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, by Rian Richard Thum. The history of a history, our teachers and mentors have told us, is called “historiography,” a stodgy term evocative of pipes and tweed jackets. In The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, Rian Thum opts instead for “biography.” Indeed, his fascinating dissertation makes Uyghur history come alive through the manuscript – the beating and pulsating heart at the center of this excellent study. It was through the manuscript and all its attendant cultural practices—copying, marginal notation, and, especially, recitation at sacred pilgrimage sites—that the settled...

How Much of a Chimera is Comparability? Reflections on Comparative Studies in Sinology Whenever I tell someone in Chinese Studies that my doctoral dissertation is about the relationship between Zhuangzi and two twentieth-century French writers who were fascinated with ancient China, I would see an expression of surprise, and sometimes, a good-naturedly skeptical look. I would then hasten to explain that I am not doing an anachronistic parallel comparison or a cause-and-effect literary influence study, and instead I am examining conceptual and theoretical interactions, i.e. to what extent the writings/thought of these French intellectuals who...

A review of A History of the Medical Control of Fertility in Peru, 1895-1976, by Raul Necochea Lopez. In his dissertation, Raul Lopez challenges the body of scholarship by demographic transition theorists who study the history of population shifts in Latin America and who argue that the introduction of biomedical contraceptive technologies in the 1960s and the interventions of foreign countries promoting a Euro-American model of development have been primarily responsible for changes in the ideas and practices of medical fertility control in Peru. Lopez grants that biomedical technologies and transnational political actors have played a...

A review of the Yunnan Provincial Archives (云南省档案馆)and the Yunnan Provincial Library (云南省图书馆) (Kunming). Archival research in Yunnan requires time, patience, and a lot of paper. Both the Yunnan Provincial Archives and the Yunnan Provincial Library are assets for scholars of local history, although they limit the use and reproduction of their holdings. During six months of dissertation research on biomedicine and public health in wartime Yunnan, I found the Provincial Library to be more open to access, while the Provincial Archives remain a unique local source of primary materials. Editor’s Note: This...

A review of The Herschels: A Scientific Family in Training, by Emily Winterburn. William Herschel and his family have long been subjects of interest for historians and popularizers. The Herschels were blessed with uncommon longevity: two event-filled centuries elapsed from the time of William’s birth in 1738 to the death of his youngest grandchild in 1939. The lives of the notable among them (William, his sister Caroline and son John) were rife with exciting tales of adventure, discovery and royal patronage that provided lessons on the value of adaptability, devotion and hard work. They endowed the public record with vast catalogues of...

A review of Genetic Discrimination: A Genealogy of an American Problem, by Janet Elizabeth Childerhose. Many worlds are tethered together in the fine and even-handed dissertation produced by Janet Elizabeth Childerhose. While coming out of anthropology, the author demonstrates competence in applying the methodologic practices of her trade while maintaining a keen freedom of form when it comes to the incorporation of theoretical frameworks from disparate social science disciplines. Such agility to travel between academic worlds marks Childerhose’s work as conspicuously inclusive and thus relevant for those whose interests span the wide...

Dissertation Reviews is seeking new dissertations to be featured in the 2012-13 season in each of the following fields: Bioethics Chinese History Chinese Literature Inner Asian Studies Japan Studies Korean Studies Medical Anthropology Premodern Japanese Literature Russian Studies Science Studies South Asian Studies Southeast Asian Studies Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Visual Studies Women’s Writing If you would like to have your dissertation reviewed (2010 defense onward), or would like to contribute a review, please contact us at:...

A review of the Chongqing Municipal Archives (重庆市档案馆) In 2010-11, I spent twelve months conducting research at the Chongqing Municipal Archives for my dissertation on public health in Chongqing during the war with Japan. These archives hold all Republican and Communist-era documents on Chongqing. They also have some Qing documents, though most of these are at the famed Ba County Archives, housed at the Sichuan Provincial Archives in Chengdu. I consulted the records of the Chongqing Bureau of Public Health, Bureau of Police, Municipal Government, Bureau of Social Affairs, Beibei Management Bureau, and various hospital and...

A review of “A Healthy Child Comes from a Healthy Mother”: Mwanamugimu and Nutritional Science in Uganda, 1935-1973, by Jennifer Tappan. The dissertation examines the science of nutrition, its development and establishment from the 1930s through to the 1970s, through a focus on the research and interventions developed around kwashiorkor among children in the Baganda kingdom of Uganda. In doing so it examines the relations between nutritional research in Uganda and the rise of international medicine, arguing against the dominant narrative of the post-war period as one in which public health was focused solely on narrow technical and...

A review of Bushidō: The Creation of a Martial Ethic in Late Meiji Japan, by OLEG BENESCH. Bushidō, the vaunted “way of the warrior” ascribed to various demographics in Japanese history and mobilized productively throughout the modern world, is a tricky subject. On the one hand, bushidō–variously and creatively imagined and mobilized–constitutes a central theme of modern Japanese constructions of historical identities and social realities. On the other, its image as a legitimate object of inquiry has suffered from enthusiastic appropriations in popular studies of Japan, samurai, and martial arts. In his 2011 dissertation, Oleg...

A review of Shaping Science with the Past: Textbooks, History, and the Disciplining of Genetics, by Jeffrey Skopek. In your high school biology class, did you read about the nineteenth-century monk Gregor Mendel carefully tending his pea experiments? Perhaps you used Punnett Squares to plot out the ratios of inherited dominant and recessive genes over several generations. These uses of history in genetics are neither isolated nor incidental, Jeffrey Skopek contends in his dissertation Shaping Science with the Past: Textbooks, History, and the Disciplining of Genetics. Rather, Skopek argues that various forms of writing involving history...

It is our pleasure to announce that Leon Rocha, who is currently the Science Studies editor here at Dissertation Reviews, will be our new Managing Editor. Our warmest welcome to Leon in his new role! To learn more about Leon and the entire Dissertation Reviews editorial committee, more information can be found here. - Tom Mullaney, Editor-in-Chief   Here is a note from Leon. My first encounter with Dissertation Reviews was in 2010, when the site was focusing on Chinese History dissertations. I thought Tom Mullaney’s project was a brilliant idea, and I submitted my own thesis for review and also acted as reviewer. It was very...

We are proud to announce that, starting in the 2012-13 academic year, Dissertation Reviews will undergo a major expansion to include 12 new and enlarged fields (for a total of 15 fields in all). If you would like to have your dissertation reviewed, or help us by serving as a reviewer, please contact dissertationreviews@gmail.com. Our new fields, and their respective Field Editors, include: Bioethics (Tamara Kayali) Chinese Literature (Lucas Klein) Inner Asian Studies (Loretta Kim) *Korean Studies (John DiMoia) Medical Anthropology (Orkideh Behrouzan) Premodern Japanese Literature (William Fleming) Russian Studies (Elizabeth McGuire and...

A Review of the Zhejiang Provincial Library (浙江省图书馆) (Hangzhou, Zhejiang) My research interests focus on the history of medicine and health in twentieth-century China. I have just completed my research of barefoot doctors in Chinese villages. It is a study of Hangzhou Prefecture (in Zhejiang Province), and is based on oral interviews, local archives, and documents. The main thread of discussion is the development of medicine and health since the middle 1940s in Jiang Village, Yuhang County, which is now a suburban area under the jurisdiction of Hangzhou City. Since 2003, I have been visiting the Zhejiang Provincial Library...

We recently invited a few of our authors and contributors to reflect upon how Dissertation Reviews has helped them in their work, and the early career academic community more broadly. Here’s what they had to say! If you’d like to contribute a testimonial of your own, please email it to dissertationreviews@gmail.com Dissertation Reviews has offered so much to junior scholars. By publicizing our intellectual contributions to the scholarly community in such a timely fashion, it has helped build connections between the established researchers and new faces. Since the review of my work appeared in Dissertation Reviews, I have received...

A review of Plantation Technocrats: A Social History of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830-1865, by Daniel Rood It would be impossible to deny the role of slavery in the development of modern industrial capitalism. Slave colonies provided Europe with sugar and tobacco, with a source of labor, with a place to send its surplus population, and with an investment upon which to build merchant fortunes. But as Dan Rood points out in his ambitious Plantation Technocrats, in all accounts of slavery as an economic system it “prefigures, foreshadows, and props up, but is always prior-to or other-than ‘true’ capitalism” (p. 14),...

A review of Learning to be Modern: American Missionary Colleges in Beirut and Kyoto 1860-1920, by Aleksandra Kobiljski. In a beautifully written dissertation, Aleksandra Kobiljski tells a new and compelling story: the transformation of “the evangelical project of converting the heathens and preparing for the second coming of Christ into a largely educational and medical enterprise” (p. 5). The dissertation is based on an in-depth analysis of sources that originated primarily in three locations: the ABCFM (American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) based in Boston, missionaries turned educators who established the Syrian...