Dr. Strangelove: How I stopped worrying about my research data and learned to love open-source content management software I spent years conducting fieldwork for my dissertation in the former Yugoslavia, mapping grassroots activism to account for war crimes and human rights violations across the region. Seamlessly, my post-doctoral research took shape based on my previous involvement in the Balkans. Rather than continuing my ethnographic study using participant observation to examine established human rights organizations in different countries, such as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, I decided to focus on a rising actor in the...

A review of Memory on the Boundaries of Empire: Narrating Place in the Early Modern Local Historiography of Yazd, by Derek J. Mancini-Lander. While earlier historical work on Iran in the Safavid period has focused on either the imperial court or the empire as a whole, Derek Mancini-Lander has taken up the question of how history could be seen and written from the vantage point of a secondary city within the Safavid domains, the southwest Iranian city of Yazd. The dissertation focuses on a local history of Yazd, the Jāmi‘-i Mufīdī, meaning “Mufīd’s Compendium,” or “Useful Compendium” (playing on the meaning...

What’s relevant in relevance? Some thoughts on the concept of relevance for museums and heritage sites I’m sure I’m not alone in noticing that discussions around the future of cultural organisations more often than not raise the issue of “relevance.” Popular use of the term appears to suggest a concern with sustaining and increasing audiences especially from hard to reach and non-visiting members of the public. But how much do we really understand “relevance” as a concept? And are we at risk of casually using the term in our discussions about the twentieth century museum or heritage site, without really understanding its...

A review of Genealogies of Korean Adoption: American Empire, Militarization, and Yellow Desire, by SooJin Pate. SooJin Pate’s dissertation is groundbreaking not only for the study of Korean orphans and adoptees but also in Asian American as well as American studies. She builds the genealogies of Korean orphans and adoptees and examines the sociopolitical conditions in which Korean orphans become adoptees. She challenges presumptions that Korean adoption has only been humanitarian and, rather, she argues that militarized humanitarianism has been profoundly involved in the form of child welfare politics in Korea. While the majority of...

A review of Sexuality, Islam and Politics in Malaysia: A Study of the Shifting Strategies of Regulation, by tan beng hui. In the past decade or so, there has been persistent and prominent hostility towards sexual diversity in Malaysia – for example, in the mass media. This public hostility has increasingly gained an “Islamic” flavour, making it easy to attribute rising homophobia to so-called religious fundamentalism. In this dissertation, tan beng hui asks how the contemporary discourse on sexuality in Malaysia has become defined in the way that it is. By doing this, she does not take “Islam” for granted as a driver of this...

A review of Voices of the New Woman in Colonial Korea: Generic and Linguistic Interplay in the Construction of Self-Narratives, by Min Koo Choi. Studies of the phenomenon of Korean New Women have gained great attention from scholars in South Korea and North America, especially in the last decade. The scholarship focuses on political, social, and cultural meanings of New Women in 1920s and 1930s colonial Korea, a time during which female social elites’ public demand for gender equality and sexual freedom set a new stage for feminist movements in modern Korean history. What sets Min Koo Choi’s dissertation apart from the previous...

A review of Theatrical Properties: Inheritance and Modern American Drama, by Sarah C. Withers. Sarah C. Withers undertakes a topic equally important to the fields of literature and theatre that has been studied to a healthy extent in the former, but not the latter: the legality and social anxieties surrounding inheritance in twentieth century American performance. In her dissertation, Withers traces themes of inheritance in theatre through the Progressive Era (1890s to the late 1920s), the Harlem Renaissance (roughly 1918 to 1937), the New Deal era (1933-1938), and throughout the mid-twentieth century. Posited on the notion that...

A review of The Base of Contention: Kyrgyzstan, Russia and the U.S. in Central Asia (2001-2010), by Alisher Khamidov. Alisher Khamidov’s The Base of Contention is a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the relations between Russia and Kyrgyzstan from 2001 to 2010. Specifically, it provides an explanation for the fluctuations in the relationship between these two countries and frames the research in larger regional and international contexts. These include relations in Central Asia between former Soviet Republics, China and the US as well as the interplay between Moscow and Washington. However, the research not only studies the nature of...

A review of Ethnicity and Sinicization: The Theory of Assimilative Power in the Making of the Chinese Nation-State (1900s–1920s), by Julia Schneider.  This dissertation discusses one of the most intriguing issues in twentieth-century China, namely the relation between ethnicity, nation and state. It has long been argued that China changed from an empire to a nation-state and in this process adapted to the new norm of nationhood that had been imported from Europe (and partly from Japan). Julia Schneider shows, however, that this transformation was a more complex one than usually assumed. While the issue of ethnicity has been an intensely...

You Want That With Pictures? How to Publish Images in a Scholarly Book And as if it were the fate of learning in these tymes, to be reduced to meere gazing; bookes that have pictures, are now in great request. – Meric Casaubon, Generall Learning Illustrated books are expensive. I knew this fact well because I was working on a monograph that examined the financial conditions of doing and printing science in early modern Europe. Yet somehow I never thought of applying this claim to my own situation when I brought my manuscript to a publisher. Surely, I believed, twenty-first century academic publishing is different from the print culture...

A review of The Causes of Cholera: Public Health in Post-Transition Vietnam, by Martha Lincoln. In 2007, a series of anomalous cholera outbreaks occurred in Hanoi, Vietnam. The appearance of this “nineteenth century” disease confounded public health experts and citizens alike: cholera is not endemic to this region of the country, and its appearance contravened a national public health system that, despite critical resource constraints, has prided itself on controlling such infectious diseases. In this dissertation, Martha Lincoln offers a meticulously researched and thoughtful account of this contemporary cholera episode. Through a deft...

A review of Ruling Religion: Buddhism, Politics and Law in Contemporary Sri Lanka, by Benjamin Schonthal. A legacy of colonial rule, a civil war persisting for over two decades, and the emergence of monastic parliamentarians are just some of the problems that have complicated the relationship between religion and politics in Sri Lanka throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries. While many studies have interrogated the construction of ethnicity, the ascendancy of fundamentalism, and the growth of nationalism, no previous study has attempted to take the approach employed by Benjamin Schonthal in his groundbreaking dissertation....

A review of the National Institute for Defense Studies, Ministry of Defense (Tokyo, Japan). The National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS) in Tokyo houses a sizeable repository of archival materials essential to scholars who do not necessarily focus on the military history of Japan. Those interested in the expansion of the Japanese empire from the late nineteenth century to the early 1940s may also find this collection of immeasurable value. I visited the military archives throughout the fall of 2012 in search of documents on the Japanese occupation of Inner Mongolia, and came across a range of files in varying degrees of significance,...

A review of Descent of Deities: The Water-Land Retreat and the Transformation of the Visual Culture of Song-Dynasty (960-1279) Buddhism, by Phillip E. Bloom. In his excellent dissertation, Phillip E. Bloom offers a convincing interpretation of the Water-Land Retreat—“a massive, icon-filled ritual of decidedly cosmic pretensions” (p. iii)—through an analysis of previously neglected visual and textual materials. Building on Daniel Stevenson’s now classic study on the Water-land Retreat, Bloom diverges from the conventional view of art and ritual, wherein artworks merely serve as backdrops for ritual performance. Instead, Bloom...

A review of Worldly Desires: Cosmopolitanism and Cinema in Hong Kong and Taiwan, by Brian Hu. Much of the growth in the field of Chinese cinema studies over the last two decades has been fuelled by a questioning of the category of Chinese cinema itself. With the national cinema paradigm considered outdated and inadequate, scholars have explored new ways to understand the film industries of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as the many transnational connections forged by Chinese filmmakers in an increasingly globalized world. Despite the wealth of research already produced on this topic, Brian Hu’s dissertation manages to break new...

A review of Patronage, Politics, and the Emergence of Rock-Cut Tombs in Early Han China, by Allison Ruth Miller. Although few have been excavated in extenso, burials of members of the imperial Liu 劉 family are mainstays of Western Han (206 BCE-9 CE) archaeological scholarship. Among a variety of different structures, multi-roomed tombs cut into the bedrock of small mountains assume a particularly significant role. In contrast to earlier sites that employed wooden chambers at the bottom of rather deep vertical shaft-pits, these monuments clearly emphasize the horizontal dimension. In the past, this change in orientation has been taken to...

A review of Surviving Slavery: Politics, Power, and Authority in the British Caribbean, 1807-1834, by Randy Browne. Randy Browne’s dissertation complicates an overly simplistic and dichotomous understanding of the master-slave relationship and avoids the resistance paradigm in slave studies by not asking as a central point of investigation how slaves resisted their masters or the institution. Instead, he looks at how slaves struggled with both their master and each other in plantation communities in nineteenth-century Berbice in what is now British Guyana. He avoids the terminology of “agency” and chooses to stress “struggle,”...

A review of Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics: Local Museums and Social Change in Siberia, 1887-1941, by Julia Fein. Julia Fein’s dissertation, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics: Local Museums and Social Change in Siberia, 1887-1941,” examines the history of local museums in Siberia as a way of understanding the changing relations between state and society, imperial center and periphery, and people and things in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. She argues that Siberian museums played a crucial role in two parallel modernization projects undertaken in Russia at the time: “cataloging and claiming” the empire’s...

A review of Illicit Nation: State, Empire, and Illegality on the Isthmus of Panama, by Matthew Scalena.   “When you hit a rock with an egg, the egg breaks. Or when you hit an egg with a rock, the egg breaks. The United States is the rock. Panama is the egg. In either case, the egg breaks.” —Unidentified Panamanian diplomat, New York Times, 1927 (p. 174).   One of the least studied Latin American countries among U.S. scholars, Panama has been a protagonist of the United States’ hemispheric history of empire, as Matthew Scalena’s Illicit Nation shows. This apparent contradiction will not surprise readers of Greg Grandin’s...

A review of Spaces of Solidarity: Karen Identity in the Thai-Burma Borderlands, by Rachel Sharples. In 1949, civil war broke out in the newly-independent country then known as Burma, and now known as Myanmar. The war, which continues to this day, pits the central government (made up mostly of Burmans) against dozens of ethnic minority insurgent groups. One of the largest and most militarily successful of these ethnic insurgent groups is the Karen National Liberation Army, which contests the state army in southeastern Burma/Myanmar in areas of Karen State abutting the border with Thailand. The conflict has created tremendous hardship for...

A review of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute and Deccan College Scriptorium. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (Deccan Gymkhana, Pune, India) The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) is an excellent resource for scholars of South Asia. In addition to its extensive holdings of rare books and manuscripts, it also boasts a peaceful and well-organized reading room and, perhaps most importantly, a small group of knowledgeable and friendly staff who take the time to advise those seeking information. The institute is located in the Deccan Gymkhana neighborhood of Pune and is very easy to find. All rickshaw drivers in the city...

A review of The Transnational Asian Studio System: Cinema, Nation-State, and Globalization in Cold War Asia, by Sangjoon Lee. “Globalization” has become a buzzword in contemporary film studies, but national film history remains the standard approach for examining language, culture, and national identity in film culture. Sangjoon Lee’s dissertation convincingly argues for a proper “transnational film history [which] examines cinemas within, beyond, and between the nation-states” (pp. 76-77). In his sweeping history of postwar regional cooperation among East Asian studios, Lee provides abundant justification for analyzing these...

A review of The Feminist Transformation of Bioethics: An Analysis of Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Applications in Feminist Bioethics, by Eeva Nyrövaara. In The Feminist Transformation of Bioethics, Eeva Nyrövaara assesses the extent to which feminist bioethics as a subfield has successfully transformed the foundations and practice of bioethics, and the central role that such transformation plays within feminist bioethics. Nyrövaara performs this task by first examining the theoretical foundations of feminist bioethics. The project then looks at how these thematic elements are carried over in the feminist treatment of autonomy, a...

A review of Acting Real: Mimesis and Media in Performance, by Lindsay Brandon Hunter. In a culture where humans are surrounded with different forms of media, how does one distinguish the real from its replicated, rehearsed, or represented form? In her dissertation Acting Real: Mimesis and Media in Performance, Lindsay Brandon Hunter provides the tools to understand authenticity and realness in mediatized contexts. Her dissertation is divided into three chapters, each focusing on one site of investigation: intermedial theater, reality television, and alternative reality games. Her analyses of these performances call for a reconsideration...

A review of The Embodied Imagination: British Romantic Cognitive Science, by Lisa Ann Robertson. Lisa Ann Robertson’s dissertation is an ambitious tour de force about Romantic theories of mind of scientists and poets alike. On the one hand, Robertson corrects the commonly received notion of British empiricist theories of mind as purely passive; on the other hand, she shows how this knowledge allows for a new and more nuanced reading of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772-1834) theories of mind, by considering their work as “part of the discourse on cognitive science” (p. 119). Robertson situates...

A review of Materials of Buddhist Culture: Aesthetics and Cosmopolitanism at Mindroling Monastery, by Dominique Townsend. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there remains a persistent willingness of a few to believe that Himalayan Buddhist monasteries are, and have been, cloistered societies focused primarily on meditative practice. Dominique Townsend’s dissertation offers compelling evidence as to how one Tibetan monastery defied this perception. Through her meticulous use of textual sources and compelling cross-cultural analysis, Townsend demonstrates how Mindroling (Smin grol gling) monastery served as a key cultural force,...

A review of Sharebon and the Courtesans: A Phase of Edo Aesthetics as the Dispersal of Ideology, by Nahoko Fukushima. The aesthetics Fukushima finds in the sharebon center on “refinement as vulgarity, and vulgarity as refinement” (p. 383). The sharebon is a genre of Japanese light fiction concerned with the pleasure quarters or demimonde, and the best-known examples of sharebon date from the late eighteenth century (p. 15). Fukushima’s emphasis is on the outer “wrapping” of sharebon. She draws attention to the way that the title, preface, physical format, and identification of the author suggest a refinement at odds with the earthy...

A review of Quest for the True Visage: Sacred Images in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Art and Concept of Zhen, by Sun-ah Choi. As in other major religions, icons in medieval Chinese Buddhism, more than merely representations of divinities, were regarded as sacred images that could manifest a higher reality. The paramount importance of icons in Buddhism is perhaps best expressed in one of the religion’s epithets, xiangjiao, or teachings of the icons. The topic of sacred images is certainly too critical to be studied only by art historians, and scholars in different fields over the past decades have also begun to engage Buddhist icons,...

A review of The Last Return Indenture/ship from Guyana to India: Diaspora, Decolonization and Douglarized Spaces, by Nalini Devi Mohabir. For the most part, scholars working in the field of Diaspora Studies have focused their attention on the diaspora in situ, that is, the socio-economic and political reality of diasporic communities in their host countries. Relatively little research has been conducted on those communities which have returned to the site of their (ancestral) origin. Nalini Mohabir’s dissertation is a welcome contribution in this respect as it presents a study of the Indian diaspora in Guyana. It examines the idea of...

A review of the General Archive of the Indies (Archivo General de Indias) (Seville, Spain).  My dissertation, entitled Indian Harvest: The Rise of the Indigenous Slave Trade and Diaspora from Española to the Circum-Caribbean, 1492-1560, examines the growth and height of the Circum-Caribbean indigenous slave trade. My project seeks to capture the scope of this slave trade and resultant Indian diaspora for the first time. In tracing the diaspora I also try to reveal the hidden consequences of the slave trade, including the indigenous experience of movement and displacement across the Caribbean. While I look at archaeological and...

A review of Friendship of the Peoples: Soviet-Czechoslovak Cultural and Social Contacts from the Battle for Prague to the Prague Spring, 1945-1969, by Rachel Leah Applebaum. Rachel Applebaum’s dissertation is a history of a momentous and now nearly forgotten cultural experiment: the communist Cold War-era attempt to construct a common socialist culture for the countries of the Soviet Bloc. Her case study is Soviet-Czechoslovak cultural relations between the Soviet liberation of Prague in 1945 and the aftermath of the Soviet occupation of the same city in 1968. For very good reasons, both the historiography and the popular memory of the...

A review of Exploring the Hypervisibility Paradox: Older Lesbians in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema (1995-2009), by Eva Krainitzki. Eva Krainitzki’s thesis explores the intersection of age, gender and sexuality in representations of older (used here to describe women considered to be sixty years or above, i.e. female retirement age in the UK) lesbians and queer women in contemporary narrative film from both Britain and the United States of America, in order to offer a new interjection into debates surrounding the onscreen representation of aging and queer sexuality in lesbian (film) studies. Working from Kathleen Woodward’s suggestion...

A review of Eknāth Remembered and Reformed: Bhakti, Brahmans, and Untouchables in Marathi Historiography, by Jon Milton Keune. The dissertation by Jon Milton Keune is a meticulous study of the various representations of the Marathi sant Eknāth, from the earliest hagiographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the stage and screen adaptations of the second half of the twentieth century. Using this rich array of retellings, Keune (pronounced koi-nee) examines how the contentious themes of inter-caste relations and socially-exclusive ritual purity were negotiated at different historical and cultural contexts in literature,...

A review of Outlasting Colonialism: Socio-political Change in the Javanese Principalities under the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia during World War II, by Frank Dhont. In Outlasting Colonialism, Frank Dhont examines the socio-political transformation the four principalities in Central Java underwent during the Japanese occupation, between 1942 and 1945. From mere symbols of Javanese hegemony under the Dutch, the Yogyakarta Sultanate and the house of Paku Alam  gained significant influence in post-independence Indonesia, while the Kasunanan and the house of Mangku Negara receded into the background. By addressing the extent of authority...

The Fun of Mapping Lies “You do realize what you are researching are works of fiction, don’t you?” she asked with a British accent, while her smile expressed a confusing mixture of sincere friendliness and wry skepticism. “Oh dear, are you telling me that all of these stories are based on lies?” I countered, in an attempt to both copy her British wit and hide my annoyance. Holding a glass of lukewarm orange juice in one hand and a soggy club sandwich in the other, I shifted my weight uncomfortably. We were standing in the staff room of a university. It was a spacious but soulless room: grey office furniture, two leather sofas, a...

A review of Vaccines against vice: A constructive technology assessment of immunotherapies for addiction, by Abbi Hobbs. In her intelligent and thoughtful dissertation, Abbi Hobbs uses Constructive Technology Assessment (CTA) to examine the potential impact of immunotherapies against addiction and drug use. CTA emphasises a participatory approach to technology assessment and development in which technology, society, and environment co-evolve. Central to this approach is an engagement with those most affected by the technology. In the first chapter, Hobbs, influenced heavily by the “biopolitics” of Nikolas Rose, reviews the historical...

A review of Settling the Past: Soviet Oriental Projects in Leningrad and Alma-Ata, by Alfrid Bustanov. Researchers in the Caucasian and Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union are faced with a paradox: the various centers of “oriental” studies are dedicated to the study domestic history, alongside that of foreign countries considered to be sufficiently “Eastern.”  In Russian the term for Orientalism (vostokovedenie) literally refers to the act of examining the “East,” but in practice the concept is entirely metaphorical in the Central Asian context, since local orientalists look not only east,...

A review of Older Adults’ Experiences of Aging, Sex, and HIV Infection in Rural Malawi, by Emily Freeman. Emily Freeman’s dissertation provides an innovative and sensitive exploration of a relatively understudied aspect of aging. Engaging literature from anthropology, demography, gerontology, and public health, Freeman attends to the lived experiences of older adults and explores how HIV both shapes and provides a lens onto broadly shared experiences of aging in Malawi. Specifically, the dissertation asks: “How do older adults living in rural Malawi experience getting older?” and “How do older adults with HIV living in rural Malawi...

A review of The Poetry of Dialogue: Kanshi, Haiku and Media in Meiji Japan, 1870-1900, by Robert Tuck. Robert Tuck’s dissertation provides us with a richly detailed examination of poetry in Meiji print media. Taking up a broad range of materials including anthologies, newspapers, and literary journals, Tuck devotes equal attention to Chinese and Japanese verse from late nineteenth-century Japan. The canonical poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who was accomplished in both kanshi and haiku, functions as an organic link in Tuck’s consideration of these two realms of poetic expression, but the dissertation also provides the first extensive...

A review of “Shopping for Freedom“ in der Islamischen Republik. Widerstand und Konformismus im Konsumverhalten der iranischen Mittelschicht, by Ariane Sadjed. The title does not bear a question mark, but this dissertation (written in German) does question whether the expansion and liberalization of markets is normally accompanied by processes of democratization. As “freedom” is a central theme with regard to Iran – not only in political discourse, but also in scholarly studies – Ariane Sadjed decided to look behind the images shaped by the western media of Iranian consumers – specifically women – whose Western-style taste is...