With the winter holidays upon us, Dissertation Reviews will be taking a few-week hiatus and will return in January 2013. With best wishes from the Dissertation Reviews Editorial Board.   Image: Lighted portal of the Christmas Market of Strasbourg (Place de Broglie). Photograph by Tangopaso. Wikimedia Commons. Share this:FacebookTwitterEmailPrintStumbleUponDiggRedditSend to KindleLinkedInGooglePocketPinterestTumblr

A Review of Infrapolitics: The Social Life of Water in Mumbai, by Nikhil Anand. Nikhil Anand’s dissertation is a nuanced, theoretically ambitious, and timely contribution to political ecology, to the anthropology of the state, and to the emergent field of the anthropology of infrastructure. Anand’s methodological approach, where the city, the “urban,” is the site through which to study the state is provocative for scholars of urban studies. The work is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with poor settlers in the city of Mumbai, engineers in Mumbai’s water department, and with various other urban “experts” such as...

Considering the Benefits of Fieldwork Websites Before beginning fieldwork for my PhD dissertation, I followed a number of blogs that related to my subject of interest within the discipline of religious studies, Buddhism. These were mostly written by non-academics who wanted an audience for their thoughts and practices involving Buddhism. I decided to join this community, adding more academic analysis and information by presenting my observations from fieldwork in Thailand’s meditation temples. So in August 2009 I launched my own blog, “Wandering Dhamma,” via WordPress. This title reflects the nature of my fieldwork within Buddhism in...

5 Archives in which to explore the Modern Metaphysical Increasingly, scholars have been exploring the modern metaphysical — what has been considered on the fringes of human interests but (as these scholars have shown) actually constitute a significant part of people’s lives, past and present. The study has been propelled by documentation left behind by the historical actors who have studied and pursued the metaphysical — heterodox religions such as occultism, Spiritualism, and Theosophy, and controversial sciences such as psychical research and parapsychology. Here, I will review five archives that provide excellent entries into the...

A review of When Worlds Collide: Art, Cartography, and Japanese Nanban World Map Screens, by Joseph F. Loh. This dissertation by Joseph F. Loh investigates nanban world map screens (nanban sekai chizu byōbu), folding screens that feature painted images of Western European maps of the world, produced during the 1540s–1640s when Japan encountered the West for the first time. As the dissertation title When Worlds Collide: Art, Cartography, and Japanese Nanban World Map Screens rightly suggests, the screens as eclectic works by Japanese artists can be interpreted as arenas where a wide range of cartographic forms and artistic expressions, as...

A review of Revolutionary Prints as Spectacle, by Claire Trévien. Claire Trévien’s dissertation deals with prints produced during the French Revolution, and offers an analysis of the links and interactions between prints and popular theater during that time. The main argument of the dissertation is that printmakers drew inspiration from spectacle in general and theater in particular. The author’s methodology consists of an analysis of both the drawing and the accompanying text, often lyrics of songs, and is grounded on the idea that prints should not be treated as mere illustrations of events but “as a mixture of art and witness”...

A review of My Land, My People: Discourses and Practices in the Tumen River Demarcation, 1860s to 1910s, by Nianshen Song. Nianshen Song’s dissertation critically examines territorial disputes over the demarcations of the Sino–Korean boundary river, the Tumen River, from the 1860s to the 1910s. Based on rich Chinese, Korean, and Japanese archives, Song examines the processes by which an immigrant society gradually forming on the borderland imposed “multilateral and multilayered” (p. 10) challenges to adjacent states from the bottom up, and how these states that were spatially, geographically, and politically involved in the border...

A review of Tōhoku as Postwar Thought: Regionalism, Nationalism, and Culturalism in Japan’s Northeast, by Nathan Hopson. Since the disaster on March 11, 2011, the Tōhoku (northeast) region of Japan has received worldwide attention as one of the places most affected by an earthquake, tsunami, or nuclear incident. Yet this catastrophe has also invigorated intellectual concerns about Tōhoku as an “area” with a specific history in Japan. For example, it is symbolic that the Reconstruction Design Council for the Great East Japan Earthquake, an advisory panel set up by the Japanese government in the immediate aftermath of the event,...

A review of Marked Men: Sport and Masculinity in Victorian Popular Culture, 1866-1904, by Shannon Rose Smith. Shannon Smith’s dissertation breaks new ground at the intersection of gender, literature, Victoriana, art history, and sports history. Marked Men: Sport and Masculinity in Victorian Popular Culture is an analysis of British popular literature’s paradoxical embrace with and critique of the increasingly organized world of sport during the latter half of the nineteenth century. These representations of sportsmen (the emphasis is important) are set within the changing urban and industrial landscape of Victorian London, and allow...

A review of Empire’s Children: Soviet Childhood in the Age of Revolution, by Loraine de la Fe. Loraine de la Fe’s dissertation is an impressive examination of the ways in which Soviet officials used children and childhood to construct Soviet empire in the two decades following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The transformation of childhood was part of the Soviet project to engineer the New Soviet Man, the goal being a thoroughly modern creation, conversant in the norms of the new socialist society and contributing to the building of socialism. Comparing Moscow and the Autonomous Republic of Kalmykia, de la Fe uses children’s...

A review of The Dismembered Family: Youth, Memory, and Modernity in Rural Southern Chile, by Rita Isabel Henderson. 11 September 2013 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Chilean military coup that overthrew the presidency of Salvador Allende and ushered in seventeen years of military rule under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet. The end of the dictatorship in 1990 was reached through a political compromise that left many Pinochet-era laws and institutions intact. Over the last thirteen years, vociferous protests of students, indigenous groups, and farmers, among others, have continually decried these legacies. Little consensus exists...

Making Headlines: When Your Research Becomes the News One morning this summer I awoke to find my friend’s picture splashed across the front page of several international newspapers. His research, part of a broader collaborative archaeological project, had made headlines and would be the subject of numerous news articles over the next several weeks. Some of the news stories accurately represented the groundbreaking findings of the project’s research. Others, however, were overly sensational, and focused on my friend and his colleagues as Indiana Jones-type archaeologists slashing through the jungle looking for lost cities. At that time, I...

A review of In the Courts of the Nations: Jews, Muslims and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century Morocco, by Jessica M. Marglin. Jews in nineteenth century pre-colonial Morocco were not members of isolated, purely autonomous societies running parallel to a prevailing, homogenized Muslim order. Indeed, Jews and Muslims – in all of their diversity – overlapped considerably in their day-to-day interactions, mutually shaping the social, cultural and political life of one another. As Jessica Marglin rightly points out in her clear and erudite study of legal pluralism in nineteenth century Morocco, Jews engaged in legal forum shopping – a...

With Thanksgiving on Thursday November 28, we will take a one-week break and return on Monday December 2. Safe travels! With best wishes from the Dissertation Reviews Editorial Board.   Image: President Ronald Reagan pardons a turkey in the annual White House ceremony, 1983. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Wikimedia Commons. Share this:FacebookTwitterEmailPrintStumbleUponDiggRedditSend to KindleLinkedInGooglePocketPinterestTumblr

A review of ‘Flying’ Female Sex Workers in Kolkata, India: Using ‘Cultural Biography’ to Understand HIV Risk Perception, by Sunny Sinha. Sunny Sinha’s dissertation, a study on flying female sex workers in India, focuses on the women’s risk perception in the social, cultural, and health context. Similar research on commercial sex workers tends to put emphasis on a public health perspective with an exploration of the impact and incidence of HIV and sexually transmitted infections. Sinha’s study, on the other hand, is more searching and complex. It roots itself in the delineation of the life experiences of the subjects and becomes...

A review of Pol Pot’s Total Revolution: An Inquiry of Democratic Kampuchea as a Political Religion, by Steven Michael DeBurger. Pol Pot’s Total Revolution offers a fresh reading of Cambodia’s Democratic Kampuchea period. This dissertation consists of 12 chapters and an appendix. Chapter 1 opens with a gloss on the pre-revolutionary violence that served as the condition of possibility for the emergence of Democratic Kampuchea, and second, the subsequent genocidal violence of Pol Pot’s revolutionary regime. The author follows this opening discussion by helpfully warning the reader that his dissertation will not focus on the questions...

A review of A Queer Political Economy of “Community”: Gender, Space, and the Transnational Politics of Community for Vietnamese Lesbians (les) in Saigon, by Natalie Newton. Natalie Newton has written what is destined to be a classic book that expands multiple fields, including — but not limited to — studies on Southeast Asia, gender, sexualities, globalization, and transnationalism. She is the only scholar I can name who provides a much-needed study on Vietnamese female homosexual communities. This is not just a dissertation about Vietnam or the micro-practices of everyday life that many Vietnamese lesbian (les) experience....

A review of The Sociocultural Aspects of Assisted Reproduction in Mexico by Sandra P. González-Santos. Reproduction is just as political a matter as Marx made production. This much we learned from the feminist anthropology of the 1970s and 1980s, which used reproduction as an avenue into thinking about the problems of biological function and cultural practice (see particularly Olivia Harris and Kate Young, “Engendered Structures: Some Problems in the Analysis of Reproduction” in Joel Kahn and Joseph Llobera, eds., Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist Societies. London: Macmillan, 1981; Marilyn Strathern, “No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen...

A review of Dinosaurs: Assembling an Icon of Science, by Lukas Benjamin Rieppel. Lukas Rieppel leads us on a gallivanting romp through turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, in a journey that includes the miners of the Old West and the industrialists of the East Coast. His dissertation draws on a seemingly narrow case study — the uses and roles of dinosaur fossils — to reveal wide-ranging and previously under-recognized connections among science, society, and business in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. The primary connection is, he argues, capitalism. As the railroad tycoons and bank barons fought their way to economic power,...

A Review of the Guomindang Party Archives (中國國民黨黨史館) (Taipei, Taiwan). The Guomindang Party Archives originally operated within the former Guomindang Central Party Headquarters on Chung-shan South Road, opposite the Presidential Office in Taipei. The Chung-shan South Road site was sold to the Chang Yung-fa Foundation in 2006 and the Party moved its headquarters to the present location at Ba-de Road Section 2 (八德路二段). It was not until late 2012 that the archives began relocating to the Ba-de Road site. Because of the laborious and time-consuming process of moving, reorganizing, and re-shelving the entire collections,...

A Review of 19th Century Periodicals of Portuguese India: An Assessment of Documentary Evidence and Indo-Portuguese Identity, by Liladhar Ramchandra Pendse. Liladhar Ramchandra Pendse’s dissertation deals with periodicals published in Portuguese in India during the 19th century, today held in various libraries in Portugal, India, and the United States. Rather than producing a chronological narrative of the periodicals, the dissertation examines these periodicals “as a group” and weaves an account around the periodicals’ social history and their life in present-day library collections (p. 2). Pendse’s extensive professional...

A Review of Tainan Chang Jung Senior High School, Museum of Church History (臺南長榮高級中學教會史料館), Tainan, Taiwan. Those working in the field of Christian missionary movements in Taiwan will perhaps have heard of the Museum of Church History housed in the Tainan Chang Jung Senior High School. The school was originally founded as Tainan Presbyterian Middle School in 1885 by missionaries of the English Presbyterian Mission (EPM). In 1950, the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan, which was established with the help of the EPM, started collecting and preserving their historical materials such as lists of baptized congregations,...

A review of Health and the Politics of “Improvement” in British Colonial Jamaica, 1914-1945, by Darcy Hughes Heuring. The health of the Jamaican population was central to imperial, colonial, and nationalist debates in interwar Jamaica and Britain. In fact, the struggle over health in Jamaica played an important role in the process of British imperial decline, and it was a key part of the growing nationalist movement in Jamaica. As Darcy Hughes Heuring skillfully argues in her dissertation, we must examine the relationship between health, politics, economics, and society in a specific colonial context to understand the lived experiences...

A review of Russian-Argentine Literary Exchanges, by Dina Odnopozova. Dina Odnopozova’s dissertation skillfully traces the history of the literary dialogue between Russia and Argentina in the twentieth century. Using the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), and Viktor Pelevin (1962- ), the author argues that the literary interactions between these two countries, located at the peripheries of the Western “cultural meridian,” used alternative channels of cultural distribution and consecration, and were often influenced by social and political conditions in their respective...

A review of The Formation of the Ottoman Learned Class and Legal Scholarship (1300-1600), by Abdurrahman Atçıl. In this dissertation Abdurrahman Atçıl tackles two issues, each formidable in its own right: the development of the Ottoman learned class from its earliest stages, and the development of theoretical and practical jurisprudence in the Islamic world in the context of the post-Mongol conception of science. This is exactly the type of approach that is required to advance the field, namely, the examination of social and political history in relation to intellectual history.  The fact that Atçıl addresses the thorny question of...

A review of Kuayue Zhong, Xin de fojiao dashi: Zhuandao fashi yanjiu 跨越中、新的佛教大师: 转道法师研究 (A Master across China and Singapore: Research on Venerable Zhuandao), by Zhang Wenxue 张文学. Despite a voluminous amount of work that has been done on Chinese Buddhism, little attention has been given to the study of Chinese Buddhism in twentieth-century China and in the Republican period (1912-1949) in particular. It was only in the last decade that scholars began to pay increasing attention and to produce English-language scholarship on this topic. Several recent dissertations contribute to the burgeoning literature...

A review of Camels, Ships, Trains: Translation Across the ‘Indian Archipelago’ 1860-1930, by Samia Khatun. Samia Khatun’s remarkable PhD dissertation, Camels, Ships, Trains: Translation Across the ‘Indian Archipelago’ 1860-1930 examines cross-cultural interactions arising from the little-known but historically significant South Asian presence in Australia in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the title indicates, a key theme of the work is translation. Khatun draws on diverse source materials originally produced in a variety of South Asian and Indigenous Australian languages, in addition to English, and is...

A review of Reflecting Hollywood: Mobility and Lightness in the Early Silent Films of Ozu Yasujiro, 1927-1933, by Yuki Takinami. Contrary to the conventional view of Ozu Yasujirō as a filmmaker whose oeuvre reflects a remarkable level of stylistic “restriction and consistency,” his career actually followed a “tortuous” path marked by varying influences, challenges and constraints depending on the period (p. 202).  So concludes Yuki Takinami, whose dissertation treads the well-traveled yet ever-fertile territory of Ozu studies to develop a thoughtful, at times provocative revision of some common conceptions. ...

A review of Experimenting with Chemical Bodies: Science, Medicine, and Philosophy in the Long History of Reinier de Graaf’s Experiments on Digestion, from Harvey and Descartes to Claude Bernard, by Evan R. Ragland. As the title of this thesis suggests, Evan Ragland aims to trace the history of experiments on digestion over almost three centuries. In doing so, he draws on recent work on early modern experiments by William R. Newman, Robert Frank and Anita Guerrini, and he adds to other existing histories of experimental practices and ideas. Moreover, Ragland bases his research on the work of a number of Dutch historians of medicine, such as...

We are very excited to welcome a new editor to “Korean Studies Dissertation Reviews,” Bonnie Tilland (University of Washington). Our new editor will continue to bring you reviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in this dynamic field. If you are interested in having your dissertation reviewed, please fill out the Review Application Form. If you are interested in helping out in some other way, please contact info@dissertationreviews.org. Bonnie Tilland can be reached at bonnie.tilland@dissertationreviews.org.   Introducing Our Field Editor Bonnie Tilland is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at...

A Review of Images of an Empire: Chinese Geography Textbooks of the Early 20th Century, by Mats Norvenius. School textbooks are interesting and tricky primary sources for historians to use. They often offer rather simplified worldviews due to their didactic function (especially those for school children). Yet they also provide us with “frozen pictures” (p. 14) of what the educated elites wanted the young generation to know of the world at a certain point in history. Mats Norvenius’s dissertation examines Chinese geography textbooks used within the framework of China’s first modern national educational system during the closing years...

A review of The Afterlife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: Taikōki and the Reinterpretation of Japan’s Past, by Susan Westhafer Furukawa. Susan Furukawa mines a rich literary vein in her exploration of the diverse twentieth-century reincarnations of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98), the warlord who reunited Japan after over a century of civil war at the end of the middle ages but failed to establish a ruling dynasty that could outlive him. Even for a time of upheaval, Hideyoshi’s career arc was unheard of: having risen from complete obscurity (he is generally believed to have been born a peasant), at the time of his death he ruled Japan more firmly...

We are delighted to announce the launch of “Medieval Studies Dissertation Reviews,” a new series spotlighting recently defended, unpublished dissertations on a variety of subjects in this vibrant field. The Medieval Studies series will feature reviews and guides for archives, libraries and collections around the world. If you wish to take part in Dissertation Reviews, please click here to become a reviewer or to have your dissertation reviewed. You may also propose a “Fresh from the Archives” or “Talking Shop” article by contacting katherine.weikert@dissertationreviews.org.   Introducing our new...

A review of A Remedy For Solitude: Russian Poet-Translators in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, by Maria Yevgenievna Khotimsky. Maria Khotimsky’s dissertation makes an invaluable contribution to our growing understanding of the vital role of translation in the development of the Russian poetic tradition. In framing her analysis, Khotimsky engages with important contemporary works in the theory of translation as well as with the theories advanced by Russian translators and scholars of the Soviet period; she also builds on the relatively limited amount of historical scholarship dealing with translation in Russia and the Soviet Union,...

A review of In the Footsteps of Sandino: Geographies of Revolution and Political Violence in Northern Nicaragua, 1956-1979, by Robert James Sierakowski. “In the Footsteps of Sandino” offers a compelling narrative and analysis of the socioeconomic and political-cultural geographies of revolution, state patronage and counterinsurgency, and political violence in the Segovias region of northern Nicaragua, focusing on the period from the assassination of the “first” Somoza (Anastasio Somoza García) in 1956 to the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in July 1979. Drawing from a wide array of valuable but hitherto neglected bodies of...

A review of Performing Nation, Performing Trauma: Theatre and Performance after September 11th, Hurricane Katrina and the Peruvian Dirty War, by Katherine Nigh. Katherine Nigh prefaces her dissertation with her own memories of the morning of September 11, 2001. Nigh was living in New York City when the World Trade Center was attacked, and she recounts her memories of this event and its impact both on her personally and on the larger community of New Yorkers. Personal reflection and perception are a frequent feature of writing about national trauma, and by locating her own historical position at the time of the event, Nigh places her...

A review of Humour as Political Resistance and Social Criticism. Mexican Comics and Cinema, 1969-1976, by Leticia Duran Neria. Leticia Neria’s dissertation contributes to the existing body of scholarship which utilizes popular culture within its historical context. Her dissertation deals with comics and movies released during the presidencies of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-70) and Luis Echeverria Alvarez (1970-76). The comic books include the titles Hermelinda Linda and La Familia Burrón, and a “hybrid” comic Los Agachados. The movies analyzed in the study include Alfonso Arau’s El Águila Descalza and Calzonzin...

A review of Missionaries, Church and the Formation of Naga Political Identity, 1918-1997, by John Thomas. John Thomas’ dissertation, Missionaries, Church and the Formation of Naga Political Identity, 1918-1997, historicizes the formation of Naga political identity. It examines the intersection of religious and national identity in the formation of the Naga self by critically evaluating missionary, colonial, and nationalist representations of Naga political identity. Thomas is critical of a particular theological perspective, produced by American and Naga Baptist missionaries that mediated this identity formation. This theological...

A review of Contested Nationalisms and Propaganda: Birth Pangs of a Malaysian Nation, 1957-1969, by Cheong Soon Gan.  In the first twelve years of Malaya/Malaysia’s independence, there was a fundamental disagreement among the country’s populace about national identity. On the one hand, the Malay majority, basically supported by the structures of government, conceived of a special role for the ethnically Malay population, the Malay language, and Malay culture (including Islam and other cultural trappings). On the other hand, non-indigenous groups, particularly the large Chinese population, imagined a nation wherein all ethnic groups, as...

A review of The Wounded Bricoleur: Adversity, Artifice and the Becoming of Street-Involved Youth in London, Ontario, Canada, by Mark Stewart Dolson. Highlighting how various forms of trauma can manifest in the lives of youth involved in street culture in a small city of 400,000 people in Ontario, Mark Stewart Dolson’s highly reflexive research gives much needed insight on the consequences of social suffering in developed urban spaces. A distinguishing feature of this endeavor — involving 12 months of research among youth, who often were homeless or had varying degrees of addiction, as well as diagnosed and undiagnosed mental illness —...