Our Call We are now accepting dissertations for review for our 2013-14 season. If you are a recent PhD and are interested in participating, please go to our Request Review page. If you are interested in acting as a reviewer, we have a new Become a Reviewer page! If you have recently resurfaced from the archives or re-emerged from the field, and wish to contribute a Fresh from the Archives or Talking Shop article, please contact us via info@dissertationreviews.org. Fancy helping out at Dissertation Reviews? Drop us a line on info@dissertationreviews.org and tell us about yourself!   Our...

A review of Hidden Waters: Groundwater Histories of Iran and the Mediterranean, by Abigail E. Schade. Abigail Schade’s dissertation is an examination of different techniques of accessing and using groundwater in different regions, and also of past literatures that have examined these techniques from various standpoints and with diverse underlying assumptions. The thesis is presented in five chapters, and each deals with a markedly different situation, varying across literature, space and time, and giving us a wide and thorough overview of different methods in, and changing perceptions of, the...

A review of The West Riding Lunatic Asylum and the Making of the Modern Brain Sciences in the Nineteenth Century, by Michael Anthony Finn. “We are all phrenologists today,” observed James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938) in 1924 in his monograph The Story of the Brain. “We have come to accept all the cardinal principles upon which the phrenologists insisted” (p. 199). It was an extraordinary remark made by an extraordinary man – one whose long life spanned an equally extraordinary century of discovery in the mind and brain sciences. In that century, intellectual, institutional and social...

A review of the Matenadaran Institute Library, Yerevan, Armenia. Presiding over Mashtots Avenue, Yerevan’s central boulevard and one of its largest, is a square building of dark basalt, rising high above the street level and inviting the reverent gaze of a casual passer-by with its imposing frame. Where the asphalt of the avenue ends, a slope of cobblestone leads you up a steep hill, up several flights of stairs, and up a serpentine walkway that deposits you, now panting, in the small plaza in front of the solemn entrance of Matenadaran. Named for the Old Armenian word for “Depository of...

A review of Performing Embodied Histories: Colonialism, Gender, and Okinawa in Modern Japan, by Valerie Holshouser Barske.  Divided into six chapters with an Epilogue and Appendix, Valerie Barske’s dissertation examines Okinawa’s postwar history, identity formation, and the politicization of culture and gender through the lens of Okinawan performance culture. Providing a comprehensive historiography of both Japanese and English secondary sources, the first chapter emphasizes the methodological and theoretical dispositions of the dissertation. A hybridization of cultural history and...

A review of The New Asian Female Ghost Films: Modernity, Gender Politics, and Transnational Transformation, by Hunju Lee. Hunjun Lee’s dissertation explores the textual, intertextual, and contextual aspects of what she calls the New Asian female ghost films, which revolve around prematurely dead women’s revenge and were produced in Japan, South Korean, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand after the release of a Japanese horror film titled Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998). The monstrous feminine in these Asian films, Lee argues, is a hybrid construction of the generic conventions of Western horror...

A review of The Hong Kong Crime Film: Genre and Film Noir from the 1940s to the Present, by Kristof Van den Troost. Although an impressive amount of scholarship on Hong Kong cinema has been published in the last two decades, crime film as a genre has mostly evaded critical attention. Narrated in a keen, persuasive scholarly voice, Kristof Van den Troost’s Hong Kong Crime Film fills this gap by establishing the general lines of this important Hong Kong genre since its early inception in the 1940s. At the heart of this genre-oriented approach lies the author’s fundamental mistrust of the...

A review of the Harvard Yenching Library Rare Books Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA. The Harvard-Yenching Library holds more than 1.3 million volumes. This review won’t bore readers with the details of each collection, which are introduced on the library’s website. Instead, my aim is to convince the reader to consider a visit to the library and its world-class rare book collection. Although most of the library’s holdings are listed in fully searchable catalogs, there are many discoveries awaiting even cursory exploration. Our persisting ignorance of the Harvard-Yenching...

A review of From “Retire Livestock, Restore Rangeland” to the Compensation for Ecological Services: State Interventions into Rangeland Ecosystem and Pastoralism in Tibet, by Yönten Nyima. In the last decade, circulating narratives considering the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau as degraded and over-exploited, and presenting serious ecological problems as consequences of human interventions have become quite common in academic and non-academic literature. Nevertheless, an accurate analysis of the actual situation of the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau is more difficult to find. The...

We’re very excited to announce that “Inner Asia Dissertation Reviews” will be expanding to include Central Asia Studies in the 2013-2014 season. Joining forces with Loretta Kim (Hong Kong Baptist University) is Niccolò Pianciola (Lingnan University). Loretta and Niccolò will bring you friendly, non-critical reviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in this newly expanded field. If you are interested in having your dissertation reviewed, please fill out the Review Application Form. Click here if you are interested in being a reviewer. If you wish to help out...

A review of Colonial Copyright and the Photographic Image: Canada in the Frame, by Philip John Hatfield. Philip Hatfield’s dissertation is an engaging study of a little explored section of the British Library’s Colonial Copyright Collection, namely the eclectic assortment of Canadian photographs originally deposited at the British Museum Library between 1895 and 1924. In seven well-documented chapters, Hatfield reconstructs the socio-historical and institutional contexts which underscored the creation of this visual archive, revealing its multiple geographies and discussing their...

An overview of the primary Persian manuscript collections in the United Kingdom. We are now approaching what UK-based researchers lovingly call “the season,” meaning the time of year when academics from across the world descend on the British Library en masse and going for a mid-afternoon cup of coffee often results in a series of impromptu reunions. The British Library boasts an extensive collection of Persian and Indo-Persian manuscripts (some of which they are digitizing), but they are not the only show in town. Scholars too often overlook other Persian language archives in London and...

My dissertation, Worlds on View: Visual Art Exhibitions and State Identity in the Late Cold War, combines several different methodologies — those identified from the start, mobilized in frustration, or emerged along the way — which all served their purpose in completing the research over a five-year period. The dissertation focuses on a joint USA and USSR visual arts project in the late Cold War, entitled 10+10: Contemporary Soviet and American Painters. This project serves as a lens to review the genealogy of visual arts exhibitions as tools of nationalism, self-promotion and cultural...

A review of Consuming Underwear: Fashioning Female Identity, by Christiana Tsaousi. The act of putting on underwear is a practice that most of us take part in everyday. Yet as Christiana Tsaousi makes clear in her dissertation, the decisions central to this practice have been largely unexplored by academic studies. Emerging at the intersection between consumption studies, fashion studies and marketing, Tsaousi explores the socio-cultural factors that influence underwear consumption. The thesis focuses on women and considers the role of underwear in the making of femininity. Through focus groups...

A review of the Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz (Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico). I spent a considerable amount of time doing research in the Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz (AGEV) during 2010 and 2011. I mostly worked with Local Agrarian Commission documents, but have also done some research in the archive section of governor Adalberto Tejeda and of the Veracruzan Ministry of Public Works. The AGEV can be incredibly rewarding, but also utterly frustrating. This, however, can probably be said about any repository in the world. I narrate here a typical day in the AGEV: • I get up in my...

A review of the Rampur Raza Library and Archives and the ITC Sangeet Research Academy. My current research focuses on the Imdad Khan gharana, a prominent Hindustani (North Indian classical) instrumental lineage. I examine Hindustani music’s historical development from the 13th century to the present through Persian and Urdu manuscripts, recordings, and ethnographic methods. I am also interested in contemporary performance practices, oral histories, and the economics of Hindustani Music. Both the Rampur Raza Library and Archives and the Sangeet Research Academy provide excellent resources for...

A review of Quotidian Catastrophes in the Modern City: Fire Hazards and Risk in Mexico’s Capital, 1860-1910, by Anna Rose Alexander. The last third of the nineteenth century saw sweeping transformations to Mexico’s capital. As the country emerged from decades of political and economic instability, foreign investment began to pour in, spurring the development of Mexican industry and the undertaking of ambitious urban infrastructure projects. Mexican authorities sought to turn the capital into a European-style metropolis with modern factories, gas streetlights, wood-frame buildings and wooden...

A review of The Buddhist Boundary Markers of Northeast Thailand and Central Laos, 7th – 12th Centuries CE: Towards an Understanding of the Archaeological, Religious and Artistic Landscapes of The Khorat Plateau, by Stephen A. Murphy. Stephen Murphy’s dissertation presents an in-depth analysis of the archeological and historic evidence for the earliest form of Buddhist Boundary markers (sema) in Southeast Asia. Following a preliminary discussion concerning existing views concerning sema in Southeast Asia and Northeastern Thailand in particular (Introduction – Chapter 1), he examines in...

A review of Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China: Disease, Healing, and the Body in Cross-cultural Translation (Second to Eighth Centuries C.E.), by C. Pierce Salguero. Pierce Salguero’s dissertation marks a significant departure from the norms of Chinese medical history, which has focused almost entirely on a received tradition that traces its origins back to the Huangdi neijing 黃帝內經. By introducing a discrete body of medical writings from the Buddhist Canon (Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經) and the Dunhuang 敦煌 manuscripts, Salguero brings to bear on these...

A review of A Knot in Common: Science, Values, and Conservation in the Atlantic Flyway, by Kristoffer Jon Whitney. A Knot in Common by Kristoffer Whitney presents controversy of the Red Knot, a fairly small and nondescript shorebird that breeds in Arctic Canada and spends the winter in Patagonia, at the southern end of South America. In full breeding plumage, Red Knots sport orangey-red plumage on the breast (hence the common term: “robin snipe”). When migrating between southern Argentina and northern Canada, Red Knots have numerous stopover points where they gorge themselves on the eggs of...

A review of Another Tale of the Heike: An Examination of the Engyōbon Heike monogatari, by Amy Christine Franks. Amy Franks’s meticulously researched and persuasively written dissertation is a study of the Engyōbon, a lesser-known but extremely important variant of the Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike, 13th century). Copied from a manuscript dated 1309 (the second year of the Engyō era), the Engyōbon Heike monogatari is widely regarded as the oldest existing Heike text. The manuscript was produced at Negoroji, a complex of Buddhist temples on Mt. Kōya, headquarters of the Shingon...

A review of The Furnace is Breathing: Work and the Everyday Life in North Korea, 1953-1961, by Cheehyung Kim. In February 2013, North Korea carried out its third nuclear test, following the successful launch of the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3 Unit 2 satellite the previous year. Many observers in the Western world – including its sibling state in the south – proposed various theories to make sense of how the most secluded and isolated country in the world, with an oppressive regime allegedly hated by most of its own people, could manage to complete such sophisticated technological projects. The...

A review of Emergence and Development of Spiritual-Religious Groups in the People’s Republic of China after 1978, by Kristin Kupfer. December 2012 witnessed a seemingly curious case of convergence of Mayan civilization, Christianity, and Chinese popular religion. Many members of a group called “Church of the Almighty God,” believing the Mayan prophesy that the end of the world was imminent, began to organize mass demonstrations exhorting the Chinese people to repent their sins, to prepare for the coming apocalypse, and to overthrow the ruling Communist Party. What happened next was highly...

A review of The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier: State Building, National Integration and Socialist Transformation, Zeku (Tsékhok) County, 1953-1958, by Benno Ryan Weiner. In July 1958 as the revolutionary fervor of the Great Leap Forward swept across the People’s Republic of China, Zeku County in the Amdo region of cultural Tibet erupted in violence against efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to impose rapid collectivization on the pastoral communities of the grasslands. Rebellion also stirred the region at the beginning of the 1950s as “Liberation” first settled on the...

A review of Scenes from Yongning: Media Creation in China’s Na Villages, by Tami Blumenfield. Tami Blumenfield’s dissertation is a refreshing anthropological study of media production and presents pioneering work based on community-based participatory research. The author’s methodological approach to collaborative fieldwork — a form of “decolonization of research” as she calls it — makes this dissertation unique in the field of Chinese minority studies in particular. The dissertation’s main ambition is an ethnography of media production processes; it successfully contributes to a...

Will you be doing archival research on topics Islamic or related to the Islamic world this summer? Before heading out, be sure to brush up with our growing Fresh from the Archives series! And if you’d like to contribute a new article or submit an update for any of these institutions below, please contact the Islamic Studies Field Editor at matthew.melvinkoushki@dissertationreviews.org.   Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul (Christopher Markiewicz) Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (Christopher Markiewicz) Al-Beruni Institute for Oriental Studies, Tashkent (Ertuğrul Ökten) Bodleian Library,...

A review of Un(der)writing Home: The Politics of Belonging in the Modern Literatures of Iran and the Maghreb, by Guilan Siassi. In bringing together Persophone writers of Iran and Francophone writers of the Maghreb, Guilan Siassi’s dissertation pushes the limits of comparative literature, Francophone studies, and area studies by positing a new approach to the study of contemporary “minor literatures.” Theoretically informed and historically contextualized, Siassi’s study addresses concepts of exile, home, and identity, and draws from a range of literary critics and authors of prose...

A review of Subtle Innovation Within Networks of Convention: The Life, Thought, and Intellectual Legacy of Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (d. 926/1520), by Matthew B. Ingalls. Since the 19th century, the Mamluk period has been characterized by scholars both Arab and Western as a time of intellectual decadence and decline, awash in unoriginal scholarly tomes and baroque literary compositions. Anthologies, encyclopedias, manuals, dictionaries, and other compilatory texts were produced in great abundance, solidifying the period’s reputation for sifting and re-arranging the archive of Islamic literature...

A review of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots, and the End of Empire 1939-1946, by Janam Mukherjee. Janam Mukherjee’s dissertation is a thorough study of late colonial Bengal in the context of war, famine, and riots leading up to the eventual dissolution of empire. The central argument of the dissertation is built on the claim that famine was the “most profound factor influencing the structural, political, social, economic and communal fabric of Bengal” during this period (p. 5). The author provides a vivid illustration of the famine’s “awesome magnitude” in terms of its impact on...

A review of The Nature of Oil in Bolivia, 1896-1952, by Stephen Conrad Cote. In October 2003 a popular rebellion in Bolivia’s highlands ousted President Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada, successfully halting the plan to export Bolivian natural gas through Chile that had triggered the revolt. The plan was a flashpoint for leftist social movements that saw the development of Bolivia’s gas and oil reserves as the country’s last chance to use its natural resources to pull its population out of poverty after the plunder of so many others. Goni’s overthrow marked a high point of a period...

A review of Homosexual Panic: Unliveable Lives and the Temporality of Sexuality in Literature, Psychiatry and the Law, by Matthew T. Helmers. Matthew T. Helmers’ dissertation revisits the concept of homosexual panic, a term originally coined in 1920 as a psychiatric diagnosis, later deployed in gay and lesbian studies of literature, and existing today as a legal defence, primarily in the United States. This project revisits the various perceptions, critiques, and instances of homosexual panic across literature, psychiatry and law to uncover the ways in which it has been understood, and how...

A review of Risk, Blame, and Expertise: The Meteorological Office and Extreme Weather in Post-War Britain, by Alexander Hall. In 1987 Michael Fish, a BBC and Meteorological Office (MO) weather forecaster, ended his forecast segment with a comment on a recent call to the BBC expressing concern that a hurricane was on the way: “Well, if you’re watching don’t worry — there isn’t.” The next day, the worst windstorm since 1703 hit the southern coast of England, and the clip of Fish’s forecast gained sufficient notoriety to warrant inclusion in the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London...

A review of Dissecting Modernity: Anatomy and Power in the Language of Science in China, by David Luesink. David Luesink’s dissertation is a brilliant analysis of the relationship between anatomical knowledge and power in China that contributes to the fields of both Science and Technology Studies and History. Luesink focuses on the transformative decade between 1910 — when disciples studied Confucian and medical classics in exclusive relationships with their masters — and 1920 — when professionally organized coteries of scientists and intellectuals controlled the terms of medical...

A review of The Dialectics of Virtuosity: Dance in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-2009, by Emily Elissa Wilcox. In this highly readable and intellectually provocative dissertation, Emily Wilcox makes a convincing and often surprising case for the intimacy of the relationship between the invention, codification and standardization of, on the one hand, specifically “Chinese” dance forms since the birth of the People’s Republic and of imaginings of Chinese culture and the Chinese nation-state on the other. She leavens this cogent historical and theoretical analysis of dance’s...

A review of Itineraries for a Republic: Tourism and Travel Culture in Modern China, 1866-1954, by Yajun Mo. This dissertation by Yajun Mo examines travel, travel writing, and travel photography in China from the final years of the Qing dynasty to the first years of the People’s Republic. Focusing on travel for leisure and exploration, rather than migration or settlement, Mo argues for the significant role played by travel writing and later photography in processes of nation-building and “worlding” China.  Written and visual accounts of travel overseas and across China’s borderlands by...

A review of Foreign Echoes and Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Historiography, and World Literature in Chinese Poetry, by Lucas Klein. Lucas Klein’s dissertation, Foreign Echoes and Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Historiography, and World Literature in Chinese Poetry, is notable both for its ambition and its erudition. In seeking to answer how the “Chineseness” of Chinese poetry, its quality of being or seeming natively Chinese, is produced in and through acts of translation, Klein not only tackles Modernist-inspired poetry from the twentieth century, where “Chineseness”...

[Archives Review, China]  Toby Lincoln (University of Leicester) review of the Jiangsu Provincial Archives (Nanjing, Jiangsu, China) and Wuxi Municipal Archives (Wuxi, Jiangsu, China) http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/2243 [China, Korea]  Eunyoung Choi, “Gender, Justice and the Geopolitics of Undocumented North Korean Migration” (Syracuse University, 2010), reviewed by Sarah Eunkyung Chee (University of California, Santa Cruz) http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/2366 [Japan]  Drake Langford, “The Violent Virtue: First Narratives of the Ishii Brothers’ Late Genroku...

We are delighted to announce another new series on Dissertation Reviews, which is coming in the 2013-2014 season, and welcome three new editors — Amaryllis Logotheti (Panteion University, Athens), Ileana Moroni (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) and Nikos Christofis (Leiden University). This series will bring you friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations on anything from the history of the Ottoman Empire to contemporary politics and society in Turkey. If you are interested in having your dissertation reviewed, please fill out the Review...

A review of Embodied Marginalities: Disability, Citizenship, and Space in Highland Ecuador, by Nicholas Rattray. Situated at the intersections of medical anthropology, the anthropology of Latin America, disability studies, and human geography, Nicholas Rattray’s important dissertation analyzes the emergence of the category of “person with disability” in a particular Latin American context and in relation to people with physical and visual disabilities. Rattray chooses to focus on Ecuador because it has an international reputation for being pro-active in the area of disability rights. In...

A review of Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko, by Angela Kristine Ahlgren. Drumming Asian America: Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Taiko is an astute exploration of the interrelated discursive practices informing the performance and historical narrative of North American taiko.  Particularly as taiko expands beyond Japanese- and Asian-American communities, studies such as Angela Ahlgren’s dissertation are important for their recognition and investigation of the ever-expanding groups interested in the art form. ...

A review of The English Clown: Print in Performance and Performance in Print, by Naoko Ishikawa. Much research has been done on comedy in general and on the English clown in particular, but little attention has been paid to this figure’s origins. This is the starting point of Naoko Ishikawa’s very rich dissertation, in which she takes up the English clown as an influential figure in early modern drama and examines its roots in jest-books and the performance of comic actors, especially Richard Tarlton (?-1588), William Kemp (?-1603), and Robert Armin (c. 1563-1615). Highlighting the...