With the winter holidays upon us, Dissertation Reviews will be taking a few-week hiatus and will return in January 2012 with the first of dozens of new posts. We will also be launching our new branch, Science Studies Dissertation Reviews. We look forward to another wonderful year. Share this:FacebookTwitterEmailPrintStumbleUponDiggReddit

A review of the Hangzhou Municipal Archives (杭州市档案馆), Hangzhou, China. In April 2011, I spent several days working at the Hangzhou Municipal Archives as part of a three-week research visit to China. Even though I only had a limited amount of time and this was my first trip to these archives, I was able to collect a substantial amount of materials on popular legal education during the 1950s and 1980s. The archives are located in Xiacheng district at 3 Xiangjisi Lu on the corner of Xiangjisi Lu and Dong Xin Lu. Unlike the Zhejiang Provincial Archives, the municipal archives are sadly...

A review of The Standpoint of World History and Imperial Japan, by TAKESHI KIMOTO. “This dissertation,” Takeshi Kimoto writes at the outset of his work, “will reread the intellectual history of the Japanese empire from the perspective of sekaishi or ‘world history’” (p.1). Beginning his introduction with an epigraph from Takeuchi Yoshimi on the 1942 symposium on “Overcoming Modernity,” Kimoto immediately locates this rereading in relation to a distinguished tradition of scholars who have used notions such as “overcoming modernity” to rethink the discursive limits and...