A review of The Politics of Writing: Tenkō and the Crisis of Representation, by YUKIKO SHIGETO. The phenomenon of tenkō (“conversion”), which typically marks individuals’ renunciations of ties to the Japanese Communist Party under harsh state repression during the 1930s, has often been analyzed through the political conditions that caused it and has been understood according to its narrow definition of party renunciation. In her dissertation, Yukiko Shigeto aims to complicate this understanding not through the causes of tenkō, but by its consequences, namely the effect on writers who...

A review of A Tibetan Buddhist Polymath in Modern China, by Nicole D. Willock. How have religion, modernity, and nationality been shaped by Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? A Tibetan Buddhist Polymath in Modern China delves into this question through the life and work of a key intellectual figure, the Sixth Tséten Zhapdrung Jikmé Rikpé Lodrö (1910-1985) of Amdo. Nicole Willock’s groundbreaking study spans the crucial periods before and during the Communist takeover of Tibet in the 1950s, as well as the Cultural Revolution and its wake. Adroitly following her subject as...

A review of The Living Rock: Natural, Human, and Sacred Histories of the Earth, 1680-1740, by Lydia Barnett. How do you write a history of the Earth from Noah’s Flood to the Apocalypse in an age that rewards piecemeal empirical research? How do you reconcile your overarching theories with the tidbits of evidence that the Bible, figure stones and Platonic myths provide? Lydia Barnett’s The Living Rock offers a refreshing intellectual history of how European scholars tackled these problems in the years around 1700. Her dissertation brings to life the heated debates that theories of the Earth...

A review of Rationalizing Empire: Nation, Space and Community in Japanese Social Sciences, 1931-1945, by SEOK-WON LEE.   Much of the literature on the Japanese empire in the 1920s and 1930s implicitly addresses the transformation of the imperial worldview from internationalist to Asianist, against a political backdrop of rupture, autarky, and military collision. Seok-won Lee’s dissertation explores this metamorphosis within the social sciences, including the disciplines of political science, sociology, and economics. In the relatively liberal atmosphere of the 1920s, social scientists...

A review of Architectures of Astronomical Observation: From Sternwarte Kassel (ca. 1560) to the Radcliffe Observatory (1772), by Alistair Marcus Kwan. Given the scientific and symbolic importance of astronomical observatories, it is surprising that they have received relatively little analysis. There are accounts of individual observatories, the astronomers who worked in them and the instruments they used, but much less has been said about observatories as type of building. Still less has the relationship between buildings, instruments and people been given sustained consideration, which seems...

A two-part review of Chinese Officials in the Hung Taiji Period (1627-1643) [皇太極時期的漢官 (1627-1643)], by TSAI SUNG-YING [蔡松穎]; and The Juridical System of the Qing Dynasty in Beijing (1644-1900), by XIANGYU HU. There is a revealing exchange between the Shunzhi emperor (1644-1661) and one of his officials. It is an exchange that speaks to the historian about the contested nature of the early Qing, and exposes the indeterminacy of the institutional arrangements of the dynasty. In this conversation captured in a memorial, the vice director of sacrifices in the Board of Rites...

A review of Between Trade and Legitimacy, Maritime and Continent: The Zheng Organization in Seventeenth-Century East Asia, by XING HANG. Like a skilled chef, Xing Hang has combined good ingredients and craftsmanship, and he serves them up in a dish (diss.) that is a pleasure to read and food for thought. Not so very long ago, maritime history was something of an oddity in Chinese or East Asian History circles. The odd paper or two might appear at a conference or workshop, but it was hard to break into the mainstream debates from this ‘minor tradition’. Maritime developments impinged...

A review of Mental Defectives, Childhood Psychotics and the Origins of Autism Research at the Maudsley Hospital, 1913-1983, by Bonnie Evans. Bonnie Evans’ excellent dissertation maps out the formation of child psychiatry in the twentieth century while simultaneously exploring the origins and construction of the autistic child in British society. Tracing evolving political standards, upheavals in local and national legislation, changing roles for medical and educational institutions, as well as new trends in psychiatric theory and treatment, Evans’ story captures the ways that the...

A review of the Shanghai Library Modern Documents Reading Room (近代文献阅览室), Shanghai, China. Over the past ten years I have done research at the Modern Documents Reading Room at the Shanghai Library half a dozen times. In July and August of 2011, I spent three weeks working there. My research focuses on literary writing, intellectual history, and the publishing business in the late Qing and Republican periods. Since most of the major publishers in the first half of the twentieth century were located in Shanghai, it makes sense that the library would have one of the best collections...

A review of Searching for the Law: Ennin’s Journal as a Key to the Heian Appropriation of Tang Culture, by Jesse Palmer. Jesse Palmer’s dissertation uses the monk Ennin’s (794-868) record of his travels in Tang China (Nittō guhō junrei kōki 入唐求法巡礼行記) to explore the nature of Heian Buddhist ritual and cultural exchange with the continent, along with various aspects of the experience of traveling monks. Ennin’s eventful nine-year stay on the continent began when he accompanied the last official Heian embassy to the Tang in 838, aiming to bring back esoteric texts and...

An article about the past, present, and future of Dissertation Reviews has just been posted here on China Heritage Quarterly. Many thanks to Geremie Barmé and the China Heritage Project at the Australian National University. Share this:FacebookTwitterEmailPrintStumbleUponDiggReddit

A review of Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture in 1950s China, by CHRISTOPHER RUSSELL LEIGHTON. The remarkable resurgence of Chinese capitalism under communist rule since the 1980s is widely recognized as a defining, if paradoxical, feature of the contemporary People’s Republic of China. What remains largely unacknowledged is that this particular historical configuration of business and politics has its roots in the very first decade of the PRC: the 1950s. Research on Chinese business history by such scholars as Parks Coble, Sherman Cochran, Elizabeth Köll, Bruce Dickinson, and Huang Yasheng...

A review of Teratology and the Clinic: Monsters, Obstetrics, and the Making of Antenatal Life in Edinburgh, c.1900, by Salim Al-Gailani. Salim Al-Gailani’s dissertation explores the career and impact of the obstetrician William Ballantyne, who in the turn of the twentieth century Edinburgh transformed teratology (study of embryonic and fetal malformations) from a practice of collecting ‘monsters’ and turning them into museum specimens into a clinical discipline of ‘antenatal pathology’. This dissertation is much more than an intellectual biography: through the story of Ballantyne’s...

A review of Speaking for Nature: Mary Somerville and the Science of Empire, by Michal Meyer. Mary Somerville (1780-1872) is an intriguing figure in the history of science; unusually for a woman, she managed to gain a reputation for herself as an elite practitioner of science, rather than as just a communicator of men’s intellectual product. That Somerville achieved this status, whereas women in the later decades of the nineteenth century faced great obstacles in sustaining a serious scientific reputation, requires an analysis that delves deep into the historically changing understandings,...