A review of the Yunnan Provincial Archives (云南省档案馆) and the Yunnan Provincial Library (云南省图书馆), Kunming, China. Archival research in Yunnan requires time, patience, and a lot of paper. Both the Yunnan Provincial Archives and the Yunnan Provincial Library are assets for scholars of local history, although they limit the use and reproduction of their holdings. During six months of dissertation research on biomedicine and public health in wartime Yunnan, I found the Provincial Library to be more open to access, while the Provincial Archives remain a unique local source of...

A review of The Herschels: A Scientific Family in Training, by Emily Winterburn. William Herschel and his family have long been subjects of interest for historians and popularizers. The Herschels were blessed with uncommon longevity: two event-filled centuries elapsed from the time of William’s birth in 1738 to the death of his youngest grandchild in 1939. The lives of the notable among them (William, his sister Caroline and son John) were rife with exciting tales of adventure, discovery and royal patronage that provided lessons on the value of adaptability, devotion and hard work. They...

A review of Genetic Discrimination: A Genealogy of an American Problem, by Janet Elizabeth Childerhose. Many worlds are tethered together in the fine and even-handed dissertation produced by Janet Elizabeth Childerhose. While coming out of anthropology, the author demonstrates competence in applying the methodologic practices of her trade while maintaining a keen freedom of form when it comes to the incorporation of theoretical frameworks from disparate social science disciplines. Such agility to travel between academic worlds marks Childerhose’s work as conspicuously inclusive and thus...

Dissertation Reviews is seeking new dissertations to be featured in the 2012-13 season in each of the following fields: Bioethics Chinese History Chinese Literature Inner Asian Studies Japan Studies Korean Studies Medical Anthropology Premodern Japanese Literature Russian Studies Science Studies South Asian Studies Southeast Asian Studies Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Visual Studies Women’s Writing If you would like to have your dissertation reviewed (2010 defense onward), or would like to contribute a review, please contact us at:...

A review of the Chongqing Municipal Archives (重庆市档案馆), Chongqing, China. In 2010-11, I spent twelve months conducting research at the Chongqing Municipal Archives for my dissertation on public health in Chongqing during the war with Japan. These archives hold all Republican and Communist-era documents on Chongqing. They also have some Qing documents, though most of these are at the famed Ba County Archives, housed at the Sichuan Provincial Archives in Chengdu. I consulted the records of the Chongqing Bureau of Public Health, Bureau of Police, Municipal Government, Bureau of Social...

A review of “A Healthy Child Comes from a Healthy Mother”: Mwanamugimu and Nutritional Science in Uganda, 1935-1973, by Jennifer Tappan. The dissertation examines the science of nutrition, its development and establishment from the 1930s through to the 1970s, through a focus on the research and interventions developed around kwashiorkor among children in the Baganda kingdom of Uganda. In doing so it examines the relations between nutritional research in Uganda and the rise of international medicine, arguing against the dominant narrative of the post-war period as one in which public health...

A review of Bushidō: The Creation of a Martial Ethic in Late Meiji Japan, by OLEG BENESCH. Bushidō, the vaunted “way of the warrior” ascribed to various demographics in Japanese history and mobilized productively throughout the modern world, is a tricky subject. On the one hand, bushidō–variously and creatively imagined and mobilized–constitutes a central theme of modern Japanese constructions of historical identities and social realities. On the other, its image as a legitimate object of inquiry has suffered from enthusiastic appropriations in popular studies of Japan, samurai, and...

A review of Shaping Science with the Past: Textbooks, History, and the Disciplining of Genetics, by Jeffrey Skopek. In your high school biology class, did you read about the nineteenth-century monk Gregor Mendel carefully tending his pea experiments? Perhaps you used Punnett Squares to plot out the ratios of inherited dominant and recessive genes over several generations. These uses of history in genetics are neither isolated nor incidental, Jeffrey Skopek contends in his dissertation Shaping Science with the Past: Textbooks, History, and the Disciplining of Genetics. Rather, Skopek argues that...

It is our pleasure to announce that Leon Rocha, who is currently the Science Studies editor here at Dissertation Reviews, will be our new Managing Editor. Our warmest welcome to Leon in his new role! To learn more about Leon and the entire Dissertation Reviews editorial committee, more information can be found here. - Tom Mullaney, Editor-in-Chief   Here is a note from Leon. My first encounter with Dissertation Reviews was in 2010, when the site was focusing on Chinese History dissertations. I thought Tom Mullaney’s project was a brilliant idea, and I submitted my own thesis...

We are proud to announce that, starting in the 2012-13 academic year, Dissertation Reviews will undergo a major expansion to include 12 new and enlarged fields (for a total of 15 fields in all). If you would like to have your dissertation reviewed, or help us by serving as a reviewer, please contact dissertationreviews@gmail.com. Our new fields, and their respective Field Editors, include: Bioethics (Tamara Kayali) Chinese Literature (Lucas Klein) Inner Asian Studies (Loretta Kim) *Korean Studies (John DiMoia) Medical Anthropology (Orkideh Behrouzan and Leon Rocha) Premodern Japanese Literature...

A review of the Zhejiang Provincial Library (浙江省图书馆), Hangzhou, China. My research interests focus on the history of medicine and health in twentieth-century China. I have just completed my research of barefoot doctors in Chinese villages. It is a study of Hangzhou Prefecture (in Zhejiang Province), and is based on oral interviews, local archives, and documents. The main thread of discussion is the development of medicine and health since the middle 1940s in Jiang Village, Yuhang County, which is now a suburban area under the jurisdiction of Hangzhou City. Since 2003, I have been...

We recently invited a few of our authors and contributors to reflect upon how Dissertation Reviews has helped them in their work, and the early career academic community more broadly. Here’s what they had to say! If you’d like to contribute a testimonial of your own, please email it to dissertationreviews@gmail.com Dissertation Reviews has offered so much to junior scholars. By publicizing our intellectual contributions to the scholarly community in such a timely fashion, it has helped build connections between the established researchers and new faces. Since the review of my work...

A review of Plantation Technocrats: A Social History of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830-1865, by Daniel Rood It would be impossible to deny the role of slavery in the development of modern industrial capitalism. Slave colonies provided Europe with sugar and tobacco, with a source of labor, with a place to send its surplus population, and with an investment upon which to build merchant fortunes. But as Dan Rood points out in his ambitious Plantation Technocrats, in all accounts of slavery as an economic system it “prefigures, foreshadows, and props up, but is always prior-to...

A review of Learning to be Modern: American Missionary Colleges in Beirut and Kyoto 1860-1920, by Aleksandra Kobiljski. In a beautifully written dissertation, Aleksandra Kobiljski tells a new and compelling story: the transformation of “the evangelical project of converting the heathens and preparing for the second coming of Christ into a largely educational and medical enterprise” (p. 5). The dissertation is based on an in-depth analysis of sources that originated primarily in three locations: the ABCFM (American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) based in Boston, missionaries...

A review of Object Lessons: Sensory Science Education, 1830-1870, by Melanie Keene. Historically science popularization was often viewed as a top down model of diffusion from those who knew and did science to those who did not. That approach has become increasingly untenable over the past decade or two, especially when applied to the Victorian era. What has become increasingly clear is that science was practiced by people of different social classes, in many different contexts, and with many different purposes in mind — from natural theology’s study of nature to gain knowledge of the Divine...

In the most recent edition of New Books in East Asian Studies, Professor Carla Nappi (History/UBC) interviews Dissertation Reviews Founder/Editor-in-Chief Tom Mullaney (History/Stanford) about the process of finding one’s dissertation topic, revising a dissertation into a manuscript, and other sundry topics. The interview can be found here. Share this:FacebookTwitterEmailPrintStumbleUponDiggReddit

A review of the Shijiazhuang Municipal Archives (石家莊市檔案館), Shijiazhuang, China. In late March 2011, I spent four days in Shijiazhuang to conduct research in the Shijiazhuang Municipal Archives and in the Hebei Provincial Archives. The trip was unfortunately very brief as I had to schedule it in between terms and teaching commitments. Fortunately, the archivists at the Shijiazhuang Municipal Archive were very friendly and helpful. In two days, I could thus access and copy more materials than I had often been able to during longer archive visits to Shanghai and Beijing in 2008 and...