Introducing Latin American Studies

Tom Mullaney
1 minute read

As part of our mission to become ever more “global,” “Latin American Studies Dissertation Reviews” will bring you friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in this very exciting and dynamic field. As usual, the series will also feature reviews and guides for archives, libraries and collections relevant to Latin American Studies. If you are interested in reviewing for the new series, having your dissertation reviewed, contributing a “Fresh from the Archives” or “Talking Shop” article, or helping out in some other way, please contact latinamerican@dissertationreviews.org.

Introducing Our New Field Editor

Jennifer Lambe is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Yale University, where she focuses on modern Caribbean and Latin American history. She received her A.B. in History and Gender Studies from Brown University. Her dissertation, “Baptism by Fire: The Making and Remaking of Madness in Cuba, 1899-1980,” examines the history of mental illness and mental healing in Cuba from the time of independence from Spain, with a focus on both institutional psychiatry and popular healing. She has published in Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe and Cuba: People, Culture, History (ed. Alan West-Durán, 2011).

Image: El Morro fortress in Havana. Wikimedia Commons.

Post written by: Tom Mullaney

Thomas S. Mullaney is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at Stanford University, having received his Ph.D. in History in 2006 from Columbia University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (University of California Press, 2011, Foreword by Benedict Anderson). This book charts the history of China’s 1954 Ethnic Classification project (minzu shibie), a joint social scientific-Communist state expedition wherein a group of ethnologists, linguists, and Party cadres traveled to the most ethnically diverse province in the People’s Republic to determine which minority communities would and would not be officially recognized by the state. He is also principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority, a pathbreaking volume that examines China’s majority ethnonational group. He is currently writing the first-ever global history of the Chinese typewriter, one of the most significant and misunderstood technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.