Notes

Introducing our New Managing Editor: Leon Rocha

Tom Mullaney
2 minute read

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 for review and also acted as reviewer. It was very exciting to see Dissertation Reviews moving into Korean Studies and Japanese Studies, and when Tom contacted me to ask if I would be interested in setting up a new branch on “Science Studies” – covering broadly the history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology of science, medicine, technology – I immediately said yes.

The Science Studies branch was officially launched in January this year, and since then we have posted around 15 reviews. We have another 30 reviews in the works, and many more Science Studies dissertations are being added over time. The response from the History and Philosophy of Science and Science and Technology Studies communities have been really overwhelming. Dissertation Reviews has been a truly wonderful forum for all its participants to promote their new work, meet new colleagues and re-connecting with old friends, share general reflections on the field and information on research practicalities. We now have nearly 500 followers on Twitter and over 1400 friends on Facebook, and the website is getting a great stream of traffic every day.

So I was delighted when Tom invited me to be Dissertation Reviews’ Managing Editor. Together with a wonderful group of scholars, we are busily preparing for the launch of twelve new fields in the upcoming academic year. We are also expanding “Talking Shop” and “Fresh from the Archives” well beyond China to cover a range of institutions, and we will start reviewing dissertations written in different languages as well. The future looks bright, and it is an absolute pleasure to be part of this international network and fantastic resource!

Leon Rocha
Research Fellow
Emmanuel College, Cambridge
lar29@cam.ac.uk

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.