With this year’s season of Dissertation Reviews beginning to wind down, it is my great pleasure to share exciting and important news with the DR community.
Andrew Janco, our talented and tireless Managing Editor and Field Editor in Human Rights, has accepted our invitation to become a Senior Managing Editor here at Dissertation Reviews. He will be working with fellow Senior Managing Editor, Jennifer Lambe, as well as the entire editorial committee and participants of the project, to steward the continued growth of Dissertation Reviews. We are delighted to begin this new working relationship with Andrew.
To learn more about the entire Dissertation Reviews Editorial Committee, please visit this page.
– Tom Mullaney, Editor-in-Chief
Here is a note from Andrew:
Dissertation Reviews has been an immense addition to my personal and professional life. I didn’t know it when I first applied to be a Field Editor, but Dissertation Reviews is a vast community of young scholars that crosses disciplinary and regional boundaries. I’ve been very impressed by the diversity and global character of our volunteers. The senior staff has also done an great job of splicing our work into small manageable tasks and processes. Emails are exchanged quickly and there’s a real energy and optimism behind all our interactions. It’s really wonderful to have found a community with this kind of engagement and energy, particularly given how rare it is for a graduate student to have the kinds of influence and responsibilities that we normally associate with the editor of an academic journal or university press. Field editors have the opportunity to place whomever they want in dialogue with each other and to feature exciting new research on the web where it’s freely available. The startup culture at Dissertation Reviews has given me the chance to help build the organization and to move into positions of increasing responsibility. Julia Fein and I have worked on a project to feature Dissertation Reviews at conferences, including our own booth and informal gatherings. As an Assistant Managing Editor, I have had the opportunity to learn about online publishing and the many features of WordPress. It has become a regular habit of mine to check our site statistics. We have a post called “Digital Resources for Sinologists” which has been viewed by nearly 5,000 people! Our features about online and digital resources are particularly popular and I look forward to developing these offerings. Our most popular reviews have 2000+ readers. That’s rather impressive when you consider that most dissertations, and academic articles for that matter, are usually read in only a small circle of colleagues and researchers concerned with precisely the same research topics and questions. While it was somewhat controversial at the time, the Russian Studies Job Report has more than 2,000 views and I look forward to expanding the Job Report format to other fields this season. I realize that this note has turned into a testimonial, but I think it says a lot that my first impulse is to celebrate the community behind Dissertation Reviews and their unsolicited enthusiasm for this project. It’s a great idea that has turned into a platform for an increasingly complex discussion about new research and the problems facing young scholars in the 21st century. I am thrilled to move into a position in the senior management and I look forward to working with everyone at DR.
Andrew Janco is currently a University Postdoctoral Fellow in the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the history of warfare, displacement, and human rights protections for refugees. Andrew’s dissertation, “Soviet ‘Displaced Persons’ in Europe, 1941-1951,” studies the westward migration of more than five million Soviet citizens during World War II, their experiences as postwar “displaced persons,” and eventual resettlement as refugees during the Cold War. Andrew recently published an article in Contemporary European History on the origins of the international right of asylum, and he is currently working on articles about the concept of unnecessary suffering and a critical history of the international arms-control regime. .
Image: A view of the south lobby of the General Assembly building at UN Headquarters, 01 September 1964, United Nations, New York, UN Photo # 104254.
