Media Reviews

Most graduate students have a pretty good idea of the flaws in their own dissertations even as they hand them over to their committees. Then, after defence, they hopefully have an even clearer idea of what needs to be revisited, emphasised or pared as they start thinking about publication. Knowledge of the flaws in one's own work are fairly pronounced at this stage, along with the hope that they can be remedied along the path from dissertation to monograph. But that has not stopped institutions from increasingly making dissertations available online to a global audience. What used to exist only as a single paper copy in a university's warehouse migrated to microfilm collections available by interlibrary loan, but are now full-text searchable, PDF-published and downloadable, persisting in an accessible digital archive, forever. Despite the dizzying access to completed dissertations, Thomas S. Mullaney, editor of the Dissertation Reviews website and associate professor of history at Stanford University, senses that 'Graduate students themselves encounter dissertations only rarely, with coursework tending to focus almost exclusively on published monographs, edited volumes and articles'. Mullaney writes, in describing his vision for Dissertation Reviews, that graduate students too often 'juxtapose their dissertations-in-progress against published monographs, failing to appreciate that a huge chasm separates these two genres (and they often become deeply discouraged by the contrast)'. Dissertation Reviews publishes synopses of recent dissertations in seventeen fields. True to the project's roots in coverage of new research in Chinese history, most of the fields are Asian, with a few fields covering topics such as the history of science and technology, print and media cultures, and bioethics. The site seeks to give the dissertations it reviews, and the genre itself, a higher profile and, in effect, to help curate the wilds of the dissertation databases. Dissertation Reviews is pointedly non-critical. Not even constructive criticism, apparently, is allowed in these reviews. Mullaney makes his case for this policy on the site: 'whereas a book is understood to be a " finished product " that can and should be submitted to rigorous analysis and critique, a dissertation is by necessity a " work-in-progress " that requires a particular kind of handling'. In answer to the question of how then are the authors supposed to benefit from being reviewed, Mullaney notes that reviewers are expected to send authors their criticisms privately. But even these communications are guided by the websites' editors. This …