Recently Completed Dissertations

Anne Chao

“Chen Duxiu's Early Years: The Importance of Personal Connections in the Social and Intellectual Transformation of China,  1895-1920”

Advisor: Richard J. Smith

Chen Duxiu’s (1879-1942) generation of intellectuals came of age at the turn of the twentieth century, and was unique for their transnational cosmopolitanism and extensiveeducation in both Chinese classical and Western learning. Their careers were shaped by the political, social and intellectual networks interspersed throughout their lives. This paper examines the way Chen and his cohorts forged individual and collective identities by selectively assimilating from their experiences and social networks in China and abroad. China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the demise of the civil service exam (1905) provided the impetus for this generation to study overseas, especially in Japan. Impelled by an urgent need to "save the nation," they devoured translations of Western and Japanese works, feverishly created study societies, published newspapers and journals, and established schools. Shuttling between Tokyo and Shanghai from 1901 to 1915, Chen co-founded the first revolutionary Chinese student organization in Japan, the Youth Society, named after Giuseppe Mazzini’s Italian unification movement. He master-minded the Resist-Russia activities in Anhui and coordinated with the branches in Shanghai and Tokyo, made bombs with Cai Yuanpei in Shanghai, published the vernacular paper Anhui Suhua Bao, and created revolutionary cells (Yuewang hui) in his home province. He catapulted to fame as founder of the New Youth magazine and Dean of Beijing University, and succeeded in pushing through the vernacularization of the written language and for exhorting the young generation to save the nation. Before his disillusionment with the West in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, Chen endorsed John Dewey’s guild socialism, and hailed France for three gifts to mankind: science, democracy, and socialism. The outcome of the Treaty of Versailles and Russian involvement in China provided the motivation for Chen’s decision to transform into a political activist, and led to his founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1920. My dissertation examines the social, political, and transnational networks of Chen Duxiu as a way to understand the hitherto neglected turn-of-the-twentieth-century decades of China’s transition to republicanism.

Luke Harlow

“From Border South to Solid South: Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880”

Advisor: John Boles

Luke Harlow's dissertation explores the changing terrain and context of religious debates over slavery and race in Kentucky before, during, and after the Civil War. Harlow argues that white Americans’ religious understandings of slavery and racial difference were key to the shaping of Confederate identity in postbellum Kentucky. A state on the border between slavery and freedom, the Bluegrass was not a bastion of proslavery thought before the Civil War. Indeed, it harbored a vocal antislavery presence into the 1860s and remained with the Union during the conflict. Yet by 1865 a change had occurred. Led by clergy and laity who rejected civil rights for African Americans, the state’s white population came to a broad embrace of Confederate identity. Though the scholarship on religion, race, and the nineteenth-century U.S. South is lengthy and robust, most histories of the topic, by either ending or beginning with the Civil War, suffer from a periodization that suggests that the conflict resolved the religious debate over slavery. The Civil War–era case of Kentucky demonstrates the strength and vitality of proslavery religion and its lasting impact on social and political life, well after most historians assume proslavery sentiment died.

Rusty Hawkins

“Religion, Race and Resistance: White Evangelicals and the Dilemma of Integration South Carolina 1950-1975”

Committee: John B. Boles (advisor), Allen J. Matusow, Michael O. Emerson

Rusty Hawkins’ dissertation is a detailed analysis of the way conservative religion motivated and sustained southerners who found themselves resisting civil rights initiatives in their region. This resistance evolved from overt appeals to what historian Paul Harvey has termed “folk theology” in the 1950s, to the creation of all-white church-supported private schools by the 1970s. As a prominent conservative voice in both South Carolina society and his local Methodist church, William Workman was involved either directly or tangentially with many of the manifestations of massive resistance spawned by conservative theology in his state, and his life is an ideal vehicle by which to gain insight into the minds of religious conservatives who believe God abhorred racial integration. Tracing this line of thought over the course of a quarter century, my dissertation will ultimately provide the necessary foundation for a better understanding of the conservative political resurgence of the late twentieth century, while offering an assessment of the flawed legacy of southern white churches in the era of civil rights.

Abbie Salyers

“The Internment of Memory: Forgetting and Remembering the Japanese American World War II Experience”

Advisor: Ira Gruber

Abbie Salyer's dissertation will examine the development of cultural representations of the Japanese American World War II experience of military service and internment during the long silence following the war and the
more recent period of commemoration. I will evaluate museums and monuments; the political process surrounding reparations for internment; the academic representation of Japanese American history through scholarly monographs, textbooks, and archives; and the construction of popular memory all in order to develop a narrative analysis of how the Japanese American war experience has been memorialized. I will begin my examination with the years of forgetting to examine how popular culture and memory influenced and was influenced by the emerging academic scholarship, government redress movement, and the creation of monuments and museums. The latter half will focus on the more recent period of remembering and the increasing emergence
of popular culture representations, museum exhibits, memorials, commemorative events, educational programs, and monuments related to the Japanese American war experience.