Monthly Archive: September 2011

We all tend to see what we want to see — in ourselves, in our friends, in our culture, and in other cultures. In his dissertation, Jens-Uwe Guettel takes a penetrating look at how Germany viewed

How do cultural influences travel from place to place? It is sometimes easy to trace these lines of influence in the modern era, but how did this process work in the past? Looking at the past, how can we decipher

James Joyce is a fascinating writer, but he can be a most difficult author to teach. In her dissertation, Lynn Bongiovanni brings a recent viewpoint – empire theory – to bear on this most singular author, and finds an interesting paradox.

When I searched dissertation titles to find topics that relate to empire, I ran across a thesis entitled A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States and their policies for a postwar disposition of the Japanese Empire 1941-1945. When I contacted the author, Xiaoyuan Liu, I found that the thesis

In their ambitious book Empires of Food, authors Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas take on a huge topic: the cause-and-effect relationship between food systems, societies and governments or, as they phrase it in the book’s subtitle, “feast, famine and the rise and fall of civilizations.”