Dissertation Reviews

Founded in 2010, Dissertation Reviews features overviews of recently defended, unpublished doctoral dissertations in a wide variety of disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our goal is to offer readers a glimpse of each discipline’s immediate present by focusing on the window of time between dissertation defense and first book publication.

Each review provides a summary of the author’s main arguments, the historiographic genealogy in which the author operates, and the main source bases for his or her research. The reviews are also anticipatory, making educated assessments of how the research will advance or challenge our understanding of major issues in the field when it is revised and published in the future.

In addition to the public, non-critical review that is published on the site, authors also receive private, critical commentary from their reviewers designed to help authors during the manuscript revision process. Critical comments are not published on the site or circulated in any way. They are expressly for the author.

Dissertation Reviews also features reviews of and guides to archives, libraries, databases, and other collections where such dissertation research was conducted, to help scholars improve their ability to undertake current and future research.