Theatre Historiography Research Articles

Catachthonic Romanticism: Buried History, Deep Ruins

This article considers Romanticism in terms of racial migration and history, seventeenth-century political theory, Whig cultural identity, legitimacy, and commerce. By examining uses of race, heritage, and region I will explain how antiquarian historical theories are incorporated into developing notions of cultural identity. In particular, this approach adds a temporal dimension to the spatialities of archipelagic thinking: historicizing archipelagic understanding to develop a catachthonic approach that analyses the historicity of historiographical theories of nationality and identity, effectively through a doubled, or subterranean, history.

Year 1948: Emancipation of Women and Slovak Theatre.

Abstract From the cultural and art point of view, the year 1948 in Czechoslovakia was not just the so-called “Victorious February” of the working people. The remarkable phenomenon of this era, which was related to the post-war political and social movement, was the phenomenon of female emancipation and feminization of the stage production. During the two consecutive theatre seasons 1947/1948 and 1948/1949, at The New Scene Theatre of the National Theatre in Bratislava, several women, led by the director Magda Husaková-Lokvencová created several productions. For the first time, a sovereign feminine alliance had emerged in our performance art, proving that conceptual and thoughtful theatrical production may not be just the domain of men. These women contributed to deconstructing the beliefs of typically male and typically female professions as well as transforming traditional views of the role and position of both sexes in society and the arts. The attention of theatre historiography in the recapitalization of the impacts of the breakthrough events of the Czechoslovak post-war politics of the forty years on cultural events so far focused mainly on the issues of dramaturgy and poetics, the process of ideological transformation and the sovietisation of art in the spirit of socialist realism. The subject of socialist emancipation and theatre was at the edge of the interest of our theatrology. Ten years ago, a collective monograph, dedicated to the first lady of the Slovak theatre directors, Magda Husaková-Lokvencová, managing to free her forgotten personality and work and return her to the context of Slovak theatre history in the second half of the 20th century. There is still room for further research, complementing the knowledge and reflection of the advent of women in the sphere of theatre directory, dramaturgy and scenography artwork, as part of the history of gender relations in Slovakia. Increased interest in the history of women provokes a new reflection on the issue of emancipation and theatre.

SONG HISTORY NARRATIVES AS GRAND ALLEGORY

My interest in Song history emerged well after my initial training in pre-modern Chinese literature. When I first began to read Song historical texts, I knew nothing about historiographical theory, so I blithely used the same techniques for close reading that I had used to decipher Tang-Song poetry. Using these strategies for reading literature—nothing much beyond old school European philology—I was able to document the different chronological layers in the Song History (Songshi 宋史) biography of Qin Gui 秦檜 (1090–1155). When this article appeared in 1998, several colleagues more attuned to theoretical issues than I was told me its approach and findings were very much au courant. It seems, stumbling around in the dark, I had unwittingly taken the linguistic turn.

Georg Iggers, 1926–2017

Georg Gerson Iggers, a world-renowned historiographer and cofounder of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography, passed away in Buffalo, New York, on 26 November 2017. He was 90 years old.

The Poetics of Performance Nonevents

Contemporary theatre and performance theory has come to rely heavily upon the idea of the event. Thanks to the advent of performance studies and recent critical historiography, it is now common to understand the study of theatre as a science of events, rather than of dramatic texts. But understanding theatre as a kind of event comes with its own limitations. Contemporary examples of this way of thinking in both performance theory and conservative theatre historiography, considered alongside artifacts of performances that never took place, make clear the problem of theatrical creations that cannot be linked to performance events. Early modern rationalist dramatic theory provides a framework that may address this problem. Alexander Baumgarten's 1735 Reflections on Poetry supplies categories that permit us to engage with the artifacts of theatrical nonevents. Baumgarten's criteria for poetic creation—clarity, vividness, and thematic coherence—can be adapted to construct a theatrical theory that embraces objects currently stranded from our ways of thinking about the nature of theatre.

‘Mere Lookers-On at Life’: Point of View and Spectator Narrative

This essay develops a new approach to print narratives about theatregoing during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Immensely popular with contemporary readers, theatrical memoirs and diaries have been a boon to theatre historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but these texts have more often been studied in spite of their subjective perspectives than because of them. Building on work in theatre historiography and audience studies, this essay seeks to transform the spectator’s discursive acts of shaping, framing, and stressing from an obstacle into an opportunity. In order to resituate historical spectator narratives in a wider narrative context, I read diaries and essays by Henry Crabb Robinson and Lady Maud Tree in conversation with Charlotte Brontë’s fictional scenes of spectatorship in Villette. This intertextual approach, I suggest, yields a more complete understanding of how different points of view facilitated claims about performance. In particular, I explore how gender affected point of view. While male reviewers and diarists often employ a disinterested narrative persona that de-emphasises their own bodies, I argue that many actress autobiographies craft an alternative form of narrative authority that makes use of the limitations of embodiment – qualities like immobility, bodily sensation, and circumscribed vision.

Online Role-playing Games and the Definition of Theatre

Online role-playing games are a form of entertainment in which players create characters and improvisationally perform scenes together within a digital virtual world. It has many theatre-like aspects, which raises the question of whether it is in fact a form of theatre. To answer that question, however, one must first have a definition of theatre – an issue with disciplinary consequences – and in this article Tobin Nellhaus develops a definition founded on social ontology, suggesting that theatrical performance, unlike other social practices, replicates society's ontology. From that perspective, online role-playing meets the definition of theatre. But its digital environment raises another set of problems, since embodiment, space, and presence in online role-playing are necessarily unlike what we experience in traditional theatre. Here, Nellhaus brings these three aspects of performance together through the concept of embodied social presence, showing how they operate in both customary theatre and online role-playing. Tobin Nellhaus is an independent scholar who was Librarian for Performing Arts, Media, and Philosophy at Yale University. He has published mainly on the relationship between theatre and communication practices, and on critical realist theory in theatre historiography. He is the General Editor of the third edition of Theatre Histories (London: Routledge, 2016), and the author of Theater, Communication, Critical Realism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth. Edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii + 205 + 11 illus. £58/$95 Hb; £45.99/$69.99 Eb. - Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England. By Jim Davis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 274 + 68 illus. £64.99/$99.99 Hb.

Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth. Edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii + 205 + 11 illus. £58/$95 Hb; £45.99/$69.99 Eb. - Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England. By Jim Davis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 274 + 68 illus. £64.99/$99.99 Hb.

Anthropology and Historiography: A Deconstructive Analysis of K. C. Chang’s Shamanic Approach in Chinese Archaeology

Abstract The hypothesis of ancient Chinese shamanism popularized by K. C. Chang in the 1980s has long been one of the central problems in the study of Chinese archaeology. By examining the structures that constitute Chang’s shamanic framework, this article argues that the problem centers around two major issues. The first is that Chang follows a tradition in Chinese academic historiography of using late historical texts to interpret Neolithic and Bronze Age materials. The second is that, in order to explore the dynamics of the formation of Chinese civilization, he employs Western theories in his construction of the history of shamanism. This article discusses the problems associated with using textual materials for interpretations of archaeological finds. It also discusses “substratum theory,” the way in which it influenced Chang’s understanding of shamanic civilization, and the manner in which Western anthropological theory was incorporated into Chang’s historiographical model. Accordingly, the author concludes that this shamanism problem in Chinese archaeology actually stems from a mixture of the Chinese historiographical tradition and Western anthropological theories, which together make Chang’s writing develop a meta-narrative that leads directly to two characteristics: generalization and polymorphism.

Historying the Past: New Histories in Art Education

Evolutions within the field of historiography have been followed closely by historians of art education, and in recent years, a shift to arts-based constructions of history has radically redefined art education history. The question of how to do this new kind of history, both methodologically and theoretically, has been addressed periodically in art education literature. In the following article, I will first provide a review of key literature from the past 30 years, chronicling a shift toward more artful histories, and then introduce recent historiographic theory as a way to articulate the practice of historying the past, taking as an example the art department at Central Technical School in Toronto, Canada. Bringing theory and practice together creates a synergistic link between the concept of new histories and the unique positioning of an art education historian.

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick Victor Emeljanow British Drama of the Industrial Revolution. By Frederick Burwick. Cambridge UP, 2015. Cloth $99.99. 320 pages. It is perhaps no coincidence that the term "melodrama" began its groundbreaking journey toward cultural and theatrical significance during the throes of the Vietnam War, which contributed to making the boundaries between high and low art irrelevant just as much as the emergence of the postmodern condition. As long ago as 1964, Michael Booth, Brooks McNamara, and Eric Bentley were some of the critics and theatre historians responsible for bringing to our attention the rich [End Page 130] values of popular entertainments among which melodrama proved to be an enduring dramatic genre. Since then critical works have proliferated exponentially, starting with examinations of the content of melodrama and its various manifestations to a status in which theatre historiography has recognized the conditions which gave rise to melodrama and, more importantly, the social and cultural seedbed out of which it sprang and which the genre never forgot. It is in this context that Frederick Burwick's recent book should be placed: it both reinforces the contemporary scholarly interest in melodrama as social documentation, and positions the form as a demonstration whereby the conditions of living could be made immediately accessible to both metropolitan and provincial spectators. Those conditions were of course inextricably tied to the consequences of the Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1840 in particular. Jane Moody's volume, Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Burwick's Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre 1780-1830 (Palgrave, 2011) both focus on theatres in London, the magnet city that drew those who had been deracinated by the turmoil of industrial change in the British provinces during the period under discussion. Burwick's new book, however, charts a journey that starts in London as players joined provincial theatre companies to perform plays with which they had become identified in the metropolis. As well, that journey enabled theatre practitioners to select their vehicles, which they regarded as appropriate for the particular venues and towns where they toured. In so doing, they were able to support the need for solidarity by performing plays that might reflect the immediate concerns of their audiences, whether they comprised out-of-work handloom weavers (who were part of the cotton, wool, or carpet industries), steel workers, miners, or even the tradesmen and members of the Friendly Societies who sponsored individual performances. Burwick's contention is that "the meaning of a play changes with every change in the performance location" (10), which reflects the protean nature of melodrama and its progeny and is one of this book's most valuable contributions to the discourses around genre, theatre venues, and the composition of audiences during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Burwick compellingly develops the theme that London's illegitimate theatre became the "dramatic newsreel of the modern metropolis" by re-emphasizing the significance of "the theatre as an agency of reform directly involved with the labour movement" (7, 16). Such comments affirm the immediacy of a changing theatre culture that mirrored the struggle for political reform and social stability, both of which would elude most of the population throughout the period. Nevertheless, Burwick clearly illustrates the role of the theatre in the period as providing a dynamic and influential forum that gained its strength and relevance in tandem with the growing demand for social reform. This demonstration of the theatre's close engagement with the concerns of its audiences is very welcome. Burwick's book does this with great skill. He identifies some of the key documents that recur as their lifespan was being extended by the numerous revivals in the provinces. For example, Samuel Foote's The Mayor of Garratt, or, The Election was first performed at the Haymarket theatre in 1763, [End Page 131] but the elements of political satire kept it very much alive in provincial centers such as Huddersfield (1826) and Belfast (1837), among others. James Sheridan Knowles's The Hunchback, depicting the faults of the aristocracy, was originally produced at Covent Garden in 1832, just as the 1832 Reform Bill...

Luiz Francisco Rebello e a censura: diálogos com a História

Denouncing and exposing censorship procedures has been one of Luiz Francisco Rebello’s (1924-2011) most visible lines of action, whether in his public interventions, his theatrical practice, his playwriting or in his theatre historiography. In this essay, we remember and discuss some key moments of Rebello’s resistance to censorship: his intervention as keynote speaker in the International Federation for Theatre Research (Lisbon, 2009); his controversial direction of the Companhia do Teatro Municipal, performing in the municipal venue Teatro São Luiz (1971); his participation in the organization of a conference cycle on German documentary-theatre (1972); and in the 2nd Republican Congress, where he discussed the situation of theatre in Portugal (Aveiro, 1969). We also look back on his play, Portugal, anos 40, directed by Carlos Avilez (at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1982). LUIZ FRANCISCO REBELLO / CENSORSHIP / ARTISTIC RESISTANCE / PORTUGUESE THEATRE / HISTORY

A Note from the Editor

A Note from the Editor Gwendolyn Alker I am pleased to introduce this general issue—the last of volume 27 and my final issue as editor of Theatre Topics. This issue presents a diversity of voices that all reflect the mission of the journal: to highlight how theatre can move between theory and practice, off the page and into specific communities and classrooms. The issue opens with Erika Hughes's essay "'The Veterans Project': Historiography in/as Performance." She adds to the burgeoning literature on applied theatre for combat veterans by focusing on "The Veterans Project," developed and performed at Arizona State University. What differs in this essay from much of the existing literature, however, is the nature of this "unscripted performance series that provides a live forum for veterans to share their stories with their communities" (179). Her ensuing exegesis of these witty and vulnerable improvisatory performances do much to complicate notions of gender and identity in the US armed forces. The use of such ethnographic theatre—this project is now in its fifth year—has allowed for a constant evolution and contemporary response to the ongoing stream of veterans as they reintegrate back into our national and local communities. Katelyn Hale Wood's "Curative Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Theatre Historiography Classroom" is an eminently useful essay that speaks to one of the core missions at TT: giving theatre teachers tools to keep their materials and teaching methods innovative. Utilizing the term curative to present an alternate mode of teaching theatre history to undergraduates, Wood challenges all faculty to think beyond the confines of historical narrative. She also situates this conversation (smartly) within our larger cultural conversations of the moment, including what is "fact" and how to negotiate teaching such truths to our students. Read this essay for some useful ideas to apply to almost any introductory theatre lecture. The next essay is also particularly timely and, in many ways, continues the conversations raised in the special issue on Latinx theatre from earlier in this volume. In "Deferred Action's Visibility for Legal Nonexistence and Legislative Power," Shelby-Allison Hibbs examines a recent production of Dallas Theater Center that was created with Cara Mia Theatre and staged in the spring of 2016. This play staged and challenged the conflicts that have been all too present within activist and political communities (both locally in North Texas and in Washington, DC). In particular it centers around the so-called Dreamers—young immigrants who were given legal protection from deportation due to President Barack Obama's executive action, known as DACA, in 2012.1 Such legal action has been a flashpoint of controversy since that time—especially after the election of Donald Trump and his administration's anti-immigrant rhetoric—making this play, and Hibbs's analysis of it, extremely timely. Emily Jane Warheit's fascinating and detailed investigation of Boalian techniques, specifically Forum theatre, within the context of public health work in Africa completes the essay section of this issue. In "Devising Theatrical Health Interventions in East Africa," she questions how the competing agendas of Boal's work and the funding streams that often enable such work coexist in both useful and problematic ways. Specifically, the basic nature of Boal's bottom-up methodologies often conflict with the top-down structures of international development organizations. Warheit's discussion of the specific challenges and successes of Magnet Theatre enlightens the evolving Boalian tradition as it moves into increasingly varied locations and applications. [End Page vii] In this issue we are pleased to include three notes from the field: one in print only, one an online-only offering, and one a hybrid piece that will appear in both formats. Our first note is a more developed version of a roundtable that began at the Congress on Research in Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars Joint Conference in November of 2016. Here, Anurima Banerji, Anusha Kedhar, Royona Mitra, Janet O'Shea, and Shanti Pillai share the cross-cultural possibilities and challenges of transferring the guru–shishya parampara (a South Asian teacher–disciple mentorship model) to US classroom environments. The particular challenges of changing certain pedagogical traditions and of carrying these histories on...

Inventing The Performing Arts: Modernity and Tradition in Colonial Indonesia by Matthew Isaac Cohen

Reviewed by: Inventing The Performing Arts: Modernity and Tradition in Colonial Indonesia by Matthew Isaac Cohen Kathy Foley INVENTING THE PERFORMING ARTS: MODERNITY AND TRADITION IN COLONIAL INDONESIA. By Matthew Isaac Cohen. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. 352 pp. cloth, $65. Matthew Cohen is one of a small group of researchers who is filling in the gaps on twentieth-century Indonesian theatre historiography by determinedly combing archives. His most recent book will be of interest to those researching Indonesian dance, music, theatre, popular entertainments, and cultural history. It surveys how the performing arts reflected and modeled the altering social, political, and economic circumstances of colonial Indonesia. The information comes from detailed readings of colonial-era newspapers for information on performance events and artists' lives, which Cohen then filters through contemporary research on Indonesia's history and elucidates via contemporary cultural theory. His detail work allows him to revitalize our understandings of popular entertainments that were in their own era often ignored by elites and have subsequently been overlooked in Indonesian theatre histories. Cohen's characteristic style of examining newspapers and journals for evidence and then interpreting them via historical and cultural analysis was initiated in his The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theatre in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (2006), which did a particular case study focusing on the work of the Eurasian theatre maker Auguste Mahieu (1865–1903), showing how his innovative popular theatre company reflected the intercultural interactions around the turn of the twentieth century when Chinese, Indos (Eurasians), and Javanese artists collaborated to develop their new popular urban theatre form. His second book, Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on the International Stage, 1905–1952 (2010), took a larger frame in terms of time and geography but used some of the same research style and interpretive techniques: he looked at international reception and intercultural interactions of multiple performers of Javanese, Balinese, and European descent who toured Europe and the United States representing—or in some cases misrepresenting—Java and Bali. Performers who lived in or toured Europe included Dutch East Indies performers such as Dewi Dja, who began as a street dancer in east Java and ended up in Hollywood movies after doing stints touring internationally and performing in an American nightclub in Chicago. Western artists who presented themselves as Javanized were also detailed, for example, Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer who had spent time in the colony as a wife of a Dutch military man and found that Orientalism pleased her clientele in Paris, and Eve Gauthier, an opera singer who, after a relatively short period in the Dutch [End Page 488] colony, began representing Java on vaudeville stages and then went on to Western avant-garde art music circles. In Performing Otherness, Cohen showed how touring was a two-way street whereby Dutch East Indies performers garnered new ideas and status in creating their modern arts (in a way that might be compared to Sada Yakko and Kawakami Otojirō in Japan or Mei Lang Fan in China), while many Westerners who had some Javanese or Balinese experience became interpreters of the colony's arts in a transnational frame from the late 1890s to Indonesian independence. Cohen's current book covers the same time period as Performing Otherness, but instead of focusing on Euro-American spectatorship, this text gives the view from inside the modernizing colony, as thinkers and artists selectively borrowed Western forms or rethought local heritage for their changing audiences. Some topics that have been rarely reported in other sources are included: for example, impacts of Western or Japanese circuses and other late nineteenth-century touring companies, Japanese propaganda theatre in World War II, influences of Hollywood or jazz on Dutch East Indies popular culture, and so on. We also get a sense of the connections of companies and personnel between Malaya, the Philippines, and China. The work envisions an interconnected world in flux. Cohen has gained a wealth of information though reading memoirs, popular literature, newspapers, and other sources. His explanations, of course, remain significantly more detailed for the forms that garnered the attention of the elite or experienced Dutch or Japanese censorship (which thereby created records), but Cohen additionally turns up important information...

Curative Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Theatre Historiography Classroom

Curative Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Theatre Historiography Classroom

Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660–1900 by Richard Schoch

Reviewed by: Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660–1900 by Richard Schoch Edward Ziter WRITING THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH STAGE, 1660–1900. By Richard Schoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016; pp. 404. In past writings Richard Schoch has argued that the theatre was a central site for the development and dissemination of historical thought in nineteenth-century England. With Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660–1900 he shifts his attention from theatre as historiography to the historiography [End Page 441] of the theatre. This is clearly an understudied subject. While a few scholars have examined the texts that form the core of Schoch’s study, many have done so only to dismiss them, and no scholar has brought the rigor and sustained analysis displayed in this book. In short, Schoch really believes that the annotated copies of Langbaine’s An Account of the English Poets (1691), David Erskine Baker’s The Companion to the Playhouse (1764), and John Payne Collier’s History of English Dramatic Poetry (1831) are important and demand study, and he does a fine job of convincing his reader. He accomplishes this (daunting) task because he is principally concerned with these and other texts as poles in a dynamic field of historical imagining, rather than as markers in historicism’s progress. Schoch makes the case that debates about the nature of the past—debates that are now understood as a part of our emerging modernity—were on full display as British thinkers first began to construct the history of their national stage. Even more compellingly, he shows that theatre’s status as an embodied activity, as a selective occupation, and as a storehouse of texts shaped the contours of this debate. The historiography of the theatre differed from historiography more generally. How could it not, Schoch explains, when the theatre functions as an archive, a repertoire, a guild, and a space of convivial gathering. He shows how different forms of theatre historiography not only documented a body of plays, but also preserved myths of the transmission of acting choices and codes of professional behavior, while generating the idea of a communal group of play-goers and scholars connected through their shared knowledge of the art. The book foregrounds the work other scholars have done to expand our understanding of theatre as historiography, such as Diana Taylor’s examination of the tension between repertoire and archive and much of Joseph Roach’s work on performance genealogies in the same period. Schoch criticizes some scholars for their failure to recognize the significance of the texts that he analyzes. Key to this significance is his assertion that a range of Restoration and early eighteenth-century texts often read as limited primary materials can be productively read as theatre history when situated within contemporary conversations of the stage. Judith Milhous and Robert Hume asserted that nothing published before the 1708 Roscius Anglicanus could be described as a historical review of literature or drama; Schoch begins his analysis forty-eight years earlier. Jacky Bratton’s dismissal of the Biographia Dramatica (1782) and earlier playlists as being purely focused on play texts posits an anachronistic text-performance binary, according to Schoch. By contrast, reading playlists with para-texts reveals that writing on the theatre assumed an embrace between page and stage even in these early texts: “antipathies came much much later” (74). While Schoch does not tell a linear story, he does posit a beginning and an end. He sees a multitude of types of writing on theatre history emerging in the Restoration, writing that was prompted by the popularity of reading plays during the Interregnum (48) and by a wish to assert artistic continuity with the theatre before the Civil War (218). He ends his study with the nineteenth century, because there he sees the emergence and eventual dominance of “performance reconstructions as based on authoritative primary sources” (9). Theatre history in the interim comes in a variety of forms: “catalogue, calendar, chronicle, list, dictionary, dialogue, documentary, transcription, marginalia, biography, and narrative” (10). Such forms have been heretofore sidelined by a progressivist view of history that excludes documents that do not move us closer to narrative historiography...

Mad Men Is History

Having ceased production in 2015, Mad Men is history. It remains, however, an apt example of the ways in which television has lately been offering a great deal of history through its programming. Television offers accessible and inviting imaginaries of historical periods and events, yet this programming is marked by different theories of historiography and very different assumptions about the role and purpose of history than that which animates the work of scholarly historians. Indeed the gulf between these approaches to history is significant not only for its size, but also for the divide it produces in historical knowledge and, in turn, the ways history can be called upon to inform political decision-making and to influence social practice. The history presented by television, therefore, is important to consider precisely because of the ways it can frame historical discourses and influence assumptions about the role of history. As a touchstone for reconsiderations of 1960s cultural history, Mad Men presented a form of history modeled on the makeover and influenced by an affinity for advertisements. This essay will interrogate the institutional, thematic, and cultural histories of the series itself in order to understand the ways it represented history to its viewers.

Notes for a Muslim American theatre historiography or a conclusion that is a beginning

Abstract

‘Being Alive’ of Internal Development Theory and Taking Root of New Theories of Historiography

This paper tries to analyze the research trend on modern and contemporary history of Korea between 2014 and 2015. The most striking event was the notification of Korean education ministry on state-sponsored compilation of history textbooks. This event is expected to influence on the academia of Korean history in three ways. Firstly, students will be fixed on monolithic thinking. Secondly, historians shall produce historiographies in bloc logic of conservative-progressive. Thirdly, further researches on new theories of historiography shall be shrunk.BR Research trend can be summarized as follows : Internal Development theory has enjoyed wide support, while producing a plenty of researches through the debates with New Right historians. Theory of colonial modernity takes root firmly in academia in spite of snubbing of mainstream Korean historians. Researches on trans-national history increases markedly. While conceptual history begins to be utilized, discourse analysis produce considerable achievements from the post-modern points of view.BR New Right historiography shares nationalism and developmentalism with Korean mainstream nationalist historiography. It also shares modernism and post-nationalism with the theory of colonial modernity, trans-national history. I hope that historians will approach history with a particular attention to peace, human rights, freedom, and social equality through intense debates among the above three trends of historiography.

Book Review: Bakich,O. M. (2015). Valerii Pereleshin: Life of a Silkworm Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Book Review: Bakich,O. M. (2015). Valerii Pereleshin: Life of a Silkworm Toronto: University of Toronto Press