Engineering Trouble: U.S.–Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent

Abstract

On Monday, January 24, 2022, Thorben Pelzer defends his PhD thesis entitled “Engineering Trouble: U.S.–Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent.” In it, the SFB 1199 researcher follows a transpacific segment of civil engineers through the first half of the 20th century. Using a combination of archival research and database analysis, the thesis describes how engineers imagined themselves as potent actors in reconstructing the young Chinese republic, and then analyzes how this imagination led to frustration, as financially and politically unstable conditions stopped the profession from following its ideals and from materializing its dreams. The thesis adds to the SFB’s understanding of the ‘spatial entrepreneur’ as an analytical category by discussing not only the potentials, but also the limits of spatial agency. An international academic publisher will release a revised version of the dissertation later this year.

Biographical Note

Thorben Pelzer (SFB 1199 & Institute for East Asian Studies, Leipzig University, Germany)

Since September 2017, Thorben Pelzer holds the position of university lecturer for Society and Culture of Modern China at Leipzig University. He graduated in Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, and East Asia Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. Further, he studied at Osaka University, at Tongji University in Shanghai, and at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. He is an alumni of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. As a social and cultural historian of the Republican period, he currently researches Chinese engineers.