Library research in action: Wandering the stacks with Mengliu Cheng
The history doctoral student is working on a dissertation about agricultural science in modern China with the help of Penn Libraries’ Zilberman Family Center for Global Collections.
2 min. read
Since arriving at Penn in 2019, Mengliu Cheng has grown very familiar with the resources of the Penn Libraries’ Zilberman Family Center for Global Collections. “Sometimes when I don’t know what to write or want to take a break, I wander the stacks and get some great inspiration just from looking at the books,” she says. A doctoral student in history in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, Cheng has been working on a dissertation about agricultural science in modern China, and these physical materials, along with historical journals and databases of Chinese newspapers, have been central to her work.
In 2024, Cheng was awarded a Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Association of Asian Studies for a work based on a chapter in her dissertation, “Disenchanting Foreign Knowledge: Revealing Agricultural ‘Pseudoscience’ in China, 1930s-1940s.”
“My dissertation discusses how people invented and made machines in everyday life, especially machines related to farming,” Cheng says. “I am particularly interested in how individual inventors and rural workshops adopted vernacular technologies, or sometimes controversial, even ‘pseudoscientific’ methods, to achieve agricultural and industrial modernity.”
Cheng explains how Penn Libraries and the Zilberman Center has aided her research. “The library organizes the books by subject, so seeing the Korean and Japanese materials related to a topic are also really important and can help a student develop and expand research ideas and sources. I find the organization very helpful," she says.
This story is by Anna-Alexandra Fodde-Reguer. Read more at Penn Libraries.
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