Research Semester Application

I am very grateful to FRAC for funding my Mellon semester, which turned out to be even more rewarding than I had hoped it would be. During my leave, I was able to spend the semester in (unpaid) residence at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, where they kindly gave me full access to all their resources and allowed me to participate in all of their programs. As a result, I not only accomplished quite a lot of writing and research, but I also became better acquainted with some of the top scholars in my area and had a chance to show them my work. This has helped my work and also created new opportunities for its publication. Here is a summary of my progress.

Writing: As planned, I wrote an article based on the theoretical framework of my book manuscript. I submitted it to the journal Comparative Politics and hope to hear back from them soon. I also wrote a new paper based on my prostitution tax project, and presented it as a seminar paper at the Columbia University Modern China Seminar and as part of the Fairbank Center’s Director’s Seminar series. I had hoped to send the article out to a journal before the beginning of this semester, but still need to do about a week’s worth of work on it before I can do that.

Research and thinking about the new project: Using the resources at Harvard, I was able to do a considerable amount of both primary and secondary research on the prostitution tax project. I was able to devote time to reading about the connections among politics, economics, and the sex industry around the world. This work will help contextualize my work on China. I was also able to develop a better understanding of the politics of the sex industry in China during the period of interest, roughly 1900-1949. In particular, I discovered that local governments took three main strategies in dealing with prostitution during that time: taxing and regulating it, forcing it into particular locations, and actually taking it over and running government brothels. Understanding the scope of this variation helped me to expand the boundaries of my new project, and at the same time to refine the questions that I would like to ask about it. In particular, I realized that I needed to move away from an exclusive focus on taxation, and to have as my main question explaining the variation in local approaches to the politics of dealing with prostitution. Using this insight, I wrote grant proposals for the first part of the field work for the project, which I now foresee taking me not only to Guangdong province, but to Kunming and Tianjin as well. The project is now, I think, much more fully developed and ready to go.

It was a really productive and rewarding semester for me. Thanks for the opportunity to devote myself fully to my research for the semester.

Sincerely,
Elizabeth J. Remick