Djibril Dramé and Xiao Wang Succesfully Defend Doctoral Dissertations

26 April 2022

Photo: UHH

Djibril Dramé and Xiao Wang have both passed their viva voce examinations. They completed their PhD projects in African Studies and Sinology, respectively.

Congratulations to Djibril Dramé and Xiao Wang, who both succesfully defended their doctoral dissertation this month.

Xiao Wang passed her viva voce examination on 12 April. Her thesis, which is entitled The Basis Unit of an Empire: A Study of the Household System in Early Imperial China (ca. 3rd-1st century BCE), employs the oldest household registration files found thus far, which were excavated from a pit at the Qianling site, to reconstruct the houshold registration system in early imperial China. The dissertation shows what these household registration documents contain and how they were used to organise the complicated data of the location, name, age, and gender of every member of millions of households in the empire.

Djibril Dramé passed his viva voce examination on 20 April. His thesis is entitled Mapping dialectal variations in Soninke Manuscripts. Soninke is one of the trans-border languages in West Africa that can be found in many early Islamic manuscripts in Arabic from Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau. By grouping several digitalised manuscripts with Soninke annotations according to their palaeographic patterns and linguistic variation, Dramé's study contributes to our understanding of the historical development of the Soninke dialects and the sociolinguistic reasons behind the distribution of variation in these manuscripts.