Miruna Belea and Xuan Tran Thi Successfully Defend their PhD Dissertations

20 December 2024

Photo: CSMC

Just before the end of the year, two more PhD researchers from the CSMC Graduate School have completed their doctoral projects: Miruna Belea defended her dissertation in Jewish Studies and Xuan Tran Thi in Sinology. Congratulations!

In her PhD dissertation, which entitled Sefer Shimmushei Torah: A Synoptic Edition and its Wirkungsgeschichte, Miruna Belea traces back the history of the transmission of Sefer Shimmush Torah from the point of view of its material and textual features. Her work provides a comparative analysis of the corpus’ codicological features and proposes scholarly editions of the three texts which constitute a single concept in the scholarly literature. Her project was supervised by Giuseppe Veltri.

Xuan Tran Thi wrote her dissertation on Vietnamese Imperial Written Communication and Document Archiving: The Thuong du of Emperor Tu Duc (r. 1847–1883). She provides a comprehensive study of the Thuong du上諭 (‘instruction of the highest’), a type of administrative documents produced by the Nguyen dynasty (1802–1945). The first part of the dissertation explains the reasons why Thuong du first emerged during the reign of Emperor Minh Menh (r. 1820–1841), and the ways they became an effective communicative tool to increase the emperor’s authority in the early Nguyen period. The second part focuses on the Thuong du of Emperor Tu Duc (r. 1847–1883). Her supervisor was Michael Friedrich.