Library Research in Action: An Interview with Mengliu Cheng

Over the past few years, Mengliu Cheng, GR'29 has become very familiar with the resources of the Penn Libraries’ Center for Global Collections. “Sometimes when I don’t know what to write or take a break, I wander the stacks and get some great inspiration just from looking at the books,” she said in a conversation with me last fall. A doctoral student in Penn’s Department of History, Cheng has been working on a dissertation about agricultural science in modern China, and these physical materials, along with historical journals, databases of Chinese newspapers, and more, have been central to her work.

In 2024, Cheng was awarded a prestigious 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.” Given to three graduate students each year, the prize “recognizes emerging scholarship in the field and fosters intellectual exchange among junior and senior scholars.” Shortly after, she came to my office to talk more about her research. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Tell me a little about yourself.  

I moved here in 2019 for the doctoral program in the History Department, focusing on the Modern China. I competed a master’s degree at Duke University, whose Divinity School hosts very interesting collections because of the connection to missionaries. I used to live in Durham, North Carolina. I enjoyed the community and natural scenery there. Philadelphia is very different from that—it is more like the city that I grew up in. There are benefits to doing archival research here in the Philly area—for example, the Presbyterian Historical Society is here. I also went to the Rockefeller Archive Center in New York on their research grant. I was able to explore their rich collections about China, particularly their collections of photographs.  

I am in my sixth year writing my dissertation. So far, I closely work with the Asianists in the department.  

Tell me about your research.  

My research is about vernacular, popular agricultural science in modern China. It addresses several important topics in the fields, which are all intertwined, in my view. On the one hand, I look at how the environment — especially environmental crises such as soil degradation and natural disasters — prompted people to make adaptations and innovations. On the other hand, I emphasize how ordinary people’s [methods of] innovating approaches could be very different from those of elite scientists, showing a broad spectrum of knowing and doing science. I am looking into cases of inventions of household machines and other popular inventions for farming created by amateur practitioners, turning attention away from a top-down narrative to non-elite, or even non-human, actors.  

Can you talk a little more about how you do your research and which resources you found the most useful for your project?

My dissertation is written by case studies; initially I find the nugget of information in the archive and online databases. Once I find interesting cases in the archive, I focus my research around that case. In the end, I do a lot of work outside of archives. The database that I use the most is the Quan guo bao kan suo yin (全国报刊索引) or the National Index to Chinese Newspaper and Periodicals published by the Shanghai National Library.  

[The database] Duxiu 读秀 is also helpful because you can search keywords, and they provide you the bibliographic information for primary sources. You can search the content of the books and not just the titles or table of contents. Gazetteers are another good resource for me. I also use digital humanities tools such as GIS and Tableau to help me map out historical trends and better organize the timeline of my narratives.  

What is the award you won from the  Association of Asian Studies? Can you tell me more about it?  

Yes, it was awarded to me for a chapter of my dissertation—a case study of an alternative science of farming called “electro-culture.” This method used electricity in the atmosphere to stimulate plant growth. Popular science is at the core of my interest here—how did people in China learn about such technology and then develop it to suit their needs? For example, when a technique from another country such as France, Japan, or the U.S. was experimented in China, practitioners made adaptations to it, such as using local materials like bamboo. A national enthusiasm for electro-farming in the 1930s was triggered by an environmental panic in China due to the prevalent use of chemical fertilizers. In the end, I want to challenge our ideas of agricultural modernization — does it have to be the adaptation and consumption of centralized, industrial products, or could it be some easy, open-source method that you can do in your backyard?

How have the Penn Libraries and the Center for Global Collections helped you in your research?  

Tremendously! Before COVID, I went to the library to get physical copies of materials—Penn has a cool collection of Chinese books, and sometimes when I don’t know what to write or take a break, I wander the stacks and get some great inspiration just from looking at physical books. I can’t live well without having the materials around me. The library organizes the books by subject, and so seeing the Korean and Japanese materials related to a topic is also really important, and helps a student develop and expand research ideas and sources. I find the organization very helpful.  

I requested a lot of books from Interlibrary Loan and the ILL staff were so helpful getting whatever I want from Ivy League institutions, including very rare books. I can get them easily! Even during the [COVID-19] pandemic, that was my work pattern.  

Brian Vivier [Director of the Center for Global Collections] ordered a whole collection from China for me and that was so helpful. I am very grateful. The large 44-volume set is called Zhongguo jin dai nong ye tuan ti zi liao hui bian (中國近代農業團體資料彙編). It really helped my research a lot because it’s a collection of journals and publications of books related to agriculture during the republican period from 1912 to 1949. Some have been digitized, but some issues were not found in the databases—you can only find them in hard copies. The Shanghai National Library’s newspaper index I mentioned above is very helpful, but doesn’t hold every single issue of a journal. I recommend these texts to my own students when I teach as a TA.  

During COVID, I had to explore more online sources. Thankfully, the Penn Libraries has the most important archives that I needed, especially the Shanghai National Library, Duxiu, CNKI [the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure], and Wanfang Dissertations of China.