University of Massachusetts History Professor Sigrid Schmalzer pointed to a yellowed cut-out Collegian headline, “UMass Professor Publishes Book.”
She said she believes this is not news. “All professors are authors, if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be professors,” she quipped.
Schmalzer, a doctoral graduate of University of California, San Diego, published “The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China” in 2008 through the University of Chicago Press.
“I had a long early life before being published” said Schmalzer, who started research for her book in 2001 and began writing in 2003.
Schmalzer called the eight-year period between research and publishing “relatively fast.”
“There are a number of things that can delay publication,” said Schmalzer. “Some authors don’t want to finish, some authors address all the publisher’s comments, but I just want to finish the project and get it out the door.”
Other delays in publishing can include the publisher’s editors taking a long time to read and comment, the
book may have to be amended to include current events, and other publisher issues, explained Schmalzer.
“I’m a big fan of Stephen Jay Gould,” said Schmalzer on her role models. “A lot of people are inspired by his work.”
Schmalzer explained that Gould is perhaps “the most popular writer on questions relating to evolution,” and wrote critically about evolution and the role of race in evolution. Schmalzer said Gould’s writing was “something interesting to explore.”
“I researched the Chinese Bigfoot, because they have one,” said Schmalzer. China’s bigfoot is known as the Yeren. The Yeren became a paper she wrote and eventually a chapter in her book.
“The People’s Peking Man” is about evolution in relation to politics and popular science in modern China.
Schmalzer writes about science dissemination, explaining that she focuses on “making science available to the public through school, movies and culture,” she said. Schmalzer explained that China wanted to spread the idea that Peking man, a possible early human ancestor found in China, was an entity the Communist government sought to cast as en everyday laborer.
“They want their own to identify as laborers,” said Schmalzer. “Peoples’ sense of what it means to be human changed because of popular science.”
Schmalzer also writes about mass science, where peasants and farmers take part in science by interacting with scientists.
“There is rhetoric about this technique, but a lot less practice of it,” Schmalzer explained.
“It’s pretty typical to spend a year abroad for research,” said Schmalzer, who was in China between 2001 and 2002. “My methods were diverse,” she explained, continuing to say that she read texts, conducted interviews with scientists, museum guides, and publishers and found museum exhibits unchanged from the 1970s.
Schmalzer at one point found a guest book in which museum-goers wrote about their visit in a museum from 1950 which her guide thought was unimportant, but she explained that it showed how the visitors reacted to the exhibits or how they thought they should react to the exhibits.
Schmalzer’s main challenge in writing the book was in the research; many Chinese were reluctant to talk.
“I can’t really blame them,” said Schmalzer, who pointed out that the Chinese government has strict punishments for dissenters and less freedom of speech.
Schmalzer did not collaborate on “Peking Man.”
“Collaboration is the exception in historical writing,” she noted.
“Writing is my favorite thing to do,” said Schmalzer, “but it’s hard get writing done when I’m teaching two classes and on five committees” as she is this semester.
Schmalzer also published two journal articles in 2002, “Breeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place in a Chinese County, 1929-1937” and “Fishing and Fishers in Penghu, Taiwan, 1895-1970,” and an essay called “On the Appropriate Use of Rose-Colored Glasses” in 2007 about socialist China.
Sam Hayes can be reached at [email protected].
