Since Paul Fuller, a Presbyterian missionary, wrote a B.Th. thesis on Christian approaches to Buddhism in 1929, there has been well over 150 dissertations and theses written on subjects related to Christianity in Thailand. The next thesis after Fuller wasn't written until 13 years later, 1942—by Helen McClure, another Presbyterian missionary. Hers was the first master's thesis. In 1961, Ach. Pisnu Akkapin was the first Thai to write a thesis, and the first doctoral dissertation was completed just six years later by another Presbyterian missionary, Jay Johnson. By the 1990s, this trickle of academic treatments of Christianity in Thailand became something of a flood, which has continued down to the near present. All of this and more is revealed in two lists of dissertations and theses related to Christianity in Thailand, which I have recently uploaded as pdfs to
herbswanson.com. One
(here) is an alphabetical listings, and the other (
here) lists the dissertations and theses by year. The source for both lists is, of course, my ongoing "
An English-Language Bibliography of Materials Related to Christianity in Thailand."
While the alphabetical listing is probably the more useful on for researchers, the chronological list is the more interesting because it gives a sense of the ebb and flow of various subjects investigated by academic researchers. The great majority of those researchers are missionaries and Thai Christians investigating a variety of subjects important to them and to the church in Thailand including numerous works on church growth and evangelism. Far fewer are the work of secular scholars, the first being Donald Lord's very useful 1964 Ph.D. biography of Dan Beach Bradley, which Lord later published as
Mo Bradley and Thailand (1969).
The most recent items on the list were completed in 2011. I can only guess that at least some dissertations and theses written in the last two-plus years haven't been cataloged into the online data bases, and I haven't yet come across any of those that have. Recent rates of production suggest that there should have been about a half dozen or so new works since 2011.
