The present article analyzes dissertations written by international doctoral graduates at Teachers College during the first two decades of the twentieth century. By focusing on the earliest period of the doctoral program, our work seeks to understand the role of the dissertation archive in producing and governing the emerging field of academic education research with global entanglements. Questions about what constitutes a dissertation, what counts as scholarship, and how expertise is defined were all in flux at this time. Setting the lens exclusively on international students allows us to begin to see the generation of a global language of education shaped by power/knowledge relations within academia.