Cantando al Amanecer (A Drum is a Woman) + The contemporary verse novel written by Latinx female author
Julia Piastro Garcia, Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures

Novels in verse are not a recent phenomenon. This genre was born between the 18th and 19th centuries, at the same time as the prose novel. The Anglophone sphere witnessed a notable resurgence of novels in verse at the end of the 20th century, many of them aimed at adolescents and young adults. In the United States, Latinx literature has been part of a shift towards a plurality of perspectives within this genre.  However, there are few examples of contemporary verse novels written in Spanish. In this project, I propose to write the verse novel in Spanish "Cantando al Amanecer" (A Drum is a Woman), a book exploring themes of identity, sexuality, and machismo within the Mexican culture. This creative project will be complemented by an academic research of three verse novels written by contemporary Latinx female authors: Elizabeth Acevedo, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Alessandra Narváez-Varela.

“Looking Backward, Moving Forward”: Carroll Greene Jr. and Black Public History Movement, 1960 – 2000
Erena Nakashima, History

My dissertation examines the life and work of Carroll Greene Jr. (1931 – 2007), a Black Museum professional, to explore the institutional formation of the Black public history movement in the late twentieth century. Throughout his four-decade career, Greene played a crucial role in bridging Black artists, intellectuals, local organizations, and museum world professionals. Examining Greene’s seven projects in public institutions to find a place for his expertise, to create and preserve spaces and institutions that presented Black-centered perspectives, and to collect Black material culture that had been largely neglected or ignored, my project illustrates Black public history as a multi-dimensional movement built upon a web of local, national, and international knowledge and resources as well as tactics to democratize American cultural landscape.

Listening to Appalachian Voices in the Writing Classroom
Chelsea Ensley, English

Drawing from relational cultural theory, my dissertation, "Listening to Appalachian Voices in the Writing Classroom," demonstrates the value of growth-fostering relationships between Appalachian students and writing teachers. By conducting interviews and surveying composition teachers at a rural university, I bring awareness to how Appalachian student-writers perceive their cultural identity and literacy practices, as well as how composition teachers understand and engage their Appalachian students. In addition, my dissertation argues how student-teacher relationships—characterized by mutuality, connection, and empathy—can potentially empower Appalachian students as academic writers and members of their own cultural community.

BOONE CO, USA
Haley Crigger, English

This story collection traverses 250 years of Northern Kentucky history—from 1801 to 2050—examining themes of legacy, self-determination, queerness, addiction, family, Evangelical culture and the bastardization of Christianity, and the false narrative of white supremacy. It will be supplemented with a critical essay that examines the 21st-century literary landscape of the “Christ-Haunted” South. Namesake of frontiersman Daniel Boone, birthplace of Margaret Garner, southern border of the Ohio River, Boone County, Kentucky has often set the stage for our nation’s greatest moral crises. As a whole, the collection is a meditation on geographical and metaphysical crossroads, located in the historical call and response between evil and the Bluegrass.

The Performance of Motherhood
Barbara Besendorfer, Asian, East European, and German Studies

The first German women’s movement at the end of the 19th century used spiritual motherhood as a concept to move women, primarily childless and unmarried women, from the margins of society and place them at the center as spiritual mothers. This conceptualization contributed to and institutionalized a maternal discourse prevalent in the German Empire, other European countries, and North America since specific female ethics and motherliness were assumed in every female human being. Focused primarily on the writings of Henriette Schrader-Breymann, Helene Lange, and Helene Stöcker, this dissertation will first explore spiritual motherhood as a valuable tool for women to open up the private sphere of the household. Second, it will elucidate spiritual motherhood as a form of feminist mothering as it was described in the writings of Second Wave feminism, and third, it strives to investigate ideas of spiritual motherhood in the newly gained German colonies. This dissertation argues that spiritual motherhood was not only a way to move women from the margins of society to the center but also a modern form of mothering that allowed women at the end of the 19th century to escape the patriarchal system of its time.

Participation in extracurricular activities and college matriculation: Is there an advantage for the disadvantaged?
Michael Parrish, Sociology

Research suggests two competing theories about the benefit for adolescents who involve themselves in extracurricular activities during secondary school education. Cultural capital theory posits that participation in school-based activities can expose youth from lower class backgrounds to high class culture and values. In doing so, individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds may gain access to better educational opportunities. The “diminished returns” stance states that students involved in school-based activities must manage the competing demands of academic achievement and extracurricular involvement, and therefore the former may suffer due to the latter. The proposed research examines whether involvement in school-based activities—such as the arts, sports, literature, politics, and academic activities—have a differential effect for minority student’s and girl’s ability to matriculate to a post-secondary institution. I use longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (ADD Health) which consists of a nationally representative sample of respondents taken from 7th thru 12th graders during the 1994-1995 school year *Wave I) and follows their educational progress taken from respondents through 2008-2009 (Wave IV). Employing this data, this research examines which type of extracurricular activity involvement increases the probability of college matriculation for students of color and girls.

Long-Term Effect of Early Exposure to Substance Use
Sachin Sisodiya, Economics

Using National Survey on Drug Use & Health (NSDUH) data, this study tries to explore (1) the gateway drug effect (i.e., progression of substance abuse from licit drugs (for example, alcohol, and cigarette) during adolescence to harder drugs (for example, heroin, and cocaine) abuse and/or dependence in adulthood, (2) the impact of exposure to substance use and/or abuse during adolescence on the economic, health, and educational attainment outcomes during adult life, (3) conditional on substance use and/or abuse during adolescence, whether delaying the initiation of substance use and/or abuse helps significantly reduce the negative effects on economic, health, and educational attainment outcomes during adult life. 

Veiled Schools: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Placemaking in Black High Schools in the U.S. South
Kierra Toney, Sociology

This study offers insights into how majority Black high schools contribute to Blackplacemaking– or how urban Black people create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. This study explores the historic and ongoing Black placemaking in two majority Black high schools in a midsize city, Chattanooga, Tennessee. The two schools chosen as the focus of this analysis represent two pathways which (re)produced racial homogeneity in schools following the legal desegregation of the education system. To do this I use a comparative historical case study methodology by combining archival document analysis, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observations. In this study I apply the Black placemaking framework to Black high schools to better understand the multifaceted relationship between schools and the communities which sustain them.

Feature film screenplay An Ordinary Life: Character Development Methodology for Screenwriting
Daniela Granja, Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures

My doctoral dissertation project consists of two parts: a screenplay for a feature film entitled An Ordinary Life and a character development methodology for screenwriting. The screenplay includes elements of diversity and inclusivity both in theme and how the characters are portrayed telling the story of an Ecuadorian couple who travels to Indiana, USA, to study and how their marriage progresses into forming a family. This story deals with culture shock, discrimination, racism, acceptance, generosity between cultures, relationship issues, diverse views of parenthood, even diverse ways to love. The research part of my dissertation centers on the elaboration of a character development methodology that will link academic elements raging from literary criticism to film studies and practical approaches to the exercise of creative writing. The creative writing part of my dissertation exemplifies the methodology and the proposed concepts.

Regularity of sets of finite fractional perimeter and nonlocal minimal surfaces in metric measure spaces
Josh Kline, Mathematical Sciences

If one takes a wire loop and dips it into a dish of liquid soap, the film that remains will have the smallest possible surface area compared with all possible films stretching across the wire. Such a film is an example of a minimal surface, and the surface area measurement is an example of a local perimeter measure.  In the setting of a metric space (where we can talk about distance, but not direction), we study a related nonlocal notion, known as fractional perimeter, and objects called nonlocal minimal surfaces, which minimize this measurement. In particular, we first study the dimension of the boundaries of sets which have finite fractional perimeter.  Concerning minimizers, we then investigate when nonlocal minimal surfaces exist, and the improved smoothness of their boundaries when they do.

Transnational Feminist Networks in South Asia: Bridging Divides and Building Solidarities in South-South Feminist Relations
Sarah Imran, School for Public and International Affairs

For my dissertation, I propose to conduct an investigation of transnational feminist networks in South Asia to determine how they developed, for what purposes, and with what challenges in an attempt to flesh out what is distinctive about transnational feminist political organizing in the region and what it can contribute to transnational feminist theorizing. A particular focus on these divides and whether South Asian TFNs take them on in their organizing is particularly important in a regional context rife with conflict and with a rich diversity of contentious ethnic, cultural and religious identities, and political ideologies. I propose to study South Asian TFNs that span Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

Marijuana Politics: Elite Racial Discourse, Socio-Economic (In)Justice, and Attitudes Towards Marijuana Legislation in the US
Yorkow Oppon-Acquah, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) 

Legalizing marijuana is widely characterized by proponents as an attempt to correct the wrongs of continuing racial unfairness in the American criminal justice system. However, no prior study directly evaluates the influence of pro- and anti-legalization arguments by elites that are framed explicitly in terms of the effects legalization would have on the African American community. Considering this, the primary objective of my dissertation is to understand how deeply rooted opinions about marijuana legalization are. I do so by (1) examining the extent to which explicit elite racial appeals prime voters’ racial predisposition on marijuana legalization policies, (2) assessing the extent to which communities perceive the economic impact of marijuana legalization on their racial in-groups, and (3) studying why some sectors of the population are fiercely opposed to marijuana legalization even when exposed to positive information about legalization. To address these research inquiries, I employ a two-step methodology. Initially, I analyze support for marijuana policies, utilizing nationally representative surveys. Subsequently, I incorporate a novel survey-embedded experiment to assess the impact of elite racial communication on voters’ views and their willingness to reconsider their beliefs when confronted with countervailing information. 

Generalized Hastings McLeod Functions
Kurt Schmid, Mathematical Sciences

The Gender Play Gap: Social Prestige and Gendered Agency in Video Game Culture
Jeremy Brenner-Levoy, Department of Sociology

This project explores whether video games, where players’ bodies are tangential and their gender is unknown, replicate inequality that we see offline. That is, I investigate whether video game spaces become differentially prestigious and gendered, and how gendered agency and expectations may shape participation within this field. To do so, I will collect quantitative data with surveys and qualitative interview data on how gender shapes people’s prestige, involvement, and interaction within video games. This project will help identify whether: 1) differing levels of prestige are afforded different types of games and roles within games; 2) gender expression and identity shapes selection into different games and roles; 3) gender expression and identity impact role selection within specific games.

Reconstructing Freedom: The politics of race, violence, and womanhood in America, 1865-1920
Diamond Crowder, Department of History

My dissertation research focuses on newly freed black women in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. During slavery, enslaved women were victims of sexual exploitation, assault, and violence and could not speak out against their perpetuators, both white men and women. Using a gender and race lens, my work seeks to reveal that newly freed black women did not stop being victims of sexual exploitation, rape, harassment once black women received their freedom. However, now that newly freed black women have their freedom in the post-emancipation era, newspapers, court records, and other primary source documents reveal how black women utilized the courts, legal aid, and other forms of the judicial system to speak out against their perpetuators who continue to sexually abuse, harass, and inflict violence on them. Sources have unveiled that white men were fined, brought to court, and sometimes found guilty on charges of sexual abuse, rape, and violence.

Whitney Extension Theorem for Curves in Carnot Groups
Hyogo Shibahara, Department of Mathematical Sciences

A typical question we ask in our everyday life is "If we need to arrive at multiple locations at different times, then can we actually find a viable path to make it a reality?". Motivated by this question, this research project explores a corresponding mathematical question: Can one characterize exactly when one can find a curve in a space that fits given data, such as times, locations, velocity and acceleration? Spaces of interest are Carnot groups, that are the ones with the constraint made on the directions that one can move in at each point. This restriction on the directions is natural for many circumstances. For instance, a car in a parking garage cannot move vertically and needs to go around to move upward.

Leaving Biddle City; The Invisible Diaspora
Marianne Chan, Department of English

A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City is a collection of prose poems that details a Filipina American speaker's experiences as a teenager and young adult living in a mostly white community. The book explores the complexities of Asian American identity formation, memory and forgetfulness, intergenerational conflict, and the consequences of racial alienation. Moreover, through narrative, realist, and surrealist poems, Leaving Biddle City unpacks the storytelling process and the ways in which story shapes memory. From prose pantoums and ballads to flattened haiku and thematic autobiographies, this formally wide-ranging collection of poems grapples with how we understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from.

In a second work, "The Invisible Diaspora: An Examination of the Migrant Filipina Domestic Helper in Filipino American Literature and Film," I will examine the ways in which Filipina domestic workers are represented in three texts: Mia Alvar’s collection of stories "In the Country, Documents", a collection of poems by Jan-Henry Gray, and a nonfiction essay, “My Family’s Slave” by Alex Tizon. The Philippine economy depends on female labor. According to research done by the International Labor Organization, in the early 2000s, Filipino women made up 73% of the Philippines’ exported labor, an increase from 12% in the 1970s (Sayres 9). The export of Filipina domestic workers who send remittances to the Philippines makes up a large percentage of the Philippine GDP. While there are benefits to Filipinas working overseas—higher salaries and higher social status are among them—the live-in requirement of the occupation results in cases of abuse and exploitative conditions, especially when legal status is a factor. The hiddenness of the experiences of Filipino domestic workers makes the representation of their lives in literature and film all the more necessary.

Explaining Military Innovation in Authoritarian Regimes
Bekir Ilhan, Department of Political Science

What explains military innovation in authoritarian regimes? The major theories of military innovation emphasize the role of senior military officers and civilian leaders under various international conditions. One strand of the literature argues that military innovation is often initiated by civilian leaders under immediate security threats, while the other branch suggests that military innovation is initiated by senior military officers in a low threat environment. While existing explanations provide valuable insights into understanding the causes and dynamics of military innovation, they have their shortcomings in explaining military innovation in autocratic regimes. I argue that the engine of innovation is civilian intervention in autocracies—but only during periods of low threat. In authoritarian regimes, periods of low threat give civilians incentives to cut the military budget and root out military influence in domestic politics, leading to military innovation at the strategic level.

A Theory of Moral Affordances in Dyadic Care Situation
Mark Ornelas, Department of Philosophy

I argue for an ecological approach to moral psychology. As such, I present a theory of moral affordances, which are opportunities for moral action that arise out of agent-environment relations. Specifically, I argue for a re-framing of traditional methods of explaining real-time, two-person, agent-patient care situations using an ecological psychology framework, or what I call caregiving affordances. The dissertation aims to demonstrate that the tools of ecological psychology should be considered by moral psychology researchers as a new avenue to understand human caring behavior in agent-patient situations. The theory focuses on the relationships moral agents have with their socially enriched environments. I build the theory drawing on Gibson's Ecological Psychology and Gilligan and Tronto's feminist Care Ethics.

Jakob von Uexküll’s Concept of Umwelt as an Account of the Mental
Elmo Feiten, Department of Philosophy

My dissertation develops a new reading of Jakob von Uexküll’s thought, contrasts it with his reception in French and German philosophy of the 20th century, and applies it to ongoing debates in embodied cognitive science. I draw a distinction between Uexküll’s use of Umwelt as an ethological heuristic on the one hand and the philosophical claim that each living subject lives in a private phenomenal world of its own on the other. I highlight that different responses in French and German philosophy, as well as contemporary embodied cognition, use different senses of "open" and "closed" in their discussions of Umwelt. Using these distinctions, I show fault lines running through the reception of Uexküll and the conceptual foundations of embodied cognition.

The Impact of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) on Indigenous Rights Legal and Policy Outcomes in the US and Canada
Francesca Gottardi, School of Public and International Affairs

Does international law influence domestic law? Does it shape the relationship between settler states and Indigenous peoples? The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is a groundbreaking international legal effort to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples. I examine whether the US and Canadian legal systems conform to UNDRIP by analyzing their current Indigenous (women’s) rights framework. To evaluate the impact of UNDRIP on law and policy, I focus on land rights and reparation claims, spiritual rights (sacred sites protection), violence against women, and forcible removal of children from their parents and communities. I posit that there is variation in the countries’ receptiveness to international law and that Indigenous peoples can use UNDRIP to reshape law and advance their interests.

Persistent Pestilence: Recurrent Yellow Fever Epidemics in Early National American Port Cities
Alysha Federkeil, Department of History

My project analyzes the public and private responses to recurrent yellow fever epidemics in the Mid-Atlantic urban centers of Philadelphia, New York City, and Baltimore, from c. 1793-1805, when yellow fever epidemics were at their height. The overall focus of my dissertation is to understand the ways in which yellow fever outbreaks changed the way people understood and interacted with their built environment. In order to accomplish this, I am using official and unofficial government records, newspapers, personal correspondence, and trade records. Combining public and private sources, provides insight into what regulations municipal officials debated as well as the responses of urban residents. The resulting narrative demonstrates how localized public health crises shaped broader political, social, and urban environmental trends in early national America.

Investigating Spatial Spillover Effects of Evictions Using a Spatial-Panel Model
Max Richards, Department of Economics

A growing body of literature in the social sciences has looked at both the causes and consequences of evictions. The center of focus has largely been on who gets evicted, and what happens to them. Just as important though is where the evictions take place. Although some studies have taken geography into account, this study uses for the first time a spatial-panel model to analyze the spillover effects of evictions across seven major cities in the U.S. The spatiality of evictions appears to be consistent throughout time, with significant levels of spillover. Census tracts that have higher rates of evictions are shown to correlate with an increase in evictions in neighboring tracts. This study is important for showing that any analysis of eviction rates that doesn’t consider a spatial component will have biased estimates.

Social Factors in the Use and Teaching of German: A Milieu-Based Approach
Mareike Lange, University of Cincinnati

This project examines the impact of social milieu on German language use. Contrary to traditional class models, milieu theories account for the complexity and intersectionality of extant social behavior such as language practices. As such, milieu research is practice-oriented, allowing for the analysis of complex linguistic behavior while averting one-dimensional social classifications.

This research contributes to the sociolinguistic documentation of spoken German by documenting diverse habitus patterns expressed through milieu-specific variation, which in turn addresses a lack of research on German in the American sociolinguistic tradition. This, furthermore, will provide new approaches to the underdeveloped field of class-sensitive language teaching. My research question is, therefore, twofold: What linguistic variations in German are associated with milieu groupings, and how can these findings enhance sociocultural/-linguistic diversity in German language pedagogy.

The Antipoetry Work of Carlos Martínez Rivas: Parody, Humor, Pessimism and The Neo-baroque Program
Tomás Emilio Arce, Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures

This work aims to define the antipoetry work proposed by Carlos Martínez Rivas. My research will demonstrate how his poetic work challenged the major poetic styles in the Spanish American poetry tradition, during the second half of the 20th. The defy was directed against the cultural establishment and its part of a neo-baroque program.

My research will address the following topics: 1. The influence on his poetic view of the pessimistic notions proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer. 2. The purpose of his neo-baroque program and how he deployed this plan. 3. How he achieves to combines in his poetry, elements from popular culture such as cinema and popular music in permanent tension with cult art expressions. 4. Identify the parodic dialogue that his poetic work had with the well-established poets of his era, like Octavio Paz and Ernesto Cardenal.

My theoretical frame is based on the poetic semiotic approach of Michael Riffaterre; the philosophical work of Schopenhauer; the Literary theories regarding the neo-baroque aesthetic and culture proposed by Erick Blandón, Omar Calabrese, Bolívar Echeverría, William Egginton and Mabel Moraña; the work on literary parody proposed by Linda Hutcheon; and the cultural studies approach of William Rowe and Vivian Schelling and Nestor García Canclini to popular art in Latin America.

You Can’t Talk About That in the #CancelCulture: Social Media’s Disparate Impacts on Racial Discourse and Ideology
Marcus A. Brooks, Sociology

In this project I use content analysis of social media discourse about cancel culture to explore how the ways in which we talk about and understand issues of race and racism are impacted by the online spaces where we have those conversations. Cancel culture, while not explicitly about race, is a topic of broad cultural discussion which is shot through with ideas and presumptions about culture, citizenship, and who has the right to speak in public. And in the United States these topics are deeply racialized. The sociological understandings about how racial discourse and racial ideology reproduce racism in the United States are largely based on pre-social media theorizing and research. We know that social media platforms have mechanisms that allow, encourage, restrict, and discourage certain content and discussions. It is important to understand how this technological mediation impacts the conversations, about race and racism, that produce public knowledge about these issues. By analyzing data from three platforms, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, and comparing results across platforms, I will demonstrate the specific ways that our racial knowledges are impacted by the particular technologies that host these conversations.

It’s All About the Ladies (Auxiliary)
Nicholas Brown, History

The International Ladies Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was formed in 1925 to aid the union in their struggle against the Pullman Company and to improve black labor. The women of this organization are essential for the success of the Brotherhood and expanding economic rights for Black people, the women also made significant contributions in the Modern Civil Rights Movement. While working with the Brotherhood, the Ladies Auxiliary formed their own separate ideologies and goals in the Freedom Struggle, including fighting against lynching’s, improving Black education, better housing, voting rights, and the elimination of Jim Crow Practices. The International Ladies Auxiliary shows how many women’s organizations are largely ignored in history; this research helps tell a more complete history of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.

Analyzing and Improving the Nested Subset Differential Attack
Joshua Deaton, Mathematical Sciences

The ability to control information is incredibly important in modern society given the importance of the internet and digital communications. We thus need systems in place to ensure that our data is protected from adversarial third parties, and we also need to be sure just who sent us a given set of data. The solution to this is public-key cryptography which develops schemes that will allow us to have this control. A proposed scheme to help with this is LUOV, made by Beullens et al. in 2017 which was put forward in a cryptography competition for new standards. My project is analyzing and improving the two recent attacks SDA and NSDA on LUOV which I co-authored.

Treatable Conditions: Boundaries for a Mental Health Ontology
Andrew Evans, Philosophy

This project is an answer to the question: What conditions should the mental health community treat? While it may seem that there is already an adequate answer to that question—the mental health community treats mental disorders—I argue that the concept “mental disorder” is flawed. “Mental disorder” implies the presence of dysfunction. But people are rightly treated by the mental health community all the time without the presence of dysfunction. Therefore, I argue for a treatment and suffering centric account of mental health conditions. If we are able to reformulate our concept of what the mental health community does, the stigma of mental health treatment will be reduced, since people will not connect mental health treatment with something being “wrong with them.” I further develop this idea by exploring the ontological implicates of such an account. I argue that only a biopsychosocial process ontology would make sense for mental health. Given that, our currently mental health ontologies are inadequate.

Powerful Emergence
Bradley A. Griggs, Philosophy

Emergence appears to be everywhere, but few among us are willing to accept it. Emergent phenomena depend on something else for their existence and are in some sense novel with respect to their dependence base. Both special science entities and ordinary objects appear to meet both criteria. Nevertheless, many of us are hesitant to accommodate emergent phenomena into our ontologies because their existence seems to be inconsistent with physicalism. Debates about emergence tend to assume a Humean ontology that takes a deflationary stance on causal powers. I argue for an anti-Humean ontology of irreducible causal powers and develop a powers theory of emergence that is consistent with physicalism and overcomes the main challenge that faces its Humean competitors: Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion argument.

Bayesian regression with piecewise linear spline
Rui Huang, Mathematical Sciences

Bayesian regression with piecewise linear spline is a nonparametric regression technique. It is a flexible and interpretable modeling strategies. I assumed a smooth functional relationship between a response variable y and a set of predictor x. The functional relationship is constructed using piecewise linear spline and I used Bayesian method to estimate the regression coefficients of the splines. The model is applicable to heteroscedastic data as the unequal variance is also modeled using spline function.
I extended the model by adding a binary treatment effect as another additional spline function. A Gibbs sampling algorithm was used to estimate the coefficients of two spline functions simultaneously. I also extended the model to deal with multivariate data. The model can be applied to causal inference analysis for clinical trial data.

Archives of Empathy: A Creative and Critical Examination of Migration, Diaspora, and Identity
Yalie Saweda Kamara, English

My dissertation is comprised of two components: creative and critical, which contribute to an interdisciplinary study, “Archives of Empathy,” a long-term interdisciplinary project that invokes and elaborates narratives that have been masked and underdetermined in the historical record, geography, circumstance, and the vagaries of memory.
The creative component is “Besaydoo,” a full-length collection of poetry that addresses the role of “witness,” with particular emphasis on the complexity of intergenerational immigrant families, the vagaries and afflictions of postcoloniality, and female kinship in West African and Black American cultures.
The critical component is “Dressing as Diasporic Identity: The Case of Sierra Leonean Creole Women,” an ethnographical project that interrogates Sierra Leonean Creole material culture. This project will foreground the kabaslot—a valued cultural artifact of the Krio People circulating in the Black Atlantic.
The dissertation draws inspiration from artistic and academic works that examine migration, diasporic formations, and identity in the framework of postcolonial studies.

Statistical Downscaling of Climate Model Projections
Ayesha Kumari Ekanayaka Katugoda, Mathematical Sciences

We propose statistical downscaling methodologies to combine coarse-resolution climate model outputs and high-resolution remote sensing data to produce fine-resolution projections of climate change. Two methods are proposed with complementary properties, one with superior computational efficiency and the other with a coherent uncertainty propagation. We will apply these proposed methods to downscale the sea surface temperature over coral reef regions over the globe. Numerical analysis will be carried out to compare the proposed methods with the state of the art. We also propose a spatial statistical model to exploit the downscaled climate projection and to investigate its relationship with extreme events. In particular, we will use this model to study the coral bleaching conditions at the Great Barrier Reef.

(Don’t) Call It A Comeback: Contemporary German Jewish Identity in German Rap and HipHop
Brenda Lamboy, German Studies

My dissertation focuses on Jewish rap in Germany and how identity is transmitted through music. Much of the research on contemporary Jewish identity currently focuses on high art, film and literature while not looking at how this question of identity is tackled through the lens of popular culture; especially music. Rap is one of the most popular music genres in Germany and the United States and has historically been a tool to speak out against a multitude of differing social issues in both the USA and Germany. The rappers that I look at address Jewish identity through their music via their lyrics and music videos. Finally, I also investigate how Jewish identity anti-Semitism, are ‘thematized’ in German and American rap.

The Philosopher’s Path to San José: Toward a Cross-Cultural Radical Embodied Cognitive Science
Jonathan McKinney, Philosophy

This work contributes to, and expands upon, two emergent movements in philosophy and cognitive science. The first is the move in the Western world to study non-Western and non-canonical philosophical traditions in a comparative and cross-cultural context. The second is the shift in contemporary cognitive science toward phenomenological approaches in embodied cognition, including 4E (embodied, enacted, extended, & embedded) cognition, ecological psychology, distributed languaging, and enactivism. This intersection promises to be especially fruitful because it is relatively unexplored, there is resonance between the many perspectives of embodiment around the world and problems faced by each movement are complementary. Instead of looking to this work for a single path toward a genuine cross-cultural cognitive science without borders, it should be understood as an invitation to consider how each tradition fits within the same world and then to reconsider our places within it.

An Unconquerable Idea: The Southern Press and Confederate Nationalism
Kevin McPartland, History

My dissertation examines the way the Southern press helped to construct and sustain Confederate nationalism during the Civil War. Focusing mainly on smaller presses rather than those located in cities like Richmond or Savannah, my project illustrates the way small town editors were able to knit their local communities into a broader national identity that was dedicated to gaining independence for the Confederacy. Centrally, this project examines the way editors and their readers created meaning through the local wartime experience, such as the presence of US forces, issues with food supply, and the loss of men in the army. These ordeals, and the way editors translated them to their audience, played a crucial role in how Confederates understood themselves, their nation, and their place in it.

Beauty on Whose Terms? Black Women and Girls’ Beauty Work Across Settings
Brittney Miles, Sociology

The larger context of Black women’s beauty work is defined by Western and white beauty supremacy, anti-Black dress codes, Black hair discrimination, and under-appreciation for Black cultural aesthetics. I use photography and interviews with Black women and girls to explore how they use fashion, hairstyling, and makeup to navigate different spaces and manage their identities. I am especially interested in how they make their daily beauty choices relative to their experiences in schools, workplaces, and/or Black communities. I recruit diverse participants who vary not only in terms of major social locations such as age, class, and sexuality, but also in terms of body size and gender presentation. Such variation expands dominant narratives about how Black women and girls do beauty and how they are represented in the larger beauty discourse. The primary goal of my project is to understand how Black women and girls use beauty as a tool to traverse gendered and racialized institutions.

The Migration of Women from Nepal for Domestic Work to the Gulf States and the Impact of Nepal Government’s Policies Banning Out-Migration for Domestic Work
Sayam Moktan, Political Science

Nepali women have been migrating for domestic work for decades, particularly to the Gulf States. What makes Nepal especially useful to study is that as of 2017, the Government of Nepal imposed a ban on the out-migration of maids, formally preventing any women from migrating abroad for domestic work. Moreover, this is not the first time that a ban has been put in place. The government has periodically imposed several prohibitions on the migration of women for domestic work, mainly to the Gulf states, yet has never prohibited male-out migration. Although there is significant evidence that women face harm and exploitation when they migrate for domestic work and the bans imposed by the Government of Nepal might appear to be an appropriate response on one level, this disregards the economic needs, rights, and agency of poor and working-class women in Nepal for which migration for domestic work may be their only option. Through policy analysis, and in-depth interviews, I examine the reasons for and the impacts of this ban and earlier bans to determine if such “protective” measures, which do not extend to male migrant workers, endanger women more and what alternatives there may be to such measures.

“They monopolize the fruit, oyster and fish trades and are nearly all peddlers:” The Racialization of Italian Immigrants in Gilded Age Louisiana, 1870-1899
Anthony Russomanno, History

Following the Civil War, the state of Louisiana encouraged immigration from areas throughout southern and eastern Europe as a way of combating labor shortages. As a result, the region witnessed a massive influx of southern Italian immigrants seeking better economic opportunities. By the early 1890s, Italians had become the largest foreign-born group within the state’s vital port city of New Orleans, occupying a section of the Lower French Quarter, known as “little Palermo.” Anti-Italian sentiment grew rapidly after 1870 as the New Orleans’ press spread rumors of a developing underworld of organized crime. After more than a decade of fanciful speculation, growing nativism, and discriminatory policing procedures, New Orleans would become the site of the nation’s largest mass lynching, when a mob of angry citizens butchered eleven Sicilian-born men on the city’s streets.
Through the lens of this infamous event, this project contends that Sicilians operated on a self-prescribed periphery in which their disinterest in assimilating, combined with increasing economic competition and growing nativism among the city’s Anglo-American population, provoked a sustained level of dissonance. That tension culminated in an episode of violence that brought international attention to the Crescent City and vividly underscored the precarity of Italian immigrants in Louisiana’s complex racial landscape. The Italian immigrant experience in New Orleans reveals the complex malleability of whiteness in the late nineteenth century United States, an instability that shaped political dialogue, impacted economic relationships, and regularly provoked violent disruptions. The Italian immigrant story in the region further serves to inform contemporary readers of the evolving and deep-rooted nuances inherent within the politics of whiteness. Ultimately, perceptions of whiteness in nineteenth century America were neither static nor nationally uniform. Instead, whiteness was (and continues to be) a malleable and often regionally ascribed construct, which bestows explicit social and political privileges.

Willful Objects and Feminist Writing Practices
Rhiannon Scharnhorst, English & Comparative Literature

My research focuses on writing tools and emotional labor in feminist composing practices. I am keenly interested in how the tools we use to write help us navigate how to write, as well as shape what gets written. For my dissertation, Willful Objects and Feminist Writing Practices, I examine a diverse array of objects used by women writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the typewriter, the kitchen table, the endpapers in cookbooks, and the hashtag. Drawing on feminist archival methodologies, Willful Objects begins not with a particular personality or writer but with the object itself, exploring how the affordances of an object shape, guide, and accompany writers. This expansive perspective on agency rejects anthropocentrism, starting instead with the assumption that all things have agentic potential. For scholar-teachers across the disciplines, my work draws attention to the everyday object and its overlooked impact on composing habits, an area of study particularly valuable for understanding the challenges students face when writing.

Topics in Bayesian Testing Procedures and Bayesian Hierarchical Model Applications
Vikram Suresh, Economics

The increasing popularity of Bayesian Inference has made it necessary to introduce Hypothesis Testing procedures that are easy to interpret and at least as powerful than their Frequentist counterparts. To this end, we introduce a Posterior Density Ratio (PDR) Hypothesis test to test the serial independence of Time Series model approximation errors. The PDR Test is seen to perform better than Breusch Godfrey and Ljung Box Frequentist Tests.

Bayesian Hierarchical Models (BHM) offer important service in the analysis of related groups of information that are yet distinct. The BHM when applied to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) datasets offer superior understanding of the efficacy of various treatments. Heterogeneous treatment effects are calibrated including the observed and unobserved individual patient effects. The hierarchical structure of the data is preserved while leveraging prior information from other studies to be incorporated into the model. The applications of BHM are further extended into the study of Minimum Wage and Income Dynamics. The various groupings of states and income levels make the BHM the most appropriate model choice given its distinctive features.

The combination of Bayesian testing procedures and inferences from the Hierarchical Models can be seen to be applicable in disparate fields of science. The research therefore is charting a new path in understanding medical treatments and economic policy applications.

My Apartment: Posthumanism, Ecology, and Poetry
Madeleine Wattenberg, English & Comparative Literature

My Apartment, a poetry collection, traces in verse the links between industrial farming, harmful algal blooms, and an urban-located speaker with the purpose of examining language’s role in defining the “human” and reconceptualizing the relation between humans and their environments. In section one, a sonnet sequence draws on the language of slaughterhouse architectural manuals to illustrate the links between architecture, language, and production; in section two, algal blooms resulting from farm-waste runoff rupture the boundary between dream and reality as the speaker visits a museum, then falls asleep; in section three, speculative poems posit a world where waste and pollution have radically altered the relationships between human and nonhuman agencies. A critical essay on typographical strategies, the posthuman subject, and Black ecological poetics, centering on Canisia Lubrin’s The Dysgraphxst, accompanies this creative dissertation.

Considering Juan Flores’ affirmation that “for many Latinos in the U.S., migration is confounded with life itself” (2000), this dissertation analyzes the poetry of Ilka Oliva Corado (Guatemala, 1976), Cynthia Guardado (United States, 1988), Alexandra Lytton-Regalado (El Salvador, 1974), and Javier Zamora (El Salvador, 1990); four emergent sociopolitical poets of Central American descent in the U.S. diaspora. Clark’s hypothesis is that different modes and conditions of diaspora affect which sociopolitical aspects these poets choose to approach and how they approach them. She employs the concepts of deterritorialization and hybridity (García Canclini, 1990) to study the language they use and how they merge Central American and U.S. culture, history, and current events to produce diverse sociopolitical critique and commentary. Within this main framing hypothesis, her study also seeks to understand what thematic and stylistic elements they have inherited from leading Central American activist poets writing during the 1950s through the 1980s and in what ways does their work diverge from this literary tradition due to stronger representations of psychological, physical, and gender borders (Anzaldúa, 1987). The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to be the first to offer a comprehensive analysis of the inner workings of twenty-first century Central American poets of the U.S. diaspora who—like those Central American activist poets of the twentieth century— are using poetry as a political weapon of light for social change both “home” and “abroad.”

Fissure
Emily Rose Cole, English & Comparative Literature

Fissure is a book-length poetry manuscript whose main poetic threads investigate how disability theory can be applied to feminism, popular culture, and ecopoetics. Fissure will trace three major threads, one relating to the speaker’s chronically ill body, one related to the specific dangers faced by women in contemporary America, and one related to the hazards of hydraulic fracturing by documenting the challenges faced by the residents of a small town in Pennsylvania after fracking was approved there. Disability theory is applied to unite these major themes.

Organism-Environment Codetermination: The Biological Roots of Enactivism

Amanda Corris, Philosophy

Where in nature do we find cognition? I attempt to answer this question by identifying four principles that make up a biological theory of cognition. Organisms qualify as cognizing systems when they are self-organizing, undergo structural coupling, are mutually specified with their environments, and actively engage in sense-making. These four principles are central to an enactive approach to cognition, on which organisms are said to ‘bring forth’ or ‘enact’ a world. They are also in line with the identifying features of the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) research program in evolutionary biology. In my dissertation, I present a theory of biological enactivism that identifies the kinds of systems that qualify as cognizing systems and explains how the features of those systems play a causal role in guiding development and evolution. I argue that this theory builds on the EES in such a way that provides an account of cognition as a process that drives evolution.

Self-Similar Stochastic Processes
Zuopeng Fu, Mathematical Science

Self-similarity is a mathematical notion that has many examples from real-life phenomena, the shape of the coastlines, images of Barnsley fern and Romenesco broccoli, network traffic data and stock market fluctuations, just to mention a few. In this talk, we shall review the notion of self-similar stochastic processes, a large family of stochastic processes in probability theory in mathematics, by going through the developments of a few outstanding ones in the literature, starting from the Brownian motion and fractional Brownian motions. We shall show at the end some latest advances in self-similar stochastic processes following this tradition, based on the so-called Karlin random fields that we have been investigating in the past few years.

Autonomy & Constraint: Sex Educators in Schools
Orlaith Heymann, Sociology

Sex education is America’s solution to an ‘epidemic’ of poor sexual health, but the curricula and approach are hotly contested at every level of society. While policymakers, school boards, and parents attempt to exert influence over sex education policies, sex educators must decide what and how to teach youth about sexuality. Sex educators may be the ‘boots on the ground’ but they are not always obedient foot soldiers. Even when given mandated curricula, sex educators can find creative ways to repurpose sex education for their students. Little research shows what circumstances or characteristics allow for such action or how sex educators negotiate gaps between curricula and what they believe their students need. Further, sex educators are not a homogenous group – while some are full-time, certified sex educators who teach in a variety of settings, others are school teachers who teach sex education as one part of their job. Scant research describes sex education from sex educators’ perspectives and no studies have compared the experiences of community and teacher sex educators in schools. This study will provide needed evidence to address these gaps and can inform advocacy and professional organizations that train and support sex educators about the factors that facilitate or constrain their autonomous teaching decisions.

This qualitative study will include interview data from 50 school-based sex educators who work as community educators and teachers. I will recruit sex educators from sex education and reproductive health conferences, professional directories, community health organizations, schools, and professional teacher associations. The interviews will describe the current state of teaching school-based sex education from the perspective of sex educators, particularly the challenges and opportunities they experience as well as their strategies to provide the sex education they believe their students need. I will compare sex educator experiences by assessing how sex educators’ experiences are shaped by identity and context, comparing community and teacher sex educators to identify how differences in training, employment, and years of experience structure these roles. I will also consider how sex educators’ personal characteristics (race, class, gender, age, and sexuality) and structural contexts such as location and school characteristics (size and student body) shape their classroom experiences. Finally, I will identify factors that enable or constrain sex educators’ creativity and agency by identifying personal, professional, or structural factors that influence sex educators’ teaching, particularly factors that shape sex educators’ sense of curricular autonomy.

Coexistence in the Face of War: Civil-Military Relations in Brandenburg During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648)
Evan Johnson, History

My dissertation probes the experience of war within the Hohenzollern territories of the Holy Roman Empire by articulating the complex relationship between civilians and soldiers during the Thirty Years War. I seek to complicate the traditional narrative of overwhelming catastrophe and hatred between these two groups which has long dominated the history of the war. The first-hand accounts from the period present ample evidence of deep seated antagonism between soldiers and local populations and the violence and destruction that resulted. However, I argue that the correspondences and chronicles of the period also reveal the relationship was not reducible to a simple power binary—military power and agency, civilian impotence and victimhood. Rather, the interactions between civilians and soldiers, and between those groups and military and civilian authorities, can better be described as existing along a continuum existence and in some cases driven by what I call a quest for normalcy. By engaging with sources from several locations in the Brandenburg territory I will be able to conduct a comparative analysis of firsthand accounts of the war and understand this continuum within the context of several considerations: the variety of strategies for pursuing normalcy in both civilians and, to a less accessible degree, soldiers’ lives during the war; whether the community’s size or distance from the electoral court mattered in facilitating or limiting civilians’ options in response to military pressures; the role of confessional and geopolitical considerations in shaping civil-military interactions; and finally, whether we can identify change on these fronts over the course of the war—an element made particularly difficult given source limitations and the varied impact of war across the region over time.

Pervasive Hegemony Theory
Igor Kovac, Political Science

Most International Relations literature suggests that when power becomes imbalanced, such a situation will be corrected—hegemony cannot continue over time. However, history offers us several examples of hegemonic endurance, e.g. Ancient Rome, Ming China. So far scholars have offered four explanations for such enduring hegemony (Coercive Hegemony, Cooperative Hegemony, Cultural Hegemony, and Opportunist Hegemony), with a common mechanism: ineffective balancing. Namely, the hegemon has the capacity to put balancing at bay using different strategies. However, I argue that this is an incomplete picture, as the nature of the US hegemony displays different characteristics what these explanations assume. Namely, although US relative power is declining, its global economic network centrality is not. Thus, I developed a new theory – Pervasive Hegemony − which is based in the idea of network relations distinguished by a ‘buy-in’ dynamic. The ‘buy-in’ denotes a behavior of non-hegemonic states that reinforce the hegemony due to their selfish national interests, risk aversion, and autonomy seeking. In pursuing my argument, I use both quantitative (Network Analysis and Time Series) and qualitative methods (case study of the end of Bretton Woods System and the long depression 1873-1896).

Pervasive Hegemony Theory
Beau Sauley, Economics

This research examines how school levies affect multiple components of their communities. The goal is to examine home prices, as well as population parameters, such as percent of the population which are children, the percent households which have children, the child poverty rate, and the change in the total number of people in the population. Each of these examinations will be executed using a spatial regression discontinuity design developed by Sauley and fellow Taft dissertation fellowship recipient, Gary Cornwall.

Aesthetic Deviation and the Depiction of Madness in German Drama: 1770-1970
Anne Delano Steinert, History

This project explores methodological questions within professional academic history regarding the types of sources historians use and impacts source type has on inquiry. Steinert specifically poses the question, "how does historical inquiry change when historians use the built environment as their foundation for inquiry?" She will demonstrate that starting with the built environment allows historians to ask new kinds of questions and discover histories beyond those available in text-based records. Because buildings, cities, and streetscapes tell the story of a broad range of people who lived in and used them, these sources will shed light on the stories of lesser known pasts and provide historians with a valuable set of tools. Steinert's dissertation will model the use of the built environment in a series of chapters on components of the built world--site, location, use, form, and materials--each of which will consist of an article-length inquiry into a Cincinnati-based historical question. In additional to these methodological models, Standing Right Here will link each example to a distinct method of public consumption. Put simply, the exploration within each chapter will be presented to the public in some way. Each of these vehicles for public consumption--scholarly publication, popular publication, exhibition, website, and lecture series-- will be evaluated within the dissertation for effectiveness and relevance to a non-academic audience. Steinert believes that beyond providing historians with new tools for inquiry, the accessibility and immersive nature of the built environment make it an idea vehicle to make history relevant to a broad audience. This connection to a broader public is necessary for the future health of the field.

The Holmes Alpha

Juli Case, English and Comparative Literature

Julialicia Case’s dissertation in progress is a novel called The Holmes Alpha, which focuses on identity in video games. This book is a speculative character-driven novel about a group of gamers who learn that a controversial video game technology—one that allows players to walk into a physical version of their favorite game and become their avatars—was secretly developed and then abandoned in a rural town in central Illinois. The experience of the “alpha” (or test version) is both exciting and psychologically difficult, illustrating the complicated intersections between physical and digital experiences. The book draws upon the critical work of game studies scholars such as Ian Bogost, Jane McGonigal, Anna Anthropy, and Janet Murray, and addresses important cultural debates about the influence of video games on empathy and identity, particularly with regard to young adults. The novel explores important questions about video games in contemporary society: What are the differences between avatar and lived experiences? How are relationships developed and sustained between individuals who inhabit both physical and virtual worlds simultaneously, and what are the boundaries between these realms? How do our digital experiences influence, affect, and alter our experiences in the physical world?

“Opera with Innovations”? - The Debt of Brecht’s “Epic Theater” to the 19th
CenturyEllen Chew, German Studies

In his notes accompanying his opera with Kurt Weill, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, “Das moderne Theater ist das epische Theater,” Bertolt Brecht remarked that opera should move away from the “culinary” or appealing directly to emotions, and toward a dialectical theater, a theater that would instruct audiences to think, not feel: an “opera with innovations”. These “innovations” were the basis of his epic theater, his theories on how the “words, music and setting” should be fully independent from one another. Despite his innovations, however, I contend that Brecht did not fully escape the musical and dramatic formulas of 19th century opera. The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk fused words, music, and setting together. Verdian and Verismo opera featured prostitutes as its leading ladies - morally ambiguous characters, and emphasized the darker elements of realism, sin, and hedonism, placing these elements above the beauty of the voice. Looking at Brecht and Weill’s Die Sieben Todsünden, one can readily see, both musically and thematically, the influence of Wagnerian, Verdian, and Verismo aesthetics, although Brecht made every attempt to distance himself from these composers, their music, and their dramas. In my dissertation, I will investigate the extent to which the nineteenth century provides the backbone for epic theater, and if perhaps epic opera, with its gritty thematic content, stock characters, and musical structure, is more indebted to the nineteenth century than previously thought.

The Metaphysics and Semantics of Natural Kinds: A Case for Kind Nominalism
Alex Huffman, Philosophy

My dissertation concerns the metaphysics of natural kinds and the semantics of natural kind terms. Natural kinds are the categories or properties appearing in our most successful scientific theories and explanations, e.g., categories such as “massive body” or “charged particle” in physics and the corresponding properties “mass” and “charge.” Many philosophers, on the basis of metaphysical or semantic considerations, or both, hold that natural kinds are abstract entities of some sort, existing in their own right. Call this view kind realism. The main motivation for kind realism goes something like this: If we take scientific representations (law statements, theories, explanations, etc.) literally, and hold them to be accurate, then we are thereby committed to the kinds they range over and the relations between them.

In opposition, I defend kind nominalism: the view that natural kinds are nothing over and above their members or instances. My primary reason for rejecting kind realism is that the abstract entities posited cannot play their purported causal-explanatory role. I argue that natural kind terms play a semantic-explanatory role that fosters understanding without successfully referring to anything that exists (mind-independently at least). The members or instances of a kind alone are eligible to play a causal-explanatory role. I argue on metaphysical grounds that only entities playing a causal-explanatory role are ontologically committing.

Estimation of a social interaction model with endogenous network formation
Huibin Weng, Economics

A large and growing literature examines the role that peer effects in the networks play in economic phenomena. Properly identifying the peer effects in social network is of real importance for policy makers in order to implement policies efficiently.

Spatial Econometrics is often use to estimate peer effects in network models. Exogeneity of the spatial weight matrix is an unrealistic assumption when it comes to model interactions between individuals. In this paper we relax the assumption of exogeneity of the weight matrix and extend the exponential random graph models (ERGMs) by including nodal-level attributes that would directly affect the probability of links between individuals.

ERGMs are some of the most popular models in network analysis but are in practice very difficult to estimate. A class of networks will be estimated by comparing two approaches approximating the Exchange Algorithm proposed by Murray et al. (2006). The first method is Double Metropolis-Hastings sampler proposed by Liang (2010) which replaces perfect sampling with a standard Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The other method extends the Exchange Algorithm by an importance sampling procedure to generate auxiliary variables, called Adaptive Exchange Algorithm (Liang et al., 2016). 

The Add Health data will be used as empirical application to estimate the peer effect for high school students on their academic performance.

Journalism as a site of Cultural Memory: the Literary Canon of the Spanish Golden Age in the Language of Hispanic Journalism (1975-2017)
María Del Mar Gámez, Romance Languages and Literatures

My dissertation is a cultural studies project that borrows and employs concepts and ideas from the fields of memory studies, media studies, and the theories of reception.

My dissertation analyzes the use and reception of literary terms related to the figures of “don Quixote,” “don Juan,” and “Fuenteovejuna” in the written press of Spain and Latin America since 1975. It studies the way Spanish-speaking journalists from those regions use the above mentioned literary terms to describe present day reality in Spain and Latin America. In addition, it analyzes which of the readings of the Spanish Golden Age literary works that gave birth to those figures are the most common in Hispanic journalism.

Firstly, my dissertation analyzes the reception of the Golden Age works Don Quixote (1605), El burlador de Sevilla (1630), and Fuente Ovejuna (1613). It studies how these texts have been read by literary criticism since their origin in the 17th century until nowadays. After that, I study several prestigious and well-known dictionaries in Spanish to find out when the words related to the figures of “don Quixote,” “don Juan,” and “Fuenteovejuna” were incorporated into the Spanish language, and how those words have evolved through the centuries (both in terms of spelling and meaning). Finally, I study more than a thousand contemporary journalistic texts, published by the press of Spain and Latin America since 1975, to learn which readings and interpretations of the works Don Quixote (1605), El burlador de Sevilla (1630) and Fuente Ovejuna are the most common in Spanish and Latin American journalism nowadays. My dissertation shows how by referring to the above mentioned literary works the journalists are also layering an interpretation/meaning onto the work (or reinscribing it) and are also in a sense continuing the process of passing the literary work on to yet another generation.

Stef Murawsky, Sociology

This qualitative dissertation explores transgender patient experiences of navigating and managing a stigmatized gender identity in biomedical contexts. Transgender people are a highly-stigmatized group in American society, making almost every area of life for them filled with discriminatory experiences. Medicine is no exception. Transgender patient experiences reflect many aspects of contemporary patienthood identified by sociologists – like the imperative to be knowledgeable about one’s health, engage in medical consumerism, and manage risk. Transgender people, however, face an additional set of distinct obstacles when trying to access care because of the stigma associated with their gender identity and the centrality of medicine to their successful enactment of it. The following research questions thus guide my dissertation: How do transgender people manage their stigmatized gender identities in biomedical contexts? Do their health care experiences and encounters vary by the type of gender identity they seek to embody (i.e. transwomen vs. transmen vs. gender-nonconforming/non-binary)? How might trans people’s other social locations (e.g. class, race, ability, sexuality) interact to constrain or facilitate their access to medical care that allows them to embody and perform their desired gender? To answer these questions, I will interview a racially diverse set of transgender people utilizing healthcare services who are broken out into categories based on their specific gender identities (i.e. transwomen, transmen and people who identify as neither men nor women). I plan to generate a critical analysis of stigma in healthcare that demonstrates how structural, interpersonal and individual-level transgender healthcare experiences are gendered and racialized.

China’s Development Model as Internal Colonialism: The Case of the Uyghurs
Murat Yilmaz, Political Science

This dissertation investigates the impact of the Chinese neoliberal development model and the global war on terror on the Uyghur community in China through the lens of internal colonialism. The purpose of this dissertation is to make the case that China’s economic development is, in part, being achieved through a contemporary form of violent internal colonization of its largest indigenous minority group, the Muslim Turkic Uyghurs. It is driven by the research question: How does an internal colonialism framework reveal the relationship between China’s development model and the suppression of the Uyghur people? My hypothesis is that an internal colonialism lens not only best explains why the Uyghurs are not benefitting from and are actually being undermined by China’s Western Development Plan, but also reveals how a globalizing China discursively constructs itself and the Uyghurs to justify its actions against them in the name of neoliberal modernization. Through a qualitative study, this dissertation seeks to challenge assumptions about the success of Chinese development and China’s self-identity as a non-colonizing country, make connections between China’s development and its dispossession and securitization of the Uyghurs, reveal the range of resistances by Uyghur people within and outside China to these features of internal colonialism, and provide an analysis of how these struggles are being cast by China as Islamic terrorism, thereby undermining international attention to and support for the Uyghur cause and enabling greater violence against them by the Chinese state. This has implications for both the survival of the indigenous Uyghur and the impunity with which the Chinese state, as a world power, engages in political, economic, and cultural violence in pursuit of development at home and abroad.

On the Quenched Central Limit Theorem for Stationary Random Fields
Na Zhang, Mathematical Science

The subject of this project belongs to the field of statistics for stochastic processes. For random sequences, it is known that the existence of certain martingale approximations implies the long run behavior of the normalized sum started at a point in an invariant form, called the quenched CLT (central limit theorem). However, it is not studied yet what we can say about the quenched CLT if we have the martingale approximations for stationary random fields. So this study is mainly aimed to investigate the quenched CLT for stationary random fields. The first goal is to establish the quenched CLT for martingale differences random fields. The second one is to investigate the projective conditions under which we have martingale approximations for stationary random fields.

Debra Burgess, History 

My research focuses on the outreach of ethnic immigrant lay religious communities and their members to abandoned and orphaned children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the U.S. At its core, my project will be grounded in US social history in conversation with political, religious, and immigration scholarship. My research examines the efforts of religiously-centered communities in three Midwestern cities to respond to the needs of their co-religionists in the areas of child welfare and child abandonment. My project examines the factors that influenced those who followed a path other than the orphan trains, the loose coalition of the Protestant-leaning child-saving efforts of the Progressive Era. From the mid-nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression, thousands of orphans and abandoned children were relocated in passenger rail cars (hence, “orphan trains”) from New York City and other east coast port cities to farms of the Midwest and Great Plains. These children were given room and board in a family setting and but were infrequently adopted into their “foster” families. Finally, my research assesses the response from the perspective of those who undertook volunteer eleemosynary roles with the institutions that provided for the day-to-day welfare, educational, and vocational training needs of these children.

New Economy, Old Inequalities: Understanding Racial and Gender Groups’ Transition from School to Work
Kalasia Daniels, Sociology

For the past 40 years, the United States (U.S.) economy has changed drastically. Starting in the 1970s, we have witnessed a sizeable manufacturing sector filled with secure paying jobs that required minimal amounts of education nearly vanish from the U.S. labor market. These once coveted manufacturing jobs have been replaced with insecure, low paying service sector jobs that offer minimal benefit to workers. In addition, we have also seen a boom dating back to the 1980s in information, technology, and computer science jobs that require higher levels of educational attainment for higher earnings. Surprisingly, this changing landscape of a largely service-oriented U.S. labor market has not deterred the youngest cohort of job seekers, millennials, from attaining higher levels of education. In comparison to older cohorts, millennials aged 25-34, have the highest level of post-secondary education, yet start off with lower earnings and experience smaller earnings growth over time. This presents a complex problem between the benefits of education and an unprecedented slow paced economy for millennials. My research will explore the educational, occupational and overall status attainment for millennials as they face the new economy. I hope to offer new ways to approach millennials’ education and earnings puzzle.

The Rematerializer on Deck 13 is Broken Again
Daniel Paul, English & Comparative Literature

A postmodern science-fiction novel that combines tropes from the serial space adventure genre and those from the tradition of the workplace novel. The novel follows the exploits of the Starship “Excel”, specifically its below-deck office staff tasked with documenting the ship’s explorations. Instigating both formal and plotted collisions between the office and sci-fi worlds, the novel seeks to undermine the naturalism that we ascribe to office culture. Told with formal and tonal playfulness, the novel explores and deconstructs the boundaries between “big” and “small” narrative events, as well as between the present and future, asking “what do our visions of the future tell us about the present?”

Robert Wilson’s Faust I+II and the Berlin Theatre Scene Today
Katherine Paul, German Studies

As one of the cultural capitals of Europe, the Berlin theatre scene has set a precedent for the standard, quality and impact of theatrical productions in the twentieth century. From Brecht’s early twentieth century theatre house producing some of the most poignant and important pieces, responsible for shaping theatre thereafter, to the latest post-modern, post-theatre, post-dramatic productions, Berlin remains a major source of innovative theatre. The current status of Berlin’s theatre world is a shifting one. Changes in the administrative bodies which governs it and the development of theatrical production styles which challenge our definition of theatre have been. This project focuses on Robert Wilson’s 2015 production Faust I+II as its centerpiece, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust I and Faust II, and I use this production as the basis for my analysis of the current state of theatre in Berlin. I will investigate the impact of Wilson’s Postdramatic productions and their aesthetic appeal, which is in contrast to the emerging documentary style of theatre groups like Rimini Protokoll, who focus on the facts of scenarios instead of relying on a script. Important aspects of my analysis include a closer look at the tradition of theatre in Berlin, a discussion of Robert Wilson’s theatre, specifically his use of world literature, and an analysis of the historical background, emergence and importance of documentary theatre in Berlin.

Approximations of Quasihyperbolic Distance
Abigail Richard, Mathematical Sciences

The aim of this project is to understand quasihyperbolic geometry. Quasihyperbolic geometry has been studied extensively since it was first introduced and has proven useful in a wide range of areas such as quasiconformal mappings, complex analysis, function theory, geometric topology, partial differential equations, group theory, and dynamics. However, quasihyperbolic distance can be challenging to compute in general spaces. Consequently, it is worthwhile to have a mechanism that allows us to approximate quasihyperbolic distance in general spaces via quasihyperbolic distance in “simpler” spaces. I, along with my advisor, do this for proper domains in Euclidean space via spaces that have only finitely many boundary points. In addition to constructing such an approximation for quasihyperbolic distance, we also prove approximations for two other non-Euclidean distances: the Ferrand distances and the KulkarniPinkall-Thurston distances. Further, we establish an analogous result in more general non-Euclidean spaces. In the process of completing this investigation, we were led to study quasihyperbolic isometries (i.e., maps which preserve quasihyperbolic distance). We characterize quasihyperbolic isometries for Euclidean space of dimension three and higher. We seek to extend these results to two-dimensional Euclidean space and also plan to study patterns in the location of maximal points of metric ratios.

Scientific Modeling without Representationalism
Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira, Philosophy

Much of scientific knowledge comes from indirect forms of investigation. Rather than directly intervening upon the various phenomena they are interested in, scientists very often build and manipulate models such as mathematical equations, robotic agents, and computer simulations. But how is it possible to gain knowledge of some phenomenon by experimenting with a model? How can we, for example, learn about climate change by running a computer simulation, or learn about animal biology and behavior through building robots? The customary philosophical approach to scientific modeling is to assume that models are epistemically useful because they represent the target phenomena. My dissertation draws from embodied cognitive science and ecological psychology to provide an alternative account. Instead of relying on representationalist assumptions, I explain the epistemic worth of model-based science in terms of the action possibilities (“affordances”) of models. This framework dissolves the abstract philosophical problem of representation, replacing it with the empirical question of how humans utilize spatiotemporally-extended cognitive resources to solve problems.

Beau Sauley, Economics 

This research will incorporate spatial dependence with regression discontinuity, a heavily utilized econometric tool. Spatial dependence is the idea that the actions of one entity effect the actions of the other entities nearby. Regression discontinuity attempts to find a causal relationship in data by only keeping data near a cutoff point and assuming individuals near the cutoff were randomly given a treatment. Due to the structure of the weight matrix when estimating a spatially dependent regression, the combination of the two popular techniques has not been done before.

Transnational Advocacy Networks as a Response to Religious Restrictions: A Comparative Study of the Christian Minorities in India and Malaysia
Kristina M. Teater, Political Science 

Religious minorities in different regions of the world face governmental restrictions on religious practice and belief. Despite constitutional guarantees, these minority groups face restrictions such as anti-conversion laws, limits to proselytization, and regulations on places of worship. In response, religious minorities turn to transnational advocacy networks. Similar to social movements, these networks emerge out of their commitment to norms, common ideas, and shared values. Bolstered by new technologies, they ‘frame’ debates, leverage states, and utilize non-state actors to bring about change. While transnational advocacy networks advocate for religious minorities in many regions, insufficient analysis has been conducted on how religious minorities access their services, especially in different contexts. In my dissertation, I conduct a comparative analysis of Christian minorities in India and Malaysia. Using multiple methods including interviews and original survey research, I explore how these groups use transnational advocacy networks in response to restrictions and what factors influence their use. I focus my research between 2000-2017 and analyze three distinct Christian NGOs and their use of transnational advocacy networks in cases and events related to the protection of majority sensibilities, limits to proselytization, and anti-conversion laws.

Advancing Women’s Political Participation in Wartime Environments through Political Motherhood: A Comparative Study of Women’s Maternal Peace Activism in Argentina and Sri Lanka
Crystal Whetstone, Political Science

Armed conflicts can have contradictory effects on women. While devastating, wars can also open spaces for transformations in gender dynamics. Most analyses that examine changes sparked by war focus on women’s involvement in fighting, women’s entrance into the workforce and women’s peace activism. Instead, I explore how opportunities to advance women’s rights in warzones are tied to the political organizing of activists mobilized by their identities as mothers, through a concept called political motherhood. During the Argentinian Dirty War (1976-1983) and Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009), activists with the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo and the Mothers’ Front, respectively, organized for peace and protested the state’s human rights abuses. While the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo’s use of political motherhood proved successful in increasing women’s long-term political participation, it failed in the case of the Mothers’ Front. Through a comparative case study of these two groups, this dissertation investigates the conditions under which political motherhood can successfully increase women’s long-term involvement in the political sphere, which I define as a maternal groups’ ability to last beyond a 10-year period and increase impact in areas such as women in government and women in civil society.

Wie man (im Osten) sieht: Exploring Subjectivity in East and West German Documentary (1961–1989)
Matthew Bauman, German Studies

My dissertation concerns the thematic and formal links between non-fiction cinema made in The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) during the Berlin Wall period (1961–1989). Specifically, the project focuses on documentary films that exhibit subjective, first-person, essayistic qualities. Often referred to as “essay films,” these films focus on filmmakers’ experiences making the films and their own opinions about the subjects of the films as much as—if not more so—than on the ostensible subjects of the films itself. Scholarship on these films has so far concerned itself almost exclusively with Western European and North American cinema. By comparing GDR documentaries with canonical essay films from the FRG, my work not only demonstrates these qualities in many GDR documentaries but also shows that they deserve to be included alongside their canonical West-European and North American counterparts in discussions of subjective, first-person, essayistic cinema. By expanding the “essay film” canon to include films produced in The GDR’s state-run, heavily censored film studio, DEFA, my project questions what is commonly understood when referring to a film as having “subjective” or “first-person” qualities and works toward a more global understanding of documentary film.

From Conformity to Protest: The Evolution of Latinos in American Popular Culture, 1930s-1980s
Vanessa de los Reyes, History

“From Conformity to Protest” examines the representation of Latinos in popular culture—specifically in film, television, and advertising—from the 1930s through the early 1980s. It follows the changing portrayals of Latinos in popular culture and how they reflected the larger societal phenomena of conformity, the battle for civil rights and inclusion, and the debate over identity politics and cultural authenticity. My project begins when Latin Americans largely accepted portrayals of themselves as cultural stereotypes and ends with Puerto Ricans and African Americans protesting in the streets of New York City against such portrayals. The chapters in between thematically and chronologically examine how mainstream cultural producers portrayed different Latino groups—including Chicanos (or Mexican Americans), Puerto Ricans, and Cubans—and how those groups reacted to those portrayals. It argues that as the U.S. moved to an era of seemingly greater equality and liberty in the postwar, Latino groups became more vocal about their place in American society. They demanded inclusion and social citizenship and pushed back against rhetoric and images that cast them as marginal and foreign. This project also analyzes the inter-ethnic coalitions that participated in this transformation and the occupying tensions within such relationships.

Black Social Life in a Diverse Suburb
Alan Grigsby, Sociology

In the past few decades the face of cities and suburbs has changed. The majority of Americans now live in suburbs and—because racial minorities have driven the most recent wave of suburbanization—today’s suburbs are becoming more racially diverse than ever before. To proponents of residential integration these trends may seem promising. However, most research on this topic is limited to statistical research designs that cannot fully ascertain the quality of race relations in this changing landscape. My research uses an ethnographic approach to investigate social life in one racially diverse suburb of Cleveland, OH: Shaker Heights. I will investigate how the black people who occupy this space—as residents, employees, and visitors—think about, describe, and participate in social life in a diverse suburb. This information will help us better understand dynamics of race relations in a neighborhood context that is both seldom explored and growing in demographic importance.

The Male Outlaw: An Intersectional Approach to Identities in Colombia's "Novelas de La Violencia" Written by Women
Juan Camilo Galeano Sánchez, Romance Languages & Literatures

“The Male Outlaw: An Intersectional Approach to Identities in Colombia’s ‘Novela de la Violencia’ Written by Women” means to establish a dialogue between matters of gender, class, race, and national identity in the novels: Jacinta y la Violencia (1967) by Soraya Juncal, Cola de Zorro (1970) by Fanny Buitrago, Triquitraques del Trópico (1972) by Flor Romero, and Estaba la Pájara Pinta Sentada en el Verde Limón (1975), by Albalucía Ángel. All these novels deal with a particularly acute period in Colombia’s conflict, La Violencia (1946-1964), during which the radicalization of bipartisanship instigated a massive manslaughter of civilians, soldiers, and insurgents. My hypothesis is that these authors construct the male outlaw character as a counter-hegemonic individual that is able to build new identities by putting into question the patriarchal-made ones, allowing an analysis that emphasizes in the overlapping of the identities aforesaid, while exposing ideologies and political agendas through fiction. My theoretical framework combines a range Feminisms, Postcolonial Studies, and Queer Theory.

Embodied Understanding: A Phenomenological Approach
Alexander Jeuk, Philosophy

I develop a dissertation project on what it means to understand something. For instance, what it means to understand what a cup of coffee is or what it means to understand to perform an action like running. I work on this topic from a phenomenological perspective, which means that I seek to establish those conditions that make it possible that we understand something through an analysis of those aspects of our experience that are invariant. Working on ideas that have been developed by Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I develop a comprehensive conception of understanding that addresses the following issues: What is the structure of understanding so that it can inform skillful action? I argue that understanding has to be concernful (i.e. affective) and that it has to be about the world through spatiotemporal schematic structure. I further work on the problem, famously treated by Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, what the relationship between embodied understanding and conceptual understanding is—and I develop a phenomenological conception of embodiment that can inform further philosophical accounts of understanding.

Hierarchical Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Models for Massive Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Datasets
Pulong Ma, Mathematical Sciences

This project aims to develop novel hierarchical spatial and spatio-temporal statistical models for massive spatial and spatio-temporal datasets from remote sensing, climate science, and environmental sciences. Using classical statistical methods such as kriging for analyzing big data is challenging even for spatial-only data and more cumbersome in spatio-temporal setting. To tackle this issue, I have developed a hierarchical spatial model, which provides flexible covariance function for modeling different spatial scales, and also allows fast and exact computation for massive spatial datasets. I have been also working on developing hierarchical dynamic spatio-temporal statistical models, where distributed inference will be carried out for massive spatio-temporal datasets in both empirical hierarchical modeling (EHM) and Bayesian hierarchical modeling (BHM) frameworks, and novel methods based on loss functions in statistical decision theory will be developed to quantify communication, computation, and prediction cost.

Political Opportunities and Strategic Choices: The Case of the Muslim Sisterhood in Egypt
Anwar Mhajne, Political Science

This paper examines the mobilizing strategies of the Muslim Sisterhood in Egypt during various regime changes between 2010 and 2014. More research is needed to examine how women’s organizing interacts with shifting political opportunity structures. This comparative analysis draws on and contributes to the literatures on political opportunity structures in particular. I will juxtapose the strategies the Muslim Sisterhood employed during various regimes with this extant body of literature, using interviews, social media posts and newspapers articles as primary sources of study. During Mubarak’s regime, the Sisters focused on socioeconomic rights and did not articulate gender demands for audiences outside of the organization. During Morsi’s government, due to the opening of the formal political arena to religious women, the Sisterhood focused on mobilizing its supporters in the formal political arena and raised women’s rights issues. Finally, during the military backlash against the Brotherhood, the sisters utilized the informal political arena to support the Brotherhood and made their arguments with a global language of socioeconomic and political rights.

A Criminal Strain Ran In His Blood: Medical Science, Criminology, and Empire in the Sherlock Holmes Canon
Simon Workman, English & Comparative Literature

Nearly a century and a half after their initial publication, it is clear that Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels continue to be a cultural phenomenon throughout the world. However, less clear are the ways in which those works emerged in response to—and as an example of—cultural anxieties surrounding advancements in science, particularly in the fields of biology and medicine. Advances such as Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection not only called into question basic long-standing assumptions about man’s relationship to the universe; they also promised to improve the investigation of crime, as well as potentially justify certain imperialist beliefs about racial difference—beliefs that themselves influenced the development of criminal investigation. This project seeks to demonstrate how the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories both respond to and participate in the ideological nexus of medical science, criminology, and British imperialism by examining the ways in which certain key texts in the Holmes canon deploy medical discourse, criminological theory, and imperialist assumptions in the creation of a rational, “scientific” worldview through the characters of Dr. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

Estimating the distribution of income using a mixture of distributions with spatial dependence
Gary Cornwall, Economics

Estimating the size distribution of income is a robust research area that has rich history dating back to the late nineteenth century. The predominant focus of research in this area is fitting parametric distributions to income data. These distributions are then used to estimate policy impact, poverty, and income inequality. This work will focus on estimating the distribution of income within a Bayesian framework using a mixture of known distributions while simultaneously incorporating a spatial weight matrix to explain locational dependence in individual income distributions. The end result will be a decomposable income distribution that provides additional avenues to evaluate changes in policy, poverty, and inequality.

Sums of equivalent positive operators in von Neumann algebras
Catalin Dragan, Mathematical Sciences

Operators are mathematical objects that are studied in Operator Algebras, an important branch of modern analysis. They are useful in representing various measurable quantities from quantum mechanics such as the energy, momentum or position of a system. Recent work by Kaftal, Ng, Zhang reveals that a positive operator A, a special class of operators, can be decomposed under certain hypotheses as a sum of rank one projections, a special class of positive operators. This has been generalized by Bourin and Lee by replacing projections with “copies” of an arbitrary positive operator B.

A von Neumann algebra, a special class of which are factors, is a collection of operators that have algebraic properties similar to the addition and multiplication of numbers. The main goal of my research is to find necessary and sufficient conditions for a positive operator A in a von Neumann algebra to be expressed as a sum of operators in the algebra equivalent to a given positive operator B. In answering a conjecture by Bourin and Lee who found a sufficient condition for type I factors, together with my advisor, I give a sufficient condition for type III factors and find a necessary and sufficient condition for type III factors. The main focus of this project is to further study when a positive operator can be decomposed as a sum of operators with prescribed properties.

Women and Life on Earth: Peace, Ecology, and a Transnational Women’s Movement, 1975-1999
Alyssa McClanahan, History

Women and Life on Earth conceives of and traces a powerful, transnational, diverse yet ultimately unsustainable women’s movement born in the late 1970s and early 1980s out of feminist, ecological, and disarmament concerns. Focused primarily on American and British women, my dissertation begins with an influential conference in March 1980 in Northampton, Massachusetts in which hundreds of women gathered to articulate and claim "that ecological right"--the idea to fashion a women's movement that "ecologically" connected all women and a repertoire of causes. Framed around chapters that each depict a specific women's organization or dramatic protest and pays particular attention to the transnational networks and projects that emerged among women, Women and Life on Earth tracks how this women's movement weathered the 1980s, and interrogates the states of feminism, environmentalism, protest strategy and politics in late-20th century America and Britain. It broadly argues that by appropriating ecology as a way to link a litany of oppressions, women began to consolidate a powerful movement that was uniquely for and by women. Yet, as genuinely inclusive and diverse as women crafted their philosophy to be, their ideas did not map evenly onto the political movement itself, and in many ways, their philosophy prescribed their own stymied future.

Fiction Writing as an Aesthetic Identity Pursuit in the Spanish Language Novel
Manuel R. Montes, Romance Languages & Literatures

This doctoral research explores, questions and analyzes how the literary creative process became a canonical theme in the Spanish language novel tradition. It traces the origin, continuous presence, development, and current status of the figure of the writer as a main character who seeks their artistic identity through the intimate, subjective ordeals, and uncertainties of telling a story. Focusing primarily on the paradigmatic contributions of Juan Carlos Onetti’s La vida breve/The Brief Life (1950); Josefina Vicens’ El libro vacío/The Empty Book (1958); Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes/The Savage Detectives (1998); and Enrique Vila–Matas’ Bartleby y compañía/Bartleby & Co. (2000), this dissertation unfolds the path that has been reshaping the concept of a fictional hero by increasingly addressing the failure of narrators who do not find themselves. Instead, they lose almost everything, except for an ephemeral yet enlightening experience of invention.

The principal inquiries attended are: How has the writer as a fictional character evolved to reach its contemporary preeminence in the Spanish language novel? How does writing fiction, closely exposed while occurring or about to occur, embody a fruitful disenchantment rooted in the inevitable loss of individuality and self–assurance? What are the repercussions of this increasing trend both in literary and academic criticisms, and also in the constant reformulation of the canon?

The detailed review of the writer’s figure as a main character begins with Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605) as the primary touchstone and starting point of the genre. This critical study then spans over some of the most transcendental works pertaining to the literary movements of the Picaresque era (XVI–XVII centuries), Neoclassicism (XVIII), Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism and Modernism (XIX–XX), aiming to highlight a wide bibliographical route that thematically precedes the arrival of Juan Carlos Onetti’s The Brief Life in 1950. 

One of the initial drafts of this research, conceived entirely at The University of Cincinnati and entitled Aurea mediocritas, has received the prestigious National Prize of Literary Essay «Alfonso Reyes» 2014 and was published as a book in Mexico the same year.

Building a Better Invasion Biology: A Normative Approach to the Problem of Terminological Disunity
Eric Rogers, Philosophy

One of invasion biology’s explicit aims is the prevention and mitigation of the many economic and environmental costs of invasive species. Unfortunately, this aim is impeded by wide-spread inconsistencies in the use of key terms and concepts, which I call “the problem of terminological disunity.” Terminological disunity impedes research integration and confuses communication between researchers and the stakeholders in interests threatened by these species. This dissertation attempts to resolve this problem by approaching terminological disunity from the perspective of invasion biology’s intrinsic ethical structure and arguing that terminological reconstruction can be aided by consideration of the social and ethical demands on research. I then offer a partial, reconstructed terminology sensitive to the concerns of working invasion biologists. This is viewed as part of the larger philosophical project of understanding and elucidating science as a socially-embedded, value-laden enterprise.

Lord Rosse's Telescope
Linwood Rumney, English & Comparative Literature

Taking Montaigne, the source of the title of the collection, as my point of departure, my poems explore various minor and mostly American historical figures and events. These events are drawn from an array of sources and time periods covering the last two centuries, from “The Great Moon Hoax” of the 1830s to Jared Loughner’s 2011 shooting-spree. Some of the poems address the absurd while others confront the tragic; most occupy a space in between. My aim is to write poems about and through subjects that don't easily accommodate available traditions (the comic, the elegiac, etc.). By doing so, I hope to revitalize stale poetry practices while investigating extremism and sensationalism.

Concepts of Justice in Spy and Detective Fiction viewed through a Kantian Lens
John Shahan, German Studies

In my project I examine German detective fiction and spy fiction through a philosophical lens. I have two main sources in terms of the literary component of my dissertation. My detective novels are written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a Swiss author who wrote in German. His novels normally feature detectives who are flawed and obsessed with the abstract concept of justice. They are willing to destroy themselves or at least sacrifice themselves in order to see that their concept of justice is implemented. I view these novels through a Kantian lens to enhance the discussion of justice in these books. Immanuel Kant was very much concerned with justice and his view of justice was based on the capacity for human reason, which in turn enables human beings to form a collective, called the Kingdom of Ends, based on mutually acceptable moral imperatives. Overall, all of his moral arguments, especially those concerned with justice, are based in an understanding of duty. One must be a moral agent not for any benefit it brings, but for the sake of duty alone. I use this analysis to show how heroes and villains are different when Kantian morality is applied to their actions and to their stories.

Building on these discussions of justice, I examine Cold War spy fiction set in Germany, written by authors such as John Le Carré. I use neo-Kantian philosophers, like John Rawls, to continue the discussion of justice and bring it into contemporary times. Questions I wish to answer are based in the Kantian school of ethics. For example, does a Kantian hero differ from a conventional hero or even an anti-hero? Second, if we value Kant’s argument that human beings are ends in themselves and not a means to an end, how can we evaluate what happed during the Cold War in Germany as seen in spy fiction? Overall, the two genres of detective fiction and spy fiction from these two periods will help me to delve into a discussion of justice in general, and relate the literature to a broader picture as seen from both a philosophical and historical context.

Learning about race in the home: The racial socialization practices of white parents
Megan Underhill, Sociology

What, and how, do white parents teach their children about being white in America? Though whites are the majority racial group in the United States, very little is known about how they racially socialize their children. Most of the racial socialization literature has examined the socialization experiences of non-white parents. This gap in the literature is problematic because it legitimates the idea that only “only non-whites “have” race” (Burton et al., 2010: 453).

The few white racial socialization studies that do exist provide us with an incomplete understanding of the process by which white parents teach their children about race. Almost all of this research focuses on the explicit racial socialization efforts of middle class parents. These studies examine what middle class parents say to their children about race, but not what they do, perhaps unconsciously, to facilitate or hinder the development of a white racial identity. As Giddens (1993) reminds us, examining practice is as important as examining beliefs because it is through practice that individuals help to create and sustain social structures.

Within this small body of literature, social factors, such as an individual’s class status and the racial composition of the neighborhood of residence, have also been overlooked. Because prior research has focused exclusively on middle class parents, it is impossible to discern what role, if any, class status has on the racial socialization practices of white parents. Additionally, scholars have not sought to understand how growing up in a white-segregated vs. a multiracial neighborhood might affect the racial socialization efforts of white parents. Bonilla-Silva et al. (2006) argue that coming of age in a segregated-white neighborhood helps to produce a “white habitus” that conditions white racial tastes, beliefs, and behaviors; however, no empirical research exists that examines the influence of neighborhood racial composition on white parents’ racial socialization practices.

To fill these gaps in the literature, the proposed project will investigate the explicit and implicit racial socialization practices of middle and lower class whites who live in either a white-segregated or a multiracial neighborhood. The significance of this study is four-fold. First, by examining explicit and implicit forms of racial socialization, I will identify parental practices that appear non-racial, but may have racialized consequences for the racial identity development of white Americans. Second, by examining how middle and lower class white parents racially socialize their children, my findings will illuminate class-based variation. Third, study findings will provide scholars insight as to whether proximity to non-whites (i.e. racial contact) impacts the racial socialization practices of white parents. Finally, by understanding better how white racial identity is created in the home, my results may help scholars reimagine how racial inequality is reproduced in other institutional settings.

Is Evolutionary Biology Possible? Overcoming the Limits of Integration
Francis Cartieri, Philosophy

Evolutionary biologists are increasingly embracing the notion of “integration” as a novel strategy for tackling the most ambitious and socially critical issues in the life sciences of the 21st century (e.g. biodiversity loss, food stability, synthetic biology, etc.).  However, biologists have tended to systematically underestimate the extent and depth of empirical and conceptual conflicts between the diverse approaches relevant to those problems that are most in need of integrated, cross-disciplinary treatment. Worse, the most prevalent models of integrative research in biology reflect this systematic under-estimation. To remedy these issues, I provide an account of the limits that typify integrative approaches to evolutionary biology’s more complex, pragmatically weighty problems, and then develop a new model of integration (“Frontier Integration”) that is designed to overcome these limits.

Rest Uneasy: Monitoring Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-Century America
Brittany Cowgill, history

Rest Uneasy takes Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) as its subject of historical analysis. Tracing the diagnosis from its mid-century origins through the late-1900s, it investigates the processes by which SIDS became both a discrete medical enigma and a source of social anxiety in the U.S. This project explores parents’ and professionals’ contributions and reactions to shifting conceptions of unexplained infant mortality and analyzes their various, often conflicting, strategies to manage and prevent inexplicable infant deaths. It shows how contemporary ideologies about medicine, infant care, technology, and family shaped Americans’ attempts to identify, explain, and eradicate SIDS and reveals that the monitoring of babies, broadly conceived, was central to these developments.

In Search of Elysium: Spanish poetry of difference at the turn of the 21st century
David Gomez-Cambrone, Romance languages & Literatures

At the tum of the 21st century, Spain's poetic literary field was embroiled in a cultural conflict between the centralized and hegemonic poets of experience and the marginalized and counterhegemonic poets of difference. As the immense influence of the poets of experience began to wane in the 1990s, the poets of difference emerged, seeking an innovative esthetic and a prized place in the legacy of contemporary Spanish poetry. By employing the theoretical frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu and Itamar Even-Zohar, this project endeavors to expose the social workings and mechanisms of the era in order prove the true literary value of the heterodox poets of difference through an analysis of the works of the Spanish poets Federico Gallego Ripoll, Juan Carlos Mestre and Concha Garcia.

African American students and black student campus organizations
Ciera Graham, Sociology

Current sociological research shows both that black college students are confronted with racism on a daily basis on college campuses, and that white educational institutions are ideologically organized around white norms, making them fundamentally white institutional spaces. However, research on how black students navigate this environment and deploy resistance strategies is relatively under developed. To address this gap, this dissertation will explore how black students at predominately white rural and urban colleges perceive and utilize the black campus community (i.e. African American student organizations). Extant literature has highlighted how involvement in black campus organizations facilitates black students’ sense of belonging to their own racial group as well as to the larger institution. In this sense, it is useful to think of the black campus community as a space where strategies of resistance can be developed, employed and shared. However, we know less about how involvement in the black campus community is influenced by the larger environment in which the institution is situated. To address these questions, I will conduct forty in-depth face to face interviews with undergraduate black students at one urban predominately white college located in a racially diverse area, and one rural institution located in a predominately white and remote area in the state of Ohio. Moreover, the sample will be selected to ensure diversity in terms of major social identities, such as gender, class and sexuality. This will allow me to examine how students from different backgrounds experience the racial climate on campus differently, and hence, may perceive and use the black campus community in different ways.

Does popular network and cable television programming simultaneously promote colorblindness and nonwhite racial stereotypes and if so, how? 
Aaryn green, Sociology

Sociological race scholars challenge the popular notion that people in society no longer “see race” and have argued that colorblindness allows for racial discrimination to persist. This study examines if and how television programming allows for stereotypical portrayals of racial minorities, albeit under the guise of racial acceptance and equality. Through content analysis of the most popular primetime TV programs, this study examines if and how television promotes colorblind discourse in mainstream programming while simultaneously promoting racial misrepresentations of nonwhites.

Dreaming of a Better Human, Or - Are We Still Just Conscious Machines?
Alex hogue, German studies

Questions about the nature and structure of consciousness and embodied being have been at the forefront of cultural debates since the German idealists and romantic philosophers reacted against problematic elements of Enlightenment philosophy. This debate about whether consciousness or physical embodiment is most fundamental to human existence has developed over the last two centuries to fit the cultures of romanticism, modernism and now posthumanism, but the underlying questions remain the same. Informed by this debate is a body of narrative works and visual art that directly engage with these very questions through the construction of artificial humans and artificial intelligences. By imagining humanity’s Other, these works reflect in their various media cultural laboratories in which they are able to explore these questions further.

Characteristics of Non-reductive Explanations in Complex Dynamical Systems Research
Maurice lamb, Philosophy

Reductive approaches to scientific explanations assume that explanations are given by describing smaller components and interactions of phenomena. However, such approaches fail to account for explanations of phenomena consisting of many nonlinearly interacting components, as in complex dynamical systems research in physics, psychology, and biology. The structure of explanation in these contexts is only partially worked out by philosophers and physicists defending theories of emergence in complex dynamical systems research in physics. I argue that complex dynamic systems research in physics and other fields provides the basis for a philosophical account of scientific explanation that acknowledges the significance of scale and complexity as they are treated in modern scientific communities and across disciplines. This account does not presuppose either reduction or nonreduction.

Preservation of bounded geometry under metric transformations
Xining li, Mathematical sciences

Calculus in metric measure spaces (sets where one can talk about metric or distances between points, and measures, or sizes, of subsets) is now an integral part of mathematical analysis. For a useful theory of calculus on such spaces, the metric and measure on the set must have certain geometric properties, called doubling and Poincare inequalities. Thus it is of great interest to identify spaces that have these geometric properties. In my dissertation, I study deformations of spaces, called sphericalization (wrapping the space into a spherical object), flattening (unwrapping), uniformization (squeezing the volume at large scales), and hyperbolization (exponentially enlarging volume at large scales) with the aim of seeing whether these deformations preserve the geometric properties of interest.

Diagonals of Idempotents
Jireh Loreaux, Mathematical sciences

A square matrix is a two-dimensional array of numbers with equally many rows and columns, however, this number may be either finite or infinite. The diagonal of a matrix is the sequence of numbers starting with the top left entry and proceeding diagonally to the bottom right entry. An idempotent matrix is one which is unchanged when multiplied by itself. The purpose of this project is to investigate and attempt to characterize the possible diagonals of infinite idempotent matrices. This has been done for finite idempotent matrices by Giol, et al. in 2011 [GKL+11]. It has also been done for certain infinite idempotent matrices that satisfy a symmetry condition known as being self-adjoint by Kadison in 2002 [Kad02a],[Kad02b]. As Giol, et al. show, this investigation has applications to frame theory and signal processing.

Primary Energy Resource Transitions and Great Power Grand Strategy: Exploring the American and British Navies’ Transition from Coal to Oil
Robert Nestheide, political science

The significant role of energy security in state grand strategy is widely acknowledged. However transitions by states militaries from one energy source to another are understudied. Many scholars and scientists have noted the likely future transition from fossil fuels to other, more sustainable, resources. In order to prepare for and manage future likely transitions, it is important that we examine past transitions. This dissertation seeks to understand the impact of such transitions by studying the shift of the U.S. and British navies from coal to oil for fueling their fleets between 1904 and 1918. I hypothesize that this transition shifted state perspectives, policies and grand strategy and thus lead to increased competition between the two powers over control of the newly prioritized energy resource.

Sea's Edge (a novel)
Rachel Steiger-Meister, English & comparative literature

Sea’s Edge, my creative dissertation, is a young adult fantasy novel that takes place in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel follows the story of Fíona, a young woman from the Aran Islands, who falls in love with a visiting young scholar, Agnes. Fíona and her community’s subsistence way of life is vastly different from Agnes’s privileged upbringing in Dublin. The novel explores what it means to love across differences in class, education, language, and worldview. The setting—Fíona’s windswept, rocky island where the supernatural figures of Irish folk belief are made real—emphasizes the power and wonder of the natural world. With its focus on romantic love between young women and traditional island life, Sea’s Edge will be a unique contribution to young adult literature.

Michael and Sal 
Brian Trapp, English & comparative literature

My dissertation-in-progress is a novel titled Michael and Sal-a serio-comic coming of-age story that follows a set of twins: Sal, who has severe cerebral palsy and mental disabilities, and Michael, the "normal one," who struggles with survivor's guilt. The novel challenges common disability narratives of compensation and sentimentality, drawing on the modes of the interior novel and the comic novel to tell a unique, domestic family story. Written in a tonally nimble style that vacillates between comedy and tragedy, Michael and Sal extends and problematizes debates in disability studies.

The Pursuit of Soft Power: A Case Study of Chinese and American Nationalism
Aileen Wang, Political science

American and Chinese nationalistic sentiments are commonly thought to induce (or at least exacerbate) tensions in Sino-American relations. Increasing US-China competition is now widely considered to be one of the central characteristics of contemporary world politics. Concerns among international observers about the implications of resurgent Chinese nationalism have been particularly pronounced recently. Current diplomatic troubles especially as inflamed by maritime confrontations in the Pacific are especially troubling not just to the US but also among China‘s East Asian neighbors. However, in the past, analysts have devoted attention primarily to ―hard power‖ competition between the US and China. The relative lack of attention to ―soft power‖ competition between the US and China presents a gap in the study of world politics. This dissertation aims to address this gap.

Berlin's Image(s): Art Exhibitions in Berlin's Transitional Architecture, 1989-2013
Emily Wyatt, German studies

Berlin’s post-1989 reconstruction has stimulated rich visual cultural research investigating how architecture performs national identity. My research contributes to this field with an examination of art exhibitions in architectural spaces that were reconfigured or dismantled in the aftermath of Berlin’s reunification, examining how artworks in these spaces perform unified German identity. I further explore how these exhibitions synthesize reflection on the historical significance visually evoked by these spaces and the sense of newness implied by their transitional status. I argue that the spaces chosen for art exhibitions are a critical component in the performance of an image of the German capital (and by extension, the German nation) that acknowledges the past but at the same time allows unified Germany to create a future-centered visual identity.

Rural-Urban Differences in Educational Outcomes: Does Religious Social Capital Matter?
Paul Anderson, sociology

Sociologists have long been interested in the impact of religion on a variety of measures of adolescent well-being. In recent years, researchers have turned to religious social capital in an effort to predict educational outcomes for youth. Despite research indicating that religious social capital improves educational achievement, the mechanisms involved in religious effects on adolescent educational outcomes remain unclear, and this uncertainty has led to contradictory findings in the literature. Using data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I employ multilevel modeling techniques to examine differences in the effects of religious social capital on educational achievement. The findings of this study will fill the gap in the current body of literature by focusing on the previously neglected influence of community-level factors.

Motherland
Mica Darley, English & Comparative Literature

This is the draft of a one-woman show written and acted in the cadre unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center Los Angeles by Strella Estéban, a seventeen-year-old migrant worker's daughter of keen intelligence and nostalgic hobbies, who awaits trial for killing a man while looting the half-demolished Beverly Hills home of George and Ira Gershwin. Strella considers herself only part-thief-she's more an archaeologist on a dig for American legend, a girl collecting abandoned souvenirs. As she performs the story of the excavation that preceded her crime, the lines between her own life and those of the people she meets in the Gershwin house—both living and dead—blur. So do the Technicolor lines between the myth and reality. In the end, Hollywood's great magic, as well as its profound injustice, form a cause at the heart of Strella's crime, and speak to the power of America's broadcast arts to reflect, recast, and reshape American history.

Composing Assemblages: Towards a Theory of Material Embodied Process
Hannah Rule, English & Comparative Literature

This is foremost a study of writers in action. It offers a new response to an old question in the field of composition studies: how is writing accomplished? Within my field, as in common parlance, writing is typically thought to be an abstract, intellectual exercise, involving brainstorming, prewriting, and revising. Perpetually unaddressed, however, is the fact that writing also happens somewhere-in a coffee shop, on a computer screen, in a library, on the bus. Through an ethnographic study of several graduate student writers, my research suggests how material objects, affect, ritual, and bodily movement contribute to the development of writing. How do writers interact with, move within, arrange and conceptualize the physical places where they write? What objects, places, feelings, movements, and rituals are central to the writing process? In arguing for the significance of physical forces in composing, Toward a Theory of Material Embodied Process makes a significant contribution to research on the writing process and to writing instruction.

Where do we go from here? Jewish Community Formation After World War I
Wes Jackson, German studies

The topic of this dissertation focuses on the Eastern European travelogues by Alfred Döblin, Arnold Zweig, Sammy Gronemann, Joseph Roth, and Walter Benjamin after World War I. These travelogues reveal how German Jewish intellectuals and Jewish communities sought to respond to the pan-European, nationalistic identity crisis after the Great War. The travelogues not only present descriptions of the Central and Eastern European Jewish ghettos to a Western audience, they also act as post-War reassessments of the very nature of authentic human community and serve as descriptions of a community's necessary components.

Multiplicity Adjustment in Bayesian Variable Selection for Linear Model

Threshold of Rebellion: A History of the Anti-Masonic Party
Michael Davis, History

The American Anti-Masonic Party has long been dismissed by historians as a collection of evangelical cranks with no importance to the politics of the nineteenth century and the birth of the Jacksonian Second Party System. This dissertation will argue that the Anti-Masons were crucial to the development of American politics. The political arm of the Second Great Awakening, the Anti-Masons mobilized religious and populist sentiment as no party had before, paving the way for the development of American radicalism in subsequent decades and the triumph of evangelical politics in the North in the 1850s and beyond. 

The Last Time I Saw Manila
Rebecca Morgan Frank, English & Comparative Literature

The Last Time I Saw Manila is a collection of poems that explore the occupation of the Philippine Islands from the Spanish American War through World War II. While one family's narrative serves as a unifying thread in this collection, the impact of war and occupation are depicted from shifting points of view through various personae. This manuscript is both deconstructed family narrative and a contemporary reflection on the ongoing legacy of American imperialism and the multicultural families born of it.

"Channel of Channels": A Comparative Study of the Poetic Works of Gonzalo Rojas, Alí Chumacero, Fernando Charry Lara, and Juan Sánchez Pelaez, and Their Interactions with the Literary Field
Manuel Iris, Romance languages & Literatures

The canonization of a poet depends on three factors: 1) the aesthetic-ideological direction of the work, 2) the negotiation between this direction and the concept of taste developed in the poet's particular (national) and general tradition, and 3) how this poetic work inserts itself in then-current and later literary fields (the case when poets gain late visibility). Iris proposes that these factors are inseparable and operate simultaneously. He analyzes the work of poets from four Latin-American national traditions to better understand the ways in which their literary fields work as a means to classify and compare them. From this, he hopes to identify a series of transnational constants in the construction and evolution of modern Latin-American poetry.

History as Cartography: Mapping the Narrative of Time in Alfred Döblin's Amazonas Triologie
Wes Jackson, German Studies

This project maps Alfred Döblin's (1878–1957) poetic recasting of history, particularly as his poetics reveals itself in his historical novel, Amazonas (1937–38). While Döblin's international literary reputation was well-established through his "big city novel," Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), critics have largely ignored Döblin's later historical epics such as Amazonas. This trend has started to change within the last decade, thanks to a new generation of scholars willing to engage Döblin's texts from non-traditional standpoints. Thanks to Döblin's training as a psychiatrist and interest in psychoanalysis, he incorporated the theories of Freud and Jung into a kind of psycho-spiritual, archetypal model of history.
Döblin's archetypal vision of time lends itself to the interpretive lens of spatial as well as psychological theory: history as map; the charting of the myths, stories, cultural narratives, and physical spaces that allow history to "take place." This project explores how Döblin combines objective historical research with the strong awareness that subjective, mythical, and poetic interpretations of human experiences are necessary for capturing the many-sided truths of reality.

Geometric Properties of the Ferrand Distance
Poranee Julian, Mathematical Sciences

We live in Euclidean space and are familiar with Euclidean geometry. Yet in many situations, Euclidean distance is not a correct measure. An alternative is length distance, the length of the shortest route. However, the shortest path is not necessarily the least expensive path, as one may have to expend more effort to travel. To study this, one introduces a density that provides the cost of passing through an area of interest. A path with the lowest travel cost is called a geodesic, and the weighted length of such a path yields the distance. Hyperbolic geometry is an especially important example of a non-Euclidean geometry. In every disk, hyperbolic and Ferrand distance are the same. Ferrand distance is a Möbius invariant and comparable to quasihyperbolic distance, a simpler, calculated distance and a substitute for hyperbolic distance. This project is an investigation of Ferrand geometry, which lies "midway" between hyperbolic geometry—the best model of non-Euclidean geometry—and quasihyperbolic geometry. This work examines quasihyperbolic geometric properties and determines analogs for Ferrand geometry. In particular, this research focuses on curvature, smoothness of geodesics, and the properties of uniqueness, prolongation, and convexity in Ferrand geometry.

Revolutionville
Christian Moody, English & Comparative Literature

The short stories and novellas of Revolutionville, hybridized narratives that both refute and draw from postmodern literature by merging literary fiction and popular "genre" forms like sci-fi, fantasy, and detective fiction, take voyeurism as their principal subject matter. Revolutionville addresses an aspect of US culture that creates a genuine conundrum for literary realism: Any serious attempt to depict how Americans actually live can't skip over the fact that, aside from sleeping, what most Americans actually do is stare at the screens of televisions, computers, and mobile devices. This poses a problem for storytellers who want to write about contemporary America while also offering the satisfaction of conflict, action, event, and drama. How can watching stuff be the stuff of fiction? Moody addresses this question through stories and novellas that explore voyeurism, espial, surveillance, and all the ways people spend their time watching. One goal is to imagine a way back to looking at unguarded, vulnerable depictions of genuine emotion and human connection, while acknowledging and critiquing the difficulty of doing this without irony when we spend so much time engaged with images that are highly self-conscious and orchestrated—TV, movies, ads, Facebook, Twitter.

An Analysis of Subideals of Operators
Sasmita Patnaik, Mathematical Sciences

At the intersection of two major fields of mathematics, analysis and algebra, lies the field of functional analysis. The historical roots of functional analysis lie in the study of operator functions. Patnaik's primary focus is the study of bounded linear operators, one of the main branches of functional analysis called operator theory. This project concerns ideals in the ring of bounded linear operators with a focus on the structure of their subideals. The goal is to determine when a subideal of a given ideal is itself an ideal, then to use this criterion to completely characterize all subideals in the spirit of the celebrated Calkin-Schatten characterization of ideals. This would extend Fong and Radjavi's result to arbitrary ideals and would lead to their characterization.

The American Attitude: Context Effects and the Change in Public Trust in Government (1964–2008)

Dmitriy Poznyak, Political Scienc

Perhaps no other public opinion topic has received more attention from academics, politicians, and the media than the decline of trust in American national government. Public trust in the Leviathan on the Potomac has declined from about seventy-five percent in 1958 to a mere twenty percent before the 2010 mid-term elections. While this decline has certainly been dramatic, it is the rapid change in trust levels over short periods—the Vietnam War, after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina—that has puzzled researchers the most. It remains an open question in public opinion research whether we should be more concerned with the overall decline in trust or the up-and-down swings in attitudes over time. Using national cross-sectional and time-series survey data, this dissertation applies a new framework to the study of change in political trust over time. It tests the attitude priming and accessibility hypothesis by modeling the effect of media content on people's perceptions of important national problems, which, in turn, affect political trust. The findings counter the established idea that the decline in trust represents vanishing systemic support of the American political system. Building on the ideas of contemporary cognitive psychology, Poznyak argues instead that response to trust-in-government questions largely depends on the content cues at the time of attitude construction. Therefore, the level of trust should not be treated as a barometer of American democracy. Instead, it is largely a syndrome of citizen's "response to everything."

Out of Sync - Why Did America's Environmental Movement Lose its Political Power?
Rike Rothenstein, Political Science

This dissertation will examine the paradox of decreasing popular support for environmental protection that is accompanied by heightened demand for everything green. The paradox yields the question of why an increasing environmental awareness especially in the marketplace in not mirrored in national electoral politics in which the issue of the environment still proves to be insignificant. I will argue that America's environmental movement and its inability to gather political and popular support for comprehensive environmental protection playa key role in answering this question. Four hypotheses considering the image, the issues, the strategies, and the membership of the environmental movement will guide this study. The study will apply quantitative analysis using national survey data combined with content analysis examining annual reports of national environmental organizations.

Flame On, Flame Off: Altering Masculine Performances among Gay Men
Travis D. Speice, Sociology

Contemporary gender theories recognize that different groups of men perform masculinity differently, for masculinity is fluid, changing, and historically informed. While different demographic variables influence men's masculine performance (race, social class, religion, etc.), sexual orientation is so deeply intertwined with gender, one cannot discuss one without the other. For gay men, managing gender and sexual identities so as to appear more or less masculine is consciously accomplished in order to perform consistently with social expectations in a number of different social settings. Speice will develop a greater qualitative understanding of the ways in which gender and sexuality are intertwined and performed simultaneously. He asks, "How do gay men understand masculinity, and how do they perform masculinity along with their sexual identities? How is masculinity communicated and interpreted among gay men in different social contexts?" This understanding will help inform related areas such as changing family composition, same-sex marriage, and GLBT service in the military.

No More Shall the Winding Rivers Be Red": War, Reunion, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Middle America
Matthew E. Stanley, History

What Americans now consider the North became the North as part of a historical process centered on the Civil War, commemoration, and reunion between former Union and Confederate soldiers. Wartime and postwar social, political, and cultural processes led to the construction and reconfiguration of regional and sectional identity during the antebellum period, the secession crisis, war, and its aftermath. In exploring how that process occurred in the southernmost portion of the free states—the Lower Middle West of southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—this dissertation addresses four principal motifs: the experiences of northern families and individuals who were born in the slaveholding South or identified as southerners or westerners pre-1861 and how they reconstructed regional and national identities during and after the war; the Ohio River as a physical and metaphorical border to define the war's meaning both during and after the conflict; the continuity of white supremacy and aversive race relations in the region from the antebellum period through the era of sectional reconciliation and how such attitudes were linked to sectional and regional identity; and the dialectic relationship between sectionalism (a form of self-identification linked to the institution of slavery and the Civil War) and regionalism (a form of self-identification linked to kinship, geography, white supremacy, ethnocultural attitudes and practices, and political conservativism) in the Lower Middle West and how reunions between former soldiers represented intersections of sectional and regional thought.

Robustifying a Non-Linear Model Using Wavelets: A Bayesian Approach with an Application to Pharmokinetics Modeling
Yuanshu Zou, Mathematical Sciences

Parametric models are easy to fit and easy to interpret; however, they may not be sufficient for modeling data that arises from complex phenomenon. Nonparametric models allow flexible modeling but have difficulties in interpreting and dealing with very few observations. In this project Zou takes a middle approach that incorporates the advantages of both methods, keeping information from the parametric model while allowing deviation, thus capturing unusual or unexpected features of the data. In other words, Zou wants to robustify a parametric model by considering models that are non-parametric, yet lie in the neighborhood of the parametric model. She uses the well-known wavelet approach to model deviations from a parametric model. Pharmacokinetics modeling serves as her primary motivation, and she will also apply her method to other scenarios.