Juli Case, English and Comparative Literature

Project Title: The Holmes Alpha

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?

Ellen Chew, German Studies

Project Title: “Opera with Innovations”? - The Debt of Brecht’s “Epic Theater” to the 19th Century

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.

Alex Huffman, Philosophy

Project Title: The Metaphysics and Semantics of Natural Kinds: A Case for Kind Nominalism

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.

Huibin Weng, Economics

Project Title: Estimation of a social interaction model with endogenous network formation

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.

María Del Mar Gámez, Romance Languages and Literatures

Project Title: Journalism as a site of Cultural Memory: the Literary Canon of the Spanish Golden Age in the Language of Hispanic Journalism (1975-2017)

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

Project Title: Transgender Patient Experiences of Biomedicine

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.

Murat Yilmaz, Political Science

Project Title: China’s Development Model as Internal Colonialism: The Case of the Uyghurs

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.

Na Zhang, Mathematical Science

Project Title: On the Quenched Central Limit Theorem for Stationary Random Fields

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 

Project Title: Closer Connections: The Response of Immigrant Communities and their Members to Progressive Child-Saving Reforms, 1880-1930

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.

Kalasia Daniels, Sociology

Project Title: New Economy, Old Inequalities: Understanding Racial and Gender Groups’ Transition from School to Work

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.

Daniel Paul, English & Comparative Literature

Project Title: The Rematerializer on Deck 13 is Broken Again

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?”

Katherine Paul, German Studies

Project Title: Robert Wilson’s Faust I+II and the Berlin Theatre Scene Today

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.

Abigail Richard, Mathematical Sciences

Project Title: Approximations of Quasihyperbolic Distance

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.

Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira, Philosophy

Project Title: Scientific Modeling without Representationalism

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 

Project Title: Incorporating Spatial Heterogeneity into Regression Discontinuity

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.

Kristina M. Teater, Political Science 

Project Title: Transnational Advocacy Networks as a Response to Religious Restrictions: A Comparative Study of the Christian Minorities in India and Malaysia

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.

Crystal Whetstone, Political Science

Project Title: 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

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.

Matthew Bauman, German Studies

Project Title: Wie man (im Osten) sieht: Exploring Subjectivity in East and West German Documentary (1961–1989)

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.

Vanessa de los Reyes, History

Project Title: From Conformity to Protest: The Evolution of Latinos in American Popular Culture, 1930s-1980s

“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.

Alan Grigsby, Sociology

Project Title: Black Social Life in a Diverse Suburb

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.

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.

Alexander Jeuk, Philosophy

Project Title: Embodied Understanding: A Phenomenological Approach

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.

Pulong Ma, Mathematical Sciences

Project Title: Hierarchical Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Models for Massive Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Datasets

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.

Anwar Mhajne, Political Science

Project Title: Political Opportunities and Strategic Choices: The Case of the Muslim Sisterhood in Egypt

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.

Simon Workman, English & Comparative Literature

Project Title:nbsp;A Criminal Strain Ran In His Blood: Medical Science, Criminology, and Empire in the Sherlock Holmes Canon

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.

Gary Cornwall, Economics

Project Title:Estimating the distribution of income using a mixture of distributions with spatial dependence.

Catalin Dragan, Mathematical Sciences

Project Title: Sums of equivalent positive operators in von Neumann algebras

Alyssa McClanahan, History

Project Title: Women and Life on Earth: Peace, Ecology, and a Transnational Women’s Movement, 1975-1999

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.

Manuel R. Montes, Romance Languages & Literatures

Project Title: Fiction Writing as an Aesthetic Identity Pursuit in the Spanish Language Novel

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. 

Eric Rogers, Philosophy

Project Title: Building a Better Invasion Biology: A Normative Approach to the Problem of Terminological Disunity

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.

Linwood Rumney, English & Comparative Literature

Project Title: Lord Rosse's Telescope

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.

John Shahan, German Studies

Project Title: Concepts of Justice in Spy and Detective Fiction viewed through a Kantian Lens

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.

Megan Underhill, Sociology

Project Title: Learning about race in the home: The racial socialization practices of white parents

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.

francis cartieri, philosophy

Project Title: Is Evolutionary Biology Possible? Overcoming the Limits of Integration

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.

brittany cowgill, history

Project Title: Rest Uneasy: Monitoring Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Twentieth-Century America

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

david gomez-cambrone, romance languages & literatures

Project Title: In Search of Elysium: Spanish poetry of difference at the turn of the 21st century

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.

ciera graham, sociology

Project Title: African American students and black student campus organizations

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.

aaryn green, sociology

Project Title: Does popular network and cable television programming simultaneously promote colorblindness and nonwhite racial stereotypes and if so, how?

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.

alex hogue, german studies

Project Title: Dreaming of a Better Human, Or - Are We Still Just Conscious Machines?

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.

maurice lamb, philosophy

Project Title: Characteristics of Non-reductive Explanations in Complex Dynamical Systems Research

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.

xining li, mathematical sciences

Project Title: Preservation of bounded geometry under metric transformations

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.

jireh loreaux, mathematical sciences

Project Title: Diagonals of Idempotents

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.

robert nestheide, political science

Project Title: Primary Energy Resource Transitions and Great Power Grand Strategy: Exploring the American and British Navies’ Transition from Coal to Oil

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.

rachel steiger-meister, english & comparative literature

Project Title: Sea's Edge (a novel)

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.

brian trapp, english & comparative literature

Project Title: Michael and Sal

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.

aileen wang, political science

Project Title: The Pursuit of Soft Power: A Case Study of Chinese and American Nationalism

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.

emily wyatt, german studies

Project Title: Berlin's Image(s): Art Exhibitions in Berlin's Transitional Architecture, 1989-2013

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.

Paul Anderson, sociology

Project Title:Rural-Urban Differences in Educational Outcomes: Does Religious Social Capital Matter?

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.

Michelle Burke, english & comparative literature

Project Title:Animal Purpose

Angelica Graciela Caicedo Casso, mathematical sciences

Project Title:Mathematical Modeling and Sensitivity of Representative Models of Circadian Rhythms in Neurospora Crassa

Circadian rhythms are daily cycles that occur in numerous species, including humans, and provide temporal information to various biological processes. Recent discoveries indicate that disruptions may result in certain pathologies such as sleep disorders, cancer and diabetes. The mechanistic blue prints of circadian rhythms are similar from Neurospora crassa (filamentous fungus) to mammals. This suggests that findings in Neurospora are translatable to mammalian system. The mechanisms of circadian rhythms involve complex molecular interactions that determine the physiology. Mathematical modeling and sensitivity analysis are sophisticated methods that facilitate detailed simulations and allow changes to be made easier than in the experiments. I am building biologically relevant models of circadian rhythms in Neurospora Crassa, aiming to discover novel molecular insights by means of scientific computing. Understanding the dynamics of circadian rhythms will facilitate development of treatments for some contemporary diseases or disorders.

Kelli Chapman, sociology

Project Title:Dating In and Out of the Closet: Negotiating Relationships as an LGBT Teenager

While there is substantial research on the dating practices and sexual decision making of heterosexual teenagers, far less is known about how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) teenagers negotiate intimate relationships, including dating and sex. Where do you meet other LGBT teens? Where do you go on a date if you are not ‘out’? How do you decide when you are ready for sex? This study is a qualitative exploration of how LGBT teens manage, negotiate, and make sense of their dating and sexual lives. Through a combination of focus groups and interviews, this study investigates how LGBT teens make decisions about forming relationships, disclosing relationships, engaging in sexual activity, and how school environments and participation in LGBT youth groups impact their decisions.

Michael Ducey, philosophy

Project Title:On the Possibility of Objective Interpretation of Literature

I propose an account of meaning determination in literature, and more specifically, novels, which can ideally expand to explain how the meaning of many types of artworks can be determined. There exists an objective, correct meaning to a work of art. This objective, true interpretation exists as a theoretical entity—the verified, true interpretation might be impossible to determine in its entirety. However, the correct meaning of the work can be determined without consulting the intentions of the author, real or hypothesized. The argument proceeds by proposing a new version of “utterance meaning,” a type of meaning determination model. It is generally held that utterance meaning is an intentionalist model, relying on speaker intentions to determine what has been said. I propose an anti-intentionalist model of utterance meaning that will be used to determine the meaning of a novel.

Jennifer Dye, political science

Project Title:Food Security and Entitlements

Food security is often misunderstood as an issue of not enough food, but at its core food security rests on underlying social and political questions of power and entitlement over food. This project seeks to address this by examining how large-scale land acquisitions affect food security and property rights, both on the local and national levels, of the developing African state. Using the cases of Tanzania and Zimbabwe, I hypothesize that these types of large-scale land acquisitions in developing states in Africa have a primarily negative impact on both food security and property rights at the local and national levels in the host state, thus maintaining a system of social and political entitlements that maintain low levels of food security in these states.

Erika Garcia Gonzalez, political science

Project Title:The role of external factors in genocide and politicide

Zachary Stuart Garrison, history

Project Title:Fugitives for the Sake of Freedom: German Immigrants, Anti-Slavery, and the Civil War in the Lower Middle West during the American Civil War era

Ospina Nidia Herrera, romance languages & literature

Project Title:Jose Donoso in Cinema: Perception of Space and Body in Literary and Cinematographic Discourses

My dissertation focuses on José Donoso’s narrative in relation to cinema. By bringing into play the concept of Perception by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I analyze how this phenomenon takes place around space and body in Donoso’s novels and their cinematographic adaptations, and how it affects readers and spectators. The analysis is on how the novel and the film are aesthetically experienced by an actual interlocutor. I concentrate on the French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne’s theory regarding aesthetic experience which is developed from a phenomenological perspective. My major goals in this research are to contribute to the study of Donoso’s poetics of space and body and his relation to cinematographic discourse, and to broaden the understanding of the bonds between literature and cinema in terms of aesthetic experience.

Nicole Lyon, history

Project Title:Perception of Calendar Time in Early Modern Germany (1450-1750)

This project sheds light on the perception of time (Zeitwahrnehmung) in 16th- and 17th-century German lands, an epoch in which calendars and "calendar time" underwent some of the most profound changes in the realm of time measurement in western history. I analyze the relationships between individuals, urban communities and calendars in the Holy Roman Empire, especially within the two urban centers of Nuremberg (Protestant after 1525) and Munich (Catholic). In the early modern period, calendar time was experienced through various avenues. The specific focus of this project is on annual liturgical cycles, natural seasons and numerical calendar systems. Historians have explored the early modern German "calendar war" (Kalenderstreit), referring to the conflict of time reckonings engendered by the Gregorian calendar reforms in 1582. This calendar reform was commenced by Pope Gregory XIII in order to reform the flawed Julian calendar that had been in use since before the time of Christ, and had "lost" nearly eleven days in two millennia. The German speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire adopted the new calendar at different times, such that written sources throughout the early modern period often contain multiple dates simultaneously. The Gregorian calendar is still in use throughout the world today. I suggest that the early modern period was not merely a bridge between "medieval" and "modern" concepts of time, or a point on the linear trajectory towards the systematization of time. It was rather an epoch in which unique and far-reaching perceptions competed for social legitimacy through confessional, regionalized and multivalent systems of time reckoning and experiencing. Many outcomes of these changes continue to shape our own time perceptions in the 21st century.

Jonathan Martin, philosophy

Project Title:Cognitive Science and the Challenge of Anti-representationalism

Representation is one of the most historically important notion in cognitive science. Models of cognition in which representations of various forms are transformed or manipulated have been dominant in both classical computational psychology, artificial intelligence, and rival approaches such as artificial neural network modeling. Recently, however, there has been a growing distrust of representational approaches – particularly from proponents of dynamical systems theory and embodied-cognition. I investigate the plausibility of eliminating representational posits from models of perception and cognition. Traditional philosophical defenses of the need for representational models underestimate the force of the primary arguments coming from recent anti-representationalist approaches. Instead, representation ought to be justified by identifying the unique explanatory role played by representational structures in existing empirical work. I show that cases from cognitive neuroscience and neuroethology provide the resources for a defense of representational modeling which is equal to the anti-representationalist's challenge.

Vanessa Plumly, german studies

Project Title:BLACK-Red-Gold in der bunten Republik: Post-Wende (Black/Afro-) German Cultural Productions

Although the Afro-/Black German population in the Federal Republic of Germany continues to seek national recognition, the volume and diversity of their cultural output has begun to receive its own international attention. What, if anything, makes their cultural texts uniquely (Afro-) German? This project is a multi-genre study exploring the discursive construction and performance of the imagined yet real concepts of nation, Heimat (home), and diaspora, in relation to German cultural identity and national belonging in Afro-/Black German texts that range from theater and literature to spoken word poetry and hip-hop. In these works, Heimat is performed in resistance to a singularly imagined German origin of Whiteness. My analysis situates Heimat as the most imperative of the concepts because Heimat can exist through contradictions, allowing it to be both individual and collective, geographically situated but also an internalized non- space/place, and both inclusive and exclusive; its construction simultaneously encompasses national belonging as well as diasporic ties.

Suayip Toprakseven, mathematical sciences

Project Title:Error Estimates for an Enriched Finite Element Scheme

This work will develop numerical approximations of solutions to mathematical models of physical processes involving high frequency components and analyze their accuracy. Problems of this sort arise many applications including cancer therapy (Simulation of High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU)), Nanomaterials and Quantum Mechanics. We particularly especially interested in a Discontinuous Galerkin Extended Finite Element Method (DG/XFEM) approach that was studied in [CQ]. We have shown error estimates of form for the Babuska-Zlamal and SIPG schemes ([BZ] and [AR]) for a variety of problems. Here, h > 0 ? is a measure of the element domain size, is the frequency while p and q are positive integers. We have thus verified that refining element size (Making h smaller), though this will increase computation time, does improve accuracy even in the more difficult case of high frequencies

Katherine Zlabek, english & comparative literature

Project Title:Their Apocrypha

Katherine’s novel, Their Apocrypha, is set in the once-forgotten town of Galena, Illinois. In it, I investigate the dangers inherent when a town, its elderly and its children, is abandoned by all except those seeking the thrills and frivolity of a getaway. This novel integrates supernatural elements more fully than my other work, employing the Gothic notion that behind a bucolic façade, a troubling truth often resides. The novel’s landscape is haunted with spiritual anxiety, repressed memories—or memories that characters are desperate to repress, and personal connections that the characters are eager to shuck. Their Apocrypha is interested in the ways that people manipulate fact in order to create an “apocryphal” past, a personal narrative that explains the way a life is spent, justifies bitterness, or accounts for a fallen state.