In the wake of Hurricane Katrinas dramatic demographic changes, scholars, journalists, and politicians have discussed Mexican migration to New Orleans as a new phenomenon and an unwelcome threat to the citys social order, rich culture, and tourist economy. This dissertation challenges these ideas and demonstrates some of the myriad ways...
This dissertation explores performance as a mechanism of racialization and politicization of Native Americans in the United States. I analyze performances of Indians on theatrical stages to define how an embodied repertoire of visual, aural, and kinetic markers, what I call the Stage Indian, became codified and circulated within popular...
Active traffic management systems aim to relieve recurring and non-recurring congestion by using estimated and predicted traffic conditions to guide trip makers before and after entering the network as well as to design control strategies to improve system performance. With external disruptions and interventions (e.g., weather, special events, and incidents),...
There has long been an interest in the idea of generativity the concern for and commitment towards promoting the well-being of future generations. In Western societies, generativity can be characterized through societal contributions and acts dedicated towards others. Since the early 1960s, when Erikson proposed generativity as the major developmental...
To accelerate the implementation of technologies enabled by two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials, the human health and environmental implications of these materials need to be addressed. Fundamental studies which elucidate the mechanisms of toxicity and environmental fate will allow for the safer design of these materials and promote their widespread use. This...
In 2015, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 1 in 6 Americans fall ill with a foodborne infection annually, resulting in more than 3000 fatalities and an estimated $15 billion in economic burden due to combined medical costs, productivity loss, and death. On a per-case basis, infections...
In this work we explore a connection between some high dimensional asymptotic problems and random matrix theory. In the first part, we establish a link between the Wishart ensemble and random critical points of holomorphic sections over complex projective space and use this to establish asymptotics on the average number...
As monolinguals and bilinguals hear words unfold over time, they experience competition from words that share sounds within the same language (e.g., st- activates strict and stamp). Unique to bilinguals is that they are also prone to competition from similar sounding-words between their two languages. In the present dissertation, we...
Developing low-cost, scalable, high-efficiency photovoltaic materials is an important technological challenge because of the projected increase in global energy consumption in coming years, the environmental cost of carbon emissions, and the widespread availability of solar energy. This dissertation contains three studies on the development of novel hybrid materials as photovoltaic...
The moduli stack of bundles on a smooth complete curve over a field, is an immensely rich geometric object and is of central importance to the Geometric Langlands program. This thesis represents a contribution towards a motivic, in the sense of Voevodsky and Morel-Voevodsky, understanding of this stack. Following the...