Supported metal oxides are an important class of heterogeneous catalysts active for many selective oxidation reactions including alkane oxidative dehydrogenation. Attempts to develop fundamental structure-function relationships for supported metal oxide catalysts for alkane oxidative dehydrogenation have been challenging, with many conflicting reports in literature. This has been in part due...
Convent education was financially accessible to many girls whose families could not afford a private tutor and nuns were the largest group of educated, culturally-active women in pre-modern Europe. Convent education mirrored the general contours of humanist education by associating learning with morality, serving the purposes of the Venetian republic,...
Through an engagement with the work of American postmodern choreographers Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, and Laura Dean, I expose choreographic legacy as an ongoing process of continually rewriting dance history. Halprin, Rainer, and Dean’s models for choreographic transmission draw from the legacy methods of repertoire, reconstruction, and reperformance, while simultaneously...
Students often change majors during college, and most workers change jobs throughout their careers. Yet the diverse opportunities for entering natural science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are often overlooked during college and beyond. This dissertation therefore analyzed four large nationally representative datasets to characterize the pathways for joining...
We compare two different methods to compute the mod 2 homology of an infinite loop space. One method is to approximate the infinite loop functor using functor calculus. The other is to approximate the spectrum using an Adams resolution. We show that these two ways lead to isomorphic spectral sequences....
œRuling Sexuality: Law, Expertise, and the Making of Sexual Knowledge, brings together approaches from the sociologies of science, law, and sexualities to examine how the institutions of law and science jointly render sexual subjects legible to state institutions by measuring and categorizing sexualities. Through the comparative study of asylum claims...
The mammalian retina harbors more than 30 output channels, each playing a distinct role in processing visual images. A comprehensive understanding of the retinal code primarily relies on the functional knowledge of individual output neurons or retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Despite recent technical advances in imaging and genetics, the function...
Raising California Together, an ethnography of licensed family childcare homes, contributes significant theoretical and empirical knowledge to our understanding of workfare, immigration and education institutions that shape the lives of the youngest subject-citizens and of those who care for them. I draw from more than three years of participant observation...
Scholars frequently use the term œhymn-like to describe passages of instrumental music but the precise meaning of the term remains elusive. This dissertation examines, through the lens of topic theory, the characteristics, origins, and communicative potential of such passages in the music of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I define...
My dissertation draws on Heideggers interpretation of Kant to argue that Kant overestimates the role that causality plays in structuring our experience. Heidegger suggests that Kants analysis of experience mistakenly universalizes a fraction of our experience: the experience of material things. I defend the merits of this suggestion by offering...
This dissertation examines the origins and social impact of New York stop-and-frisk law, which authorizes police to stop, question and frisk people without a warrant or probable cause to believe crime was committed. Several observers associate it with a recent history of racial profiling, or conservative policing practices of 1990s...
Many key crises of international security are tied to the spread of nuclear weapons and technology, but what makes a state nuclear remains subject to controversy. The possession of nuclear technology does not always grant legal and political nuclear status”a phenomenon evident not only in the recent debate over Irans...
Holy Mediocrity: Saintly Matrons and the Dominicans in Late Medieval Italy', 'Julia Lauren Miglets', 'The task of this study is to explain why a cluster of female saints who were noted not for their miracles but for the moderate even boring quality of their sanctity, a paradigm I call holy...
It is pertinent now more than ever that we find sustainable alternatives to produce chemicals. For decades, scientists and engineers have turned to biological systems to help meet societal needs in energy, medicine, materials, and moreespecially when chemical synthesis is untenable. Often, biologically-produced small molecules are insufficient for production at...
In the past decade, scholars, the news media, and the public have turned increased attention to the activity of atheists in the West. Atheism serves as a source of identity and community in todays society, signaling more than a simple lack of belief in god(s). This dissertation is a cultural...
Many democratic theorists suggest that harmonious relationship between groups are critical for democracy; however, far less is known about how everyday experiences promote or impede such intergroup harmony. In this dissertation, I explore a common, but overlooked, form of intergroup contact casual, brief experiences with outgroup strangers. I propose a...
ABSTRACT', 'Reinventing Television and Family Life, 1960-1990', 'Hannah Spaulding', 'In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the field of television changed. A series of new electronic devices that interfaced directly with TV technology video cameras, home recorders, cable boxes, video calling systemswere introduced to the American public. These devices promised to...
This dissertation analyzes the early excavation, classification, and publication of Cypriot sculpture and its collection and display in European universal museums. The author argues that the events and intellectual climate of the nineteenth century profoundly and lastingly shaped the perception of the ancient Cypriot tradition, determining the island conventional place...
Land and Water: Performing Ecologies of Statelessness in the Aftermath of the Vietnam/American War focuses on land and water as epistemological and ontological grammars to examine cultural productions of Vietnamese refugee narratives. Specifically, I analyze how Vietnamese/American oral history narrators, filmmakers, visual artists, and performance artists narrate refugee subjectivity in...
This dissertation focuses on Chinese contemporary artists conceptualization of spectatorship in the 2000s, the decade when the state started to regulate art production within the parameters of cultural industry. I argue that these artistsCai Guoqiang (b. 1957), Xu Bing (b. 1955), and Yang Shaobin (b. 1962)adopted the visual language and...