This project addresses the uses of coalition in US political imaginaries throughout the 1930s and 1960s. Throughout this period, public familiarity with “coalition” undergoes a marked transformation: whether deployed as argument, performance, or organizational form. Analysis focuses on three case studies: accounts in the national and Black press of a...
In this dissertation I examine the entanglement between female literacy and female sexuality in nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. I investigate the ways in which male authors used literature as a mechanism for policing female sexuality and stabilizing the traditional family. I argue that nineteenth-century Brazilian fiction exhibits a recurring preoccupation with...
Bio-inspired materials have a distinct advantage over other materials by virtue of their mimicry of nature’s own products, which have been subjected to the inimitable tests of time and evolutionary pressure. Here we have taken instruction from natural nanostructures that are ubiquitous across the animal kingdom, namely high-density lipoproteins (HDL)....
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
In my dissertation I explore several applications of collective household models with limited commitment to study the behavior of singles and couples in the modern US marriage markets in presence of endogenous risk of divorce. In the first chapter, I show that the model is capable of rationalizing the patterns...
We prove the Rigidity Conjecture of Goette and Igusa, which states that, after rationalizing, there are no stable exotic smoothings of manifold bundles with closed even dimensional fibers. The key ingredients of the proof are fiberwise Poincaré–Hopf theorems generalizing earlier such results about the Becker–Gottlieb transfer. These theorems show how...
This dissertation is divided into three chapters. Chapter one studies changes in market concentration and productivity growth in the United States from the 1990s to the 2010s. Chapter two measures the impact of a banking crisis, the British Panic of 1825, on non-financial firms. Chapter three examines how women's employment...
Earth’s mantle has a two-layer structure comprising an upper and a lower mantle, separated by a global seismic discontinuity at 660 km depth. The mantle transition zone (MTZ), which extends from the seismic discontinuity at 410 km depth to the base of the upper mantle plays a crucial role in...
Miniaturized lasers are important for fundamental studies of light-matter interactions and applications in on-chip photonic integration. Plasmonic nanoparticle lattices supporting surface lattice resonances can provide optical feedback for directional lasing emission at room temperature. This thesis focuses on how the design of plasmon cavities can enable engineering of laser emission...
Quantum dots (QDs) are promising photocatalysts due to their large extinction coefficient, large surface area-to-volume ratio, and stability upon irradiation. QDs have been studied in photocatalytic hydrogen production, CO2 reduction, and reduction of small organic molecules such as nitrobenzene. This dissertation describes the application of QDs in two photocatalytic cross-coupling...