In this dissertation, I assert that a contradictory aesthetic has remained and been reborn in the U.S. daytime soap opera through time and technology; I call this the “everyday implausible.” Using textual analysis and archival research, I follow this genre from its beginnings on radio, through its move to television...
A prominent cause of premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) is gonadotoxic cancer therapies, which deplete the ovarian reserve of follicles, oocytes, and hormone-producing cells. Current fertility preservation methods include the removal and cryopreservation of ovarian tissue prior to gonadotoxic treatment. This cryopreserved tissue can be transplanted back and has been found...
Chapter 1 proposes and tests a model where a country aligns with a foreign power to obtain its support and reduce its geopolitical risks, which also depend on the country's exposure to the other foreign powers. We show that the country's alignment with a given foreign power is increasing in...
In the wake of environmental catastrophe, active intervention is needed to heal trauma, resist erasure, and navigate changing communities. Focusing on New Orleans after the federal levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, this dissertation looks across a diverse mix of case studies to theorize how communities utilize performance to navigate mass...
Between the 1880s and the 1980s, typography mutated from an entirely manual, craft-based practice to a comprehensively mechanized, then a fully digitized one. With the arrival of Apple’s Macintosh computer in 1984, the graphic design profession found itself in the midst of a deep transformation of its tools, techniques, and...
Skeletal muscle is a highly sexually dimorphic tissue, with males and females exhibiting differences in muscle size, gene transcription, and metabolism. This thesis describes two models wherein males and females responded to an intervention with the same physiological adaptation but through two distinct mechanisms. In the first model, mice of...
Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning, purpose, and temporal coherence (McAdams & McLean, 2013). Moreover, narrative identity has been found to be associated with...
ABSTRACT This dissertation moves work on school discipline into the digital era by filling a gap in the literature which has largely ignored how data from digital student ecosystems are mined and processed by school authority. My dissertation interrogates the role youth of youth online behavior in school discipline decision-making....
Yugoslav wartime television news often conformed to the demands of the political regimes. Informed by this knowledge, scholars have argued that TV as a medium incited and legitimized the wars by fostering ethnonationalist ideologies. Using archival and textual analysis, this project examines how television reacted to the political constraints imposed...
RAS is one of the most frequently mutated oncogenes in cancer with ~30% of all human tumors harboring a mutation in either HRAS, NRAS, or KRAS isoforms. Despite countless efforts for the development of small molecule inhibitors for RAS, it remains an elusive target in the clinic. Here I demonstrate...