They Left Us Dead: Anti-Black Violence, Black Evidence, and The Insistence of Black Life examines the mercurial, though seemingly fixed, notion of evidence as it is brought into relation with anti-blackness, Black death and, ultimately, Black life. They Left Us Dead queries how and why certain forms of documentation and...
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the United States expanded the scale, funding, and technological sophistication of its defense resources, enabling its current standing as the dominant global military superpower. This dissertation examines the role that the popular narrative genre of science fiction played in shaping American cultural...
This dissertation project uses both quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches to examine the dynamics of responsible investing in financial markets. The first chapter investigates how the institutionalization of responsible investing as a business strategy affects category claims made by mutual funds. The study finds that as the divestment movement in...
While microbial competition during infection has most often been examined at the genus or species level [1, 2], the dissertation work described herein asked whether interstrain competition plays an important role in determining which bacterial lineages emerge to cause disease. The goal of this dissertation was to examine the strain...
Molecular self-assembly is a process in which molecules spontaneously form ordered aggregates, the process of which is important in the natural world, considering those ordered systems and complex architectures contained in a living cell. The goal of chemists is to design simple molecules or chemical systems that can undergo molecular...
Biochips and high-throughput screening methods are powerful tools for studying biological processes. The combination of peptide arrays and SAMDI mass spectrometry incorporates these tools to study a broad range of biochemical transformations, including enzyme activities, to provide valuable information on substrate recognition and guide the development of diagnostic and therapeutic...
Plant life history traits influence the extent and degree of gene flow across a species range. The resulting genetic neighborhood size can influence population differentiation and the scale of local adaptation, with implications for species response to environmental change and sourcing of plant materials for ecological restoration. To assess the...
The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act (or “GRH”), which unprecedentedly provided for “sequestration”, a doomsday device to enforce fiscal discipline upon Congress and the President, was passed with bipartisan support on December 12, 1985. How did GRH take place, and why did it assume its final form? Casting GRH’s enactment in functionalist and...
The invention of GdIII-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) probes substantially expanded the capability of MRI in visualizing details in tissue. Building upon the achievement of GdIII-based complexes, more ideal probes should feature contrast that is responsive to biomarkers, such as redox status and ion concentrations. The abnormality of these biomarkers...
In response to exponentially increasing demand for digital media, today's Internet landscape has evolved into a multitude of diverse and interdependent distribution systems designed to move content as efficiently as possible. While many of these systems have \emph{individually} been explored in depth by both academic and industrial communities, a cross-sectional...