Habshis—people of African descent in early modern India—are best known as military slaves in the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan region, a handful of whom rose to political prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars argue that, unlike the alienation that characterized Atlantic African slave diasporas, military slavery encouraged...
In his 1971 inaugural speech, the Asantehene (King of Asante), Opoku Ware II, proposed the reconstruction of the traditional Asante palace, which was demolished in 1874 when the British colonial forces attacked the “national” capital, Kumase. The aftermath of the attack witnessed the British attempt to alter and reinvent the...
In this current historical moment, with the increase in globalized inequity and with the intensification of decolonial efforts, I argue for “pluriversal” orientations towards development discourses wherein people are “de-linked” from inherently damaging comparisons (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011). To these ends, I interrogate the intersections of discourse, social structure, and...
This presentation is concerned with how return migrants articulate and experience belonging within faith communities in Accra. Focusing on Christian women, the paper investigates how interlocutors traverse ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of Pentecostal/Charismatic practice in Accra. In it, I discuss their connection to Hope City Church, parsing out the relationships...
This paper will focus on fashion and body aesthetics in Vodu religious spaces. African fashion is often limited to the glitz of runways shows, urban dandies and flashy fashion weeks. This sums up the unresolved dialogue of decolonizing the aesthetics of African fashion. Colonialism and an interplay of post-colonial modernity...
This paper considers the planning of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, in the late 1970s as a site of global knowledge production about urbanism that cut across the Global North and South. The planning of Abuja presented an unprecedented opportunity to international teams of planners to experiment with environmental city planning and...
Since the official adoption of the Islamic legal system by the state governments in Northern Nigeria, Islamic figures in the religious public sphere have amplified their censure of homosexuality as a 'social illness' and 'depravity of depravities' incommensurable with the ethics that govern the discourse on gender and sexuality in...
Forecasting U.S. elections has been a field of interest for many researchers, with various statistical and mathematical models being proposed. In my research, I analyzed a prior election model, the SIS election model. In this model, a system of differential equations traditionally used in epidemiology to study disease transmission (but...
Lack of access to safe drinking water is a global problem, and methods to reliably and easily detect contaminants could be transformative. We report the development of a cell-free in vitro transcription system that uses RNA Output Sensors Activated by Ligand Induction (ROSALIND) to detect contaminants in water. A combination...
Numbers are not simply measurements. Often mobilized to support a certain political narrative, numbers contain underlying assumptions about what is important and how the world works. This is especially true when measures address public health issues. My project compares how numbers are politicized in two recent global health crises —...
How do you map a rebellion, especially when its participants do not want to be seen? Between British colonization in the 18th century and emancipation in 1834, Dominica presented a number of slave and Maroon rebellions. This mapping project considered the First Maroon War (1785-86), the New Year’s Day Revolt...
Many theories of categorization have included an intuitive role for our ability to detect and judge similarity. Yet, this important role of similarity processing has been disputed. This research adopts a model of similarity processing through structure mapping (Gentner, 1983) to explore its role in similarity processing and categorization. Relational...
Spatiotemporal dynamics of EEG/MEG (electro-/magneto-encephalogram) have typically been investigated by applying time-frequency decomposition and examining amplitude-amplitude, phase-phase, or phase-amplitude associations between combinations of frequency bands and scalp sites, primarily to identify neural correlates of behaviors and traits. Instead, we directly extracted global EEG spatiotemporal dynamics as trajectories of k-dimensional state...
Within the world of art music, composers have employed a variety of techniques to infuse popular music elements into their writing. This document is an examination of specific instances of this trend in twenty-first century wind ensemble repertoire. The study is limited to twenty-first century wind ensemble works by living...
This is an attempt to recreate a reference architecture with the intention of completing a data engineering capstone project and also learning the services and technologies along the progress. The objective of the project is to use aws cloud managed services to build at scale solution to process, parse and...
The 2005 NHL Lockout instituted a hard salary cap, which is the most limiting salary cap of the major US sports leagues. The NHL as a result doesn’t have the luxury of overpaying or dumping a contract as other professional sports leagues have, which places a huge constraint and emphasis...
This dissertation examines the behavior of bare singular noun phrases, a set of English nominals showing no formal indication of either definiteness or mass/ count status. Although they appear to be count nouns, I show that these nominals represent maximal projections.
This study is in consideration of the spread of COVID-19, the related various government responses, and how these responses and other demographic variables affected the spread and severity of the virus on a domestic (United States) and international level. During the last few months, the virus has spread from its...
Previous research indicates that regret is a painful experience for people but often leads to enhanced self meaning and personal growth. In this study, we employ a narrative approach to explore the architecture and coping methods of regret experiences in late midlife adults. We relate variation in regret narratives told...
My research is a historical ethnography of depictions of the ethnic and cultural other in 19th century England. I was motivated to do this research by curiosity about how cultural and racial otherness and national belonging was constructed historically. Although my work does not directly relate to modern conceptions of...
The goal of this project was to better understand the pathogenesis behind rheumatoid arthritis(RA), an autoimmune disorder that primarily affects the joints. Despite affecting around 1.3 million people in the United States, its causes are not well-understood. Previous research at Pope Lab indicated that when compared to the healthy controls,...
Negative body image in women has been a prevalent issue throughout history. Societal expectations have left many women feeling insecure and dissatisfied. Current research has indicated that oftentimes negative body image is passed down from mother to daughter. While there is a variety of research on mother-daughter interactions with body...
My research paper focuses on inequality in America specifically covering the incarceration system and the intersection of race and the criminal justice system. This is an important topic to study due to the high number of racially diverse individuals that are disproportionally affected and incarcerated due to the inequalities in...
Obesity is a multifactorial disease reflecting the interplay of biological and social factors. Lower socioeconomic status (SES), food insecurity, and poor sleep quality are risks factors for obesity; yet, our understanding of the physiological mechanisms behind overweightness is limited. Leptin, a hormone which modulates hunger, could be a potential mechanism...
"Recently, there has been a public push for the film industry to improve female representation; subsequently, DC and Marvel released female-lead films Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel to critical praise and record box office figures. Strictly looking at industry measures of success (critics’ reviews and box office totals) it would...
Forecasting the outcomes of U.S. elections is a relevant and complex task that has been approached in many ways, most commonly incorporating statistics or proprietary methods that include some degree of subjectivity. Our approach differs from this convention in that we use multidisciplinary methods from applied mathematics. Specifically, we use...
With concerns about how to feed an exponentially growing, increasingly obese population, humanity’s relationship with food is a pressing concern. Evaluating the evolutionary changes in the composition of gut microbiota (GM), defined as the microorganisms that live in the digestive tract, may offer insight into how human bodies have adapted...
In everyday conversation, individuals actively process speech in order to comprehend and respond in real-time. As a word unfolds, listeners activate possible lexical candidates and actively determine the target word as they receive more information, a process referred to as incremental processing. This process requires knowledge of one’s native spoken...
We think data is definitive, but our perception of it contains bias from expectations and motivations. For example, when Democrats and Republicans view the same depiction of global temperature trends, Democrats see an increasing trend, while Republicans see overall flatness. Could prior beliefs bias our perception of relations depicted in...
Efficiency and equity have always been the key dilemma in local economic developments. On the one hand, economic prosperity is crucial for sustainable growth; on the other hand, the neighborhoods might undergo gentrification, transforming the area to appeal to high-end markets. Hence, vulnerable or indigenous residents might face displacements, and...
In the era of international volunteerism, mounting evidence suggests that the presence of unskilled and culturally unaware volunteers in the Global South fosters “voluntourism”, and endangers the very populations and institutions that volunteers want to help. Northwestern does not enforce a pre-trip curriculum for student organizations that coordinate private service...
Listeners have difficulty understanding speech in environments containing background noise. This difficulty is exacerbated for listeners with hearing loss, which is often attributed to the degradation of the speech signal caused by interfering noise, impaired hearing, hearing device processing, or a combination of these factors. To resolve and understand speech...
The successful development of vaccines for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) has been hindered because there are no identified tumor-associated antigens. As an alternative to peptide vaccines, the administration of tumor lysates has been investigated in TNBC to activate the immune system against tumors, wherein a mixture of tumor-specific lysates...
Colombian journalist Jineth Bedoya was kidnapped on May 25, 2000 when covering a prison riot in Bogotá. Held hostage for 16 hours, the journalist was repeatedly raped and tortured in response to her journalistic work. Due to its level of brutality and impunity, Bedoya’s story has become emblematic in Colombia....
It is no secret that Southeast Asia has long been a major source of opium production, providing a lucrative enterprise for European empires in the 19th-20th century. The “Golden Triangle” region, where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand’s borders meet has been one of the world’s largest opium producers since the 1950s....
Life stories are strong predictors of identity, since the specific narratives adults tell about themselves represent individual differences in personality characteristics. One way researchers analyze these life stories in adults is by measuring the story’s coherence, which is comprised of a clear context, a linear chronology, and an explanation of...
