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Disciplinary Writing, Defiant Speech: The Politics of Textual Discourse in Northern Renaissance Art
No full textThis dissertation examines the visual representation of writing as it pertains to class in northern Renaissance art. I focus on the social significance of oil paintings of the literate bourgeoisie and the illiterate peasantry, exposing how images of writing both reflected and participated in the negotiation of power relations during the long sixteenth century.
I maintain that literacy provided members of the emergent bourgeoisie with a fragile form of cultural capital that allowed them to associate themselves with the reigning Habsburg monarchs and, simultaneously, distance themselves from their peasant roots. The paintings examined in this dissertation reveal that upwardly mobile professionals are generally depicted as the producers of writing in works of art, while the lower classes are portrayed as the subjects or victims of their textual discourse. In this context, peasants function as iconographic foils that provide occasions for members of higher social echelons to perform their own class status through disciplinary acts of writing.
I explore how paintings of writing participated in a kind of commodity fetishism, whereby instruments of bureaucratic control—contracts, records, and ledgers—were transformed into composed objects for bourgeois consumption. In this sense, the paintings not only reflect the power of writing but also mystify it, ultimately making it appear natural, benign, and even pleasurable while obscuring the systems of domination behind it. But by shifting the focus to the peasantry, I reveal that works of art also provide indications of how those who were wholly or partially illiterate could make incursions into the sphere of letters—or find a ready means of resistance to elitist textual hegemony through subversive speech
Celebrity and Urban Politics in the Imperial Greek
No full textThis dissertation studies the phenomenon of celebrity and celebrity culture in the civic life of Greek cities in the Roman empire (c. 1st century CE – 3rd century CE). Drawing on literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence and a variety of methodologies, I outline the cultural and political contexts for celebrity as a political phenomenon – in festival culture, performance culture, honorific practice – and as an element of the social imaginary expressed in literary discourse, inscriptions, and the urban mediascape.
Drawing on Sharon Marcus’ (2019) model of celebrity culture as a dynamic contest over agency between celebrities, audiences, and media, I show how celebrity politics not only gave the Imperial Greek its distinctive appearance, but how that same elitist façade masks the political agency exercised by urban crowds.
The aim is thus to provide a more expansive vision of urban politics, which accounts for crowd agency in both institutional and extra-institutional forms, while not ignoring elite attempts to exercise power in the public sphere. I argue that traditional views of elite power and oligarchic shifts in the political structure of the Imperial overestimate the cohesiveness of urban elites as a class, while a model of celebrity culture reveals how the pursuit of distinction among the wealthiest and most visible minority of elites both undermined elite solidarity and granted power to the urban crowds who controlled the currency of celebrity
Disability, Human Rights, and Higher Education: A Study of Accommodations as a Tool for Accessibility and Adaptability
No full textDisability accommodations have been used for decades now in higher education spaces in order to accommodate students with disabilities. Universities across the United States have enacted policies and created offices dedicated to addressing the specific and wide-ranging needs of students with disabilities. However, these accommodations for disabled students are rarely seen as a human right and are seen, rather, as an additive bonus for students with disabilities.
Therefore, this study seeks to explore the intersection of disability accommodations and the human right to higher education. This study uses interviews with disabled students from Columbia College and Barnard College of Columbia University to explore how accommodations are, or are not, used as a tool to further the right to higher education.
The results of these interviews show that the interviewed students face unintended internal barriers related to requesting and using their accommodations, including negative self evaluation and image, relating oneself to abled peers and external barriers like disability information sharing practices and lack of “comfortability” in discussing accommodations. These results complicate the spirit of disability accommodations acting as a tool for disabled students to realize their right to education, and call for a reimagining of disability accommodations in higher education spaces
Russia as Woman: The Afterlives of Émigré Female Bodies in Russo-Turkish Space, 1919-39
No full textThis dissertation examines the sexualized, racialized, and politicized portrayals of Russophone refugee women in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish literature and visual culture. Focusing on the mass displacement of White Russian refugees to Istanbul following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, it explores how the presence of these women reshaped Turkish perceptions of gender, race, and national identity in a moment of profound political and cultural transition.
While the figure of the Slavic/Russian woman as an object of desire has held a prominent place in the Turkish imagination for over a century, scholarly engagement with these representations remains limited. Such work often reduces Turkish-Russian encounters to illicit sex work, overlooking the longer visual and literary genealogy through which these women became racialized symbols of threat, desire, and modernity. This dissertation challenges the existing scholarship, arguing that the roots of this racializing and sexualizing gaze lie in the period following the First World War and 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when over two hundred thousand White Russians sought refuge in Istanbul. During the Allied Occupation (1918–23), Russophone refugee women—working as waitresses, dancers, nude models, and vendors—became highly visible participants in Istanbul’s public life. Marked by their Europeanized manners and racial whiteness, they emerged as striking figures in a still patriarchal and conservative society. Their presence unsettled dominant gender norms and triggered anxieties surrounding modernity, belonging, and national integrity.
Drawing on a wide range of sources—including archival materials, memoirs, satirical cartoons, short stories, and novels—this dissertation constructs a prehistory of the racializing and sexualizing gaze. It situates these representational practices within the intersecting upheavals of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Kemalist nation-building project. One of the central arguments of this study is that the refugee influx catalyzed the formation of a new sensory and affective regime through which the Turkish male gaze came to relate to the Russian/Slavic female body. This gaze, saturated with desire and anxiety, was articulated through recurring literary and visual tropes that rendered these women simultaneously desirable and morally suspect.
Russia as Woman ultimately asks: How did the White Russian refugee women become a site of fantasy and fear in Turkish cultural production? How did forced migration, wartime displacement, and nationalist anxieties inscribe the Slavic female body with contradictory meanings—oscillating between erotic allure and moral panic? By tracing the emergence of a new representational language this dissertation offers a critical account of how gendered and racialized imperial legacies were negotiated, reconfigured, and aestheticized through the figure of the Russian refugee woman
Unlocking Opportunity: Eight Strategies for Community Colleges to Improve Post-Completion Outcomes
No full textThis practice guide builds on the work of colleges in the Unlocking Opportunity Network by offering practical strategies that can help more students graduate with credentials that lead directly to good jobs or transfer and successful attainment of a bachelor’s degree
Beyond Engagement: Promoting Motivation and Learning in Online Courses
No full textThis Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative brief examines how students develop and use self-directed learning (SDL) skills—motivational, metacognitive, and applied learning processes that enable them to sustain effort, reflect on progress, set goals, and adapt their study strategies
Why Did They Leave? Learning From the Experiences of Former Community College Students
No full textBased on survey findings from 480 former students who stopped out of community college before the start of their second year, this report sheds light on the experiences of this population and their reasons for leaving college
Promising Combinations of Dual Enrollment, AP/IB, and CTE: The College and Earnings Trajectories of Texas High School Students Who Take Accelerated Coursework
No full textUsing data from Texas, this report examines how students combine different types of accelerated coursetaking in high school and how these combinations are associated with students’ subsequent postsecondary attainment and earnings trajectories
Intimate Contracts: Genre and Family Planning in Postcolonial India
No full text“Intimate Contracts: Genre and Family Planning in Postcolonial India” is a literary and cultural study of family planning in India. As the first of the newly independent former colonies to launch a state-sponsored family planning program, India’s attempt to address “the population explosion” culminated in the forced sterilization of over 8 million, mostly poor, lower-caste, and Muslim people under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1975-1977).
In my dissertation, I see this family planning program as a negotiation between the state and capital to take control of the family as a unit of the social reproduction of the nation, which emerges in the context of development discourse, concerns about “the population explosion,” and Cold War politics. Using the Emergency as its animating center, my project examines Anglophone novels (Midnight’s Children [1981], A Suitable Boy [1993], A Fine Balance [1995]), popular Hindi films (the horror films of the Ramsay brothers [1973-1999], Hum Saath-Saath Hain [1999]), and government documentaries from India alongside government reports to argue that cultural production from the period and after deploys genre—understood as an aesthetic contract between a cultural text and its specific audience—to mediate the logics of family planning.
My dissertation examines family planning as both a system of medicalized interventions as well as a metaphorical, future-oriented apparatus of ‘planning’ to highlight how these ‘intimate contracts’ of genre reveal the ways in which family planning projects continue to live on in India, shaping the new Indian family, long after the Emergency. As I show, the medical and biological dimensions of reproduction are inextricable from their social and discursive dimensions. My dissertation posits that an understanding of family planning is essential to understand the formation of the new postcolonial Indian family at the turn of the millennium
Student Experiences in Corequisite Courses at CUNY
No full textThis CAPR brief provides an overview of corequisite course models at three CUNY colleges and, using student focus group data, describes three factors that improved students’ experiences with corequisites and three factors that presented challenges for students