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4E-BP1 Differentially Regulates Translation of a Subset of Human mRNAs
No full textElevated levels of eukaryotic initiation factor 4E-binding protein 1 (4E-BP1) influence cap-independent translation by forming a complex with eukaryotic initiation factor 4E (eIF4E) (eIF4E•4E-BP1). Certain mRNAs—including those encoding hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α), fibroblast growth factor-9 (FGF-9), and two isoforms of tumor suppressors, p53 (p53A, and p53B)—contain structured 5’untranslated regions (UTRs) that enable translation either via cap-independent translation enhancer (CITE)-like or internal ribosomal entry site (IRES)-like mechanisms. However, how 4E-BP1 modulates these mechanisms remains unclear. Using fluorescence-based anisotropy assays, we showed that the eIF4E•4E-BP1 binds more tightly to the 5’ m7G-cap of these mRNAs than eIF4E alone. Luciferase reporter assays further demonstrated that 4E-BP1 inhibits translation of CITE-like (HIF-1α, and p53A) more effectively than IRES-like (FGF-9, and p53B) mRNAs. Although binding affinity of eIF4E•4E-BP1 to each of these mRNAs increased, only CITE-like mRNA translation was significantly inhibited. Importantly, eIF4GI557-1599 and its binding partner eIF4A, overcomes this inhibition selectively for CITE-like mRNAs, while eIF4E alone has only partial effects. In contrast, IRES-like mRNAs, despite binding to eIF4E•4E-BP1, remained largely resistant to translational repression and were minimally affected by eIF4GI557-1599•eIF4AoreIF4E. These findings reveal that 4E-BP1 selectively represses cap-independent translation in a transcript-specific manner. Moreover, fluorescence anisotropy revealed that 4E-BP1 enhances eIF4GI557-1599 recruitment to certain mRNAs, potentially facilitating 43S pre-initiation complex (43S PIC) assembly during stress. These results provide new mechanistic insights into selective translational control with implications for stress response and cancer progression via non-canonical translation
The Correlation Between Racial Inequality and Rent Stabilization Apartments in New York City
No full textThe federal, state, and local governments have enacted policies to address housing issues in New York City. But have African Americans and Latinos benefited from these policies? To explore this, we conduct a case study of the history of rent-stabilization policy and use data from New York City agencies to contextualize these developments. We also apply Claire Jean Kim’s racial hierarchy framework to examine how White supremacy has shaped housing policy and its effects on communities of color. Our analysis shows that African American and Latino communities face disadvantages both in the number of rent-stabilized units and in access to them. These findings highlight how racial hierarchies influence housing outcomes, resulting in systemic advantages for White residents relative to communities of color
A Work on/of Language: Lyric and the Care of the Self
No full textDrawing on Michel Foucault’s work on the Ancient Greek practice of the care of the self, this dissertation argues that lyric poetry is a technology of the self: an ethical practice that creates potential for self-transformation through the demands it places on language and modes of attention. Lyric thus maintains a form of truth discourse overshadowed by the Cartesian conception of truth as propositional and method-driven. Unlike contemporary self-care, the care of the self, as the original Greek epimeleia heautou entails, is care inflected by concern and anxiety: the practicing subject places her thoughts, assumptions, ways of being, and—in the case of lyric—language under scrutiny as she cultivates a self capable of truth.
Lyric poetry, I contend, is not a retreat into interiority but a relational practice that places the subject under pressure and at risk. This risk arises from the interplay of language and consciousness: drawing on Julia Kristeva’s account of entry into the symbolic order and Paul Celan’s concept of language as strangeness and poetry as a “second strangeness,” the dissertation shows how lyric’s demands on language create potential for self-transformation. Niklas Luhmann’s concept of risk, as a modern way of navigating the unfamiliar through symbol and myth, further illuminates lyric’s ethical potential as a technology of the self.
Through close readings of six poets, this dissertation demonstrates that lyric’s function as a technology of the self is not governed by fixed formal criteria. In Chapter I, William Wordsworth and John Keats offer contrasting Romantic models of selfhood. In Chapter II, Charles Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson are presented as inaugural figures of modern poetry, explored through the idea of their poetry as an alternative spirituality. In Chapter III, Rilke and Graham are paired based on shared philosophical preoccupations, analyzed through Martin Heidegger’s thinking on truth as disclosure and attentiveness. Together, these pairings show how lyric produces a relational space in which a work on/of language becomes an event providing the potential for transformation of the subject through exploration of language, attentiveness and ways of being
Foreign Songs, Occitan Voices, and the Guitar in Early Modern France (c. 1570-1650)
No full textThe cultural traditions of European nations are too often treated as independent and essential entities, obscuring the transnational and interregional exchanges that have shaped modern cultures. In musicology, recent studies have emphasized the plurality and mobility of people, cultures, and music in Europe. Yet, French songs are still largely explained within the framework of the national, generally privileging written over oral traditions, printed over manuscript music, national over regional languages, and monolingual over plurilingual practices. Through the study of songs in Italian, Spanish, Occitan, and Turkish, this dissertation challenges such preconceptions.
This study shows that secular songs in foreign and regional languages circulated alongside those in French, representing difference while also demonstrating familiarity. The relation between printed courtly songbooks and manuscript sources reveals nuanced differences in the presence of songs in each language and leads to conclusions about their cultural associations in France, the different coexisting mechanisms of representation, their social and geographical circulation, and their access to print and notation. Through the examination of an understudied manuscript of guitar songs, linked to a woman from Avignon, the five-course guitar emerges as a sonic marker of otherness and as a vehicle for transnational repertoires. This dissertation thus sheds new light on the use of that instrument and of alfabeto notation in France and contributes to a more inclusive understanding of the practice of secular song in the early modern period.
The first chapters focus on the representation of foreigners and songs in languages other than French. Chapter 1, Introduction: A Ballet of Nations in Song, provides an introduction to the historical context and state of research through the study of the Ball de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Paris, 1626). In Chapter 2, Foreign Songs and French Voices, I argue that airs de cour represented images of courtly cosmopolitanism while disseminating repertoires for domestic practice. A song from the Avignon manuscript suggests that Turkish songs were practiced in these contexts, alongside the more numerous Italian and Spanish ones. In Chapter 3, Occitan Voices in Early Modern France, I argue that Occitan songs in air de cour books reflect courtly ideas about the hierarchy and cultural associations of the kingdom\u27s languages, but also testify to the circulation of Occitan songs across linguistic boundaries. I further examine the Occitan voices of women and poets who sang in their local language through manuscript and printed sources from southern France.
The final two chapters focus on the use of the five-course guitar to accompany foreign and French songs. Chapter 4, The Othering Sound of the Strummed Guitar, examines the guitar\u27s associations with foreign languages and cultures in guitar songbooks printed in the first half of the seventeenth century in Paris. Chapter 5, French Songs or an Instrument for Mobility, focuses on the appropriation of the guitar by French musicians to accompany French song alongside foreign repertoires. In the conclusions I discuss the mechanisms of representation of the foreign people and songs that emerged from this research, marked as different but becoming part of Early Modern French culture
Schooling in Crisis: How New York City Families and Organizations Reconfigured K-12 Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic
No full textHow do organizations and stakeholders handle extreme uncertainty and institutional instability? Using an in-depth study of parental and organizational sensemaking and decision-making from 2020 to 2023, I examine how private educational organizations and parents navigated constant disruptions and changes to the educational field during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City when schools shifted to emergency remote learning. Combining strategic action fields theory (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012), relational inequality theory (Tomaskovic-Devey & Avent-Holt, 2019), and the cultural logic of intensive parenting (Hays, 1998), the study bridges micro-level parenting practices with meso-level organizational strategies and macro-level field transformations. Findings show that the pandemic served as a major exogenous shock that intensified preexisting inequalities and accelerated the privatization of education. When dealing with uncertainty about daily operations, shifting enrollments, and new competitors, elite private schools reinforced their dominance, mid-tier schools experienced divergent paths of adaptation or failure, and lower-cost schools suffered widespread closures. Although the crisis briefly opened space for innovation and new hybrid models, structural, legal, and financial constraints prevented systemic transformation. Given changing policies and concerns about whether school sessions could meet their needs, parents across social classes engaged in constant sensemaking and decision-making to secure their children’s learning, well-being, and stability. Affluent families leveraged their resources to access elite private schools or create alternatives such as pods, microschools, and private tutoring. Meanwhile, working- and middle-class families absorbed institutional breakdowns through intensified caregiving, teaching, and emotional labor; these responsibilities were disproportionately assumed by mothers. The study argues that the pandemic individualized collective risks by shifting public responsibilities for education onto private families and markets, producing a self-reinforcing cycle of inequality. It concludes that the ideology of intensive parenting, combined with the heightened anxiety about children’s future, continues to legitimate privatization and obscure the structural roots of educational inequality. By tracing how social actors navigated uncertainty and reshaped the market, this study also shows how organizations enable inequalities, particularly in markets for complex human services such as education
The Lives of English Catholic Seminarians before Rome, 1598–1609
No full textThis dissertation examines the lives of English Catholic seminarians before their admission to the English College, Rome, between 1598 and 1609, a formative moment in the history of the English Mission during the reign of Elizabeth I and the early Stuart period. Drawing on the Responsa scholarum—a collection of entrance questionnaire answers written in the seminarians’ own hands—this study constructs a prosopography of 132 men who sought ordination with the intention of returning to England as missionary priests in a context of persecution and danger. Rather than focusing on clerical careers after ordination, this project looks backward, recovering the social origins, education, health, religious identities, and motivations of these largely obscure figures when they entered the seminary.
By placing the Responsa scholarum at the center of analysis, this dissertation offers a microhistorical reading of the questionnaire itself, treating it as both an institutional instrument of scrutiny and a vehicle for early modern self-narration. The responses reveal a wide diversity of experiences shaped by region, class, family networks, education, conformity and conversion, physical and mental health, and patterns of mobility between England and the continent. They also demonstrate how seminarians consciously fashioned their identities for an institutional audience, negotiating expectations of obedience, fitness, and missionary zeal.
Engaging with major historiographical debates on English Catholicism, recusancy, education, and identity formation, this study complicates narratives of decline, continuity, and heroic martyrdom by foregrounding lesser-known actors and the ambiguities of lived Catholic experience. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that these seminarians—often overlooked in favor of prominent missionaries and martyrs—were central to the survival and reconstruction of English Catholicism. Their collective biographies illuminate the social foundations of the English Mission and provide a richer understanding of what it meant to live, believe, and prepare for priesthood as a Catholic in post-Reformation England
Analytical Approaches for Analyzing Microplastics Using Pyrolysis Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry and Accelerated Solvent Extraction
No full textWastewater treatment plant (WWTP) biosolids act as major sinks for microplastics, yet robust mass-based quantification of polymer composition in these complex matrices remains analytically challenging. This study applies an integrated accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) and pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (Py-GCMS) workflow to quantify polymer mass concentrations in biosolids from two municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTP1 and WWTP2). Polymer-specific calibration curves were developed and validated across multiple analytical days to assess linearity, reproducibility, and quantitative reliability.
Five polymers – polyethylene (PE), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) – were consistently detected and quantified in all biosolid samples. Across both WWTPs, PE dominated total polymer mass, followed by PVC, with PP and PS present at intermediate concentrations and PMMA occurring at the lowest levels. WWTP1 exhibited higher concentrations for all quantified polymers compared to WWTP2, although the relative ranking of polymer abundance was consistent between plants. Replicate agreement was strong, indicating good analytical precision and method robustness.
These results demonstrate that ASE when combined with Py-GCMS can provide a reproducible and sensitive mass-based approach for characterizing polymer burdens in biosolids. The observed dominance of PE and PVC highlights the disproportionate contribution of high-production, fragmentation-prone plastics to wastewater-derived solids. The method offers a complementary perspective to particle-count-based techniques and provides critical insight into the true polymer mass loads associated with land-applied biosolids
Cognitive Consequences of Job Discrimination: An Investigation of Race/Ethnicity/Nativity Disparities in Neuropsychological Test Performance
No full textBlack and Latine populations demonstrate worse performance on neuropsychological tests than White peers, a pattern which necessitates investigation to determine how sociocultural contexts may contribute to brain health inequity. Previous studies have shown inconsistent evidence of associations between cognition and interpersonal discrimination, a socially constructed process of exclusion based on identity, but the relationship to systemic discrimination remains underexplored. Job discrimination is a form of systemic mistreatment that may be highly relevant to Black and Latine communities who are more socioeconomically disadvantaged than majority counterparts. The current study utilized a sample of 550 non-Latine Black, US-born Latine, and immigrant Latine adults from the Health and Retirement Study to determine differences across race/ethnicity/nativity groups in endorsement of different types of discrimination, explore sociodemographic correlates to job discrimination, and investigate the relationship between cognition and job discrimination. Black and immigrant Latine reported more experiences of daily discrimination than US-born Latine, but groups did not significantly differ on lifetime or job discrimination. There were no significant correlations between job discrimination and income, years of educational attainment, age, or sex/gender. Among Black adults, job discrimination was not significantly associated with working memory, immediate memory, or delayed memory scores. Among Latine, there was no significant interaction between nativity and cognitive outcomes. These findings suggest that further research is required to determine how systemic discrimination interplays with other psychosocial factors to impact cognition. They also highlight the responsibility clinicians hold in sensitively considering how discrimination may contribute to brain health
Real Language: Cybernetics and Transatlantic Romanticism
No full textThis dissertation explores the relationship between the origins of Romanticism in England and the United States through the lens of the twentieth-century science of cybernetics, as formulated by Norbert Wiener in his book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1952) and developed by Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). A tracing of an intellectual filiation, “Real Language” looks specifically at the revolutionary poetic project of Wordsworth and Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads and its effort at programmatically reforming culture by means of the reorientation of received attitudes towards poetic language as an example of a cybernetic process operating through feedback. The dissertation then moves to a consideration of the psychological concept of “the uncanny” as developed by Sigmund Freud and Ernst Jentsch and how this concept complicates the ideas of cybernetics articulated by Wiener and provides a means of interpreting Wordsworth’s poems of encounter. Following this, “Real Language” moves to the context of the early United States, situating the nationalistic project of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, specifically his treatment of indigenous American subjects, in cybernetic terms, with special attention paid to the larger conception of “mind” Longfellow attributes to his native subjects. Finally, the dissertation concludes with an exploration of Emerson, focusing on his series of essays, looking at the ways his vision of the interplay between empirical and idealist (or “mystical”) perspectives on the world combine in an ongoing process of feedback that anticipates the cybernetic visions of both Wiener and Bateson
Using What We’ve Got: Activating Institutional Archives in Uncertain Times
No full textActivating institutional archives can provide rich opportunities for original research, the development of multiple literacies, and cultivating a sense of student belonging. This proceedings paper outlines a place-based, primary source research project presented at the 2025 LACUNY Institute. Implemented in a 100-level Library Research course, the project utilized historical yearbooks from our institutional archives to investigate the undergraduate experiences of notable alumni. The replicable design of the project allows for adaptation across disciplines and institutions, offering a flexible model for integrating archival pedagogy and primary source literacy into a broad range of disciplines