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Urgent Expertise, Explored Together: A Scholarly Communication Peer-Mentoring Group
No full textIn Spring 2025, the authors participated in a structured peer-mentoring program designed to deepen their knowledge of scholarly communication topics and issues. In this article, based on our panel at the 2025 LACUNY Institute, we share our perspectives on the program and discuss how current events are making scholarly communication expertise more essential than ever
Lecture Notes on Cloud Computing (Ver. Winter 2026)
No full textThis collection of lecture notes provides a comprehensive technical foundation for modern cloud computing, spanning from physical infrastructure to high-level application patterns. The text explores how warehouse-scale computers and virtualization transformed traditional data centers into flexible, on-demand resource pools characterized by elasticity and a pay-as-you-go economic model. Detailed chapters examine core architectural components, including Kubernetes orchestration, serverless computing (FaaS), and distributed key-value stores like Dynamo. The sources also emphasize the critical nature of fault tolerance, utilizing techniques like erasure coding and replication to manage the statistical inevitability of hardware failure. Security and management are addressed through frameworks like the Shared Responsibility Model, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and Zero Trust Architecture. Moreover, MLOps and microservices are discussed, highlighting the trade-offs between system agility and the inherent complexities of network-based communication
I Wear the Past in the Cold
No full text“I wear the past in the cold” is a multi-modal archival project exploring themes of intergenerational memory and postmemory. A hand-knit sweater acts as an archive, encoded with metadata about a collection of newspaper articles written by my late father, as well as affectual elements of memory and grief. The accompanying website provides additional detail into the project and design choices. The piece builds on work from memory studies, craft studies, digital humanities, and critical data studies to create a tangible and personal archival object. By accepting the invitation from the #DHMakes movement (Visconti, Dombrowski, and Berger 2020) to embrace physical making within the field, the project forges novel interventions in material and archival studies. By reimagining the form an archive takes to center the materiality of an object, we find a medium that embodies memory
The Constant Cause of Friction: Maud Mosher and Gendered Authority in the Indian Service and at Ellis Island
No full textThis thesis focuses on the federal career of Maud Mosher, who, from 1893 to 1907, worked as an Indian Service boarding-school teacher, then a matron at Ellis Island. By analyzing Mosher’s extensive, complaint-driven correspondence and personnel files, as well as an unpublished memoir, I claim that her grievances represent a rare form of agency available to women in maternalist roles at Progressive Era federal agencies. Though Mosher’s superiors branded her complaints trivial, the substance of them reveals gendered hypocrisy and institutional contradictions inside two federal institutions dealing with racialized populations.
In both the Indian Service and the Immigration Service, Mosher had to combine care, discipline, and what each institution defined as moral judgment. Maternalism enabled her employment within the federal government but limited her autonomy and authority once there. When Mosher drew attention to employee misconduct or questioned governmental policy, her superiors labeled her insubordinate and ultimately dismissed her from the Civil Service altogether. By placing Mosher at the center of the story, this thesis demonstrates how maternalism simultaneously expanded women’s access to state power and narrowed the boundaries of acceptable dissent on the federal frontlines
Conspicuous Technique: Black Avant-Garde Poetry and the Politics of Aesthetics
No full textThis study is comprised of two essays on the politics of aesthetics in postwar American black experimental poetry. Within the domain of contemporary poetry scholarship, this study serves three distinct yet interrelated purposes: 1.) to intervene within ongoing debates about the relation—or purported lack thereof—between black artistic practices and those of the historic and American avant-gardes by emphasizing the politics of aesthetics; 2.) to offer a critique of the usage of the discourses of postmodernism and of black aesthetics in the field by elucidating the historicity of their conceptual frameworks; and 3.) to provide an alternative to contemporary scholarship’s narrow preoccupation with identity-based themes and subject-matter by reprioritizing poetic form and technique as categories of historical analysis and cultural critique.
The first essay, entitled “Conspicuous Technique: Black Experimental Poetry and the Politics of Form” addresses the politics of literary form in experimental black poetry of the 1960s. Analyzing the use of collage aesthetics—a term denoting a suite of attributes conceptually inherent to and historically associated with collage artistic practice—in works by Russell Atkins, Norman Pritchard and Lorenzo Thomas, it argues that such a poetics can be understood as 1.) a tacit rebuttal, at the level of form, of the inter and intra racial strictures placed upon black artists and cultural production by the racial politics of the era; and 2.) as an alternative means of addressing the societal position of African Americans caught between the struggle for desegregation—and thus the promise of full integration into the American socio-political and economic order—and the resistance to forced assimilation of African American cultural identity and social life.
The second essay, entitled “Bob Kaufman: Between Surrealism and Afro-Surrealism” addresses the Surrealist-influenced poetry of Bob Kaufman from the perspective of the twenty first century conception of Afro-Surrealism. Reading Kaufman’s poetry against the notion of contemporary Afro-Surrealism as articulated by D. Scot Miller in his 2007 manifesto on Afro Surrealist aesthetics, it argues that despite shared commonalities the disjunction between Miller’s aesthetics and Kaufman’s poetics reveals a shift in the American discourse of race and therefore of the function of black aesthetics that is underacknowledged in accounts of contemporary Afro Surrealism
Social Capital and the Spread of Information on Twitter Related to Change in the Criminal Legal System
No full textCriminal legal reformers and abolitionists have differing visions for change within the criminal legal system, where reformers seek to modify and abolitionists aim to dismantle it altogether (Davis 2005; Foucault 1977; Kaba 2020). Advocates used print media to disseminate information related to their proposed changes to broader audiences. While print media remains a valuable tool to reach wide audiences, the advent of social media introduced new mechanisms to interact with broad audiences at very low cost while leaving traces of digital data which could be analyzed to better understand the social factors which impact whether information is spread. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that Bourdieu’s approach to social capital is equipped to provide an explanation regarding the social factors which contribute to an account’s success in receiving engagement from their audiences. I test this perspective by collecting Twitter data through a multi-step sampling process via the 2.0 application programming interface (API) from October 1st, 2021, until December 31st, 2021 which allowed for the collection of accounts which tweeted a keyword as well as those who participated in the same conversation. I observed that likes and retweets were concentrated on a small group of accounts and that their social capital, measured in their number of followers as well as their Katz-Bonacich Centrality within the reply network was positively associated with an increase in likes and retweets. While prior research has examined the distribution of engagement of accounts sampled from the keyword search, I found weaknesses to this approach when introducing other accounts who participated in the broader conversation. Namely, while the elite group remained elite if operationalized as accounts in the 99th percentile, they would have been missed if relying on visual inspection of a distribution of likes or retweets. Further implications related to social media research, as well as criminal legal reform and abolition are discussed throughout
Unveiling the Impossible: The Intentional Fantastic in Ancient Greek Literature
No full textThis dissertation investigates the tension between the ubiquitous presence of supernatural elements in Greek culture and the absence of a theoretical framework or literary genre, where the impossible was often concealed or denied to prioritize narrative credibility. Utilizing narratological and cognitive perspectives, this study proposes the framework of the “Intentional Fantastic,” defined not as a genre, but as a deliberate narrative mode where unreality is a conscious artistic choice recognized by both author and audience.
The analysis traces the evolution of this mode from a “poetics of credibility” to a “poetics of disbelief”. It begins by distinguishing the fantastic from myth and the marvelous. The study then examines the Odyssey, arguing that the epic text employs “cognitive anchoring” to mask the impossible, prioritizing the appearance of truth and reliability over the fantastic. In contrast, the dissertation demonstrates how Aristophanes and Lucian disrupt this tradition. Through an analysis of Birds and True Histories, it is argued that these authors establish a new cognitive pact where literary pleasure is derived from a shared, explicit awareness of the invention.
Furthermore, this work explores the visual aspect of the fantastic through the lens of the “gaze”. It contrasts the “avoidant gaze” of epic poetry with the “engaged gaze” of visual arts and the “constructive gaze” of the theater, where the audience actively visualizes the impossible. Ultimately, this research posits that the Greeks engaged in the intentional fantastic as a sophisticated, playful, and cognitive exploration of the impossible
Knowing Through Making: Weaving a Pedagogy of Love, Embodiment, and Freedom Through Arts-Based Research
No full textBridging the divide between art and science, my dissertation weaves together multiple worldviews to explore the generative possibilities of radical imagining in the learning sciences. In response to the harm caused by a positivist worldview that, all too often, reduces people to objects of study, I center collaborative seeing and making as a methodological response to the extractive nature of research. Grounded in liminal spaces of becoming, I explore the physical, intellectual, and spiritual tensions that arise when dominant ways of being and knowing are disrupted by ancestral memory, lived experiences, and creative practices.
Across three published manuscript-style chapters, I examine four themes with respect to education as a practice of freedom: listening and collective agency, epistemic erasure and freedom, wellbeing and liberation, and student-centered pedagogy. Theorizing art as a way of being and participating in the world, I position artmaking as both a site of inquiry and a liberatory methodology—one that centers relationality, embodiment, and the pursuit of epistemic freedom in education. As an artist | teacher | advisor | researcher, my scholarship combines autoethnography, playwriting, and artmaking as paths for contemplation and transformative action.
Chapter One presents my personal and theoretical backgrounds in loving and embodied ways to situate the research that follows. In Chapter Two, I enter into dialogue with myself, my community, and my non-human relatives—including plants, rivers, and birds—through map-poems to illustrate how artmaking can help document injustice and increase methodological transparency in our research. In Chapter Three, I examine the arpilleras (tapestries) in the digital archive at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile to participate in archival repair and the recovery of stories through a one-act play. The arpilleras in this archive are visual testimonios that capture acts of survival, creativity, and resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). In Chapter Four, three textiles serve as heuristics to examine how artmaking contributes to educational research as a practice of freedom and wellbeing. I argue that embracing an arts-based research framework is as an act of transgression, challenging dominant paradigms and affirming the legitimacy of embodied, intuitive, and relational ways of knowing. In my closing chapter, I examine what it means to live, teach, and learn from a liminal space of transformation and possibility. I present an evolving understanding of education and educational research as loving, relational, and liberatory practices, where relationality shapes not only what we know but who we become as teachers and learners
Essays on Inheritance: Tax Policies and Household Outcomes
No full textAn increasing proportion of wealth in the United States is owned by adults over the age of 70. As the so-called Baby Boomer generation ages, a sizeable wealth transfer is likely to occur from this generation to younger age groups. The expected impacts of wealth transfers (and inheritances in particular) at all levels are thus a subject of interest. At the level of the federal government, estate and inheritance taxes in the U.S. have generally been rolled back over time alongside increases in wealth inequality and ballooning debt. However, the specific policy levers used in this process, their revenue implications, and several nuances at the state level have not been thoroughly explored. At the household level, the impact of inheritances is not well-understood. Studies have taken piecemeal approaches and assessed the impacts of inheritances on labor supply and wealth-related outcomes, and the effects are not large enough to explain what households do with their inheritances. Meanwhile, changes in expenditure remain underexplored — existing studies are insufficiently rigorous in establishing causality, conflate inheritances and gifts, and do not broadly assess the relative impact on wealth-based outcomes (such as home ownership and non-home wealth) and expenditures. The three essays of this dissertation examine each of these aspects in turn. The first is an overview of the history and revenue implications of estate and inheritance taxes at the federal and state levels. The results show that the marital deduction plays a more significant role in reducing tax liability as compared to tax credits, and that the exemption threshold has reduced estate tax revenues more than the top marginal tax rate. The second essay replicates the earliest of a handful of papers that evaluated the impact of inheritance on household expenditure. Findings suggest that while the effects on other outcomes could not be replicated, the influence of inheritances on food expenditure, while small, is much more robust. The third essay takes a rigorous and broad approach in establishing a causal link between inheritances and household expenditures, home ownership, and wealth. The results show that inheritances increase expenditures on durable goods such as home repairs and furnishings
At the Margins of History, the Body Moves and Knows: Carmen as Myth, Flamenco as a Fugitive Form of Knowledge Transmission
No full textMy research, grounded in decolonial historiography and performance studies, examines how Spain has historically relied on the exoticized Other for the construction of its national identity. At the center of my analyses is Carmen, the eponymous protagonist of French writer Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella Carmen. Through this dissertation, I attend to the process through which this fictional character turned into the enduring myth of Carmen—the Orientalized, quintessential Spanish woman—and the consequences that upholding this myth has on the real lives of women, historically and contemporarily. I depart from the assumption that this myth-making process emerged in response to Spain’s inability to integrate its colonial and postcolonial reality into its self-image; while official historiography emphasizes “the myth of a pure ‘Gothic’ [ethnonational] origin” (Fuchs 20), Andalusia and flamenco—deeply tied to Spain’s Islamic heritage and Roma culture—have periodically been elevated as symbols of Spanish identity, creating a paradox of association that remains unresolved. My project interrogates this paradox, investigating how state-sponsored cultural investments have shaped the consolidation of flamenco and Andalusia as markers of both “authentic” Spain, the quintessential “European exotic,” while also remaining marginal and agonistic to conflicting versions of Spanishness. Employing a Foucauldian archaeological approach, I trace moments where flamenco and Andalusian culture are centered in an attempt to define Spanishness via the bodies of women who are directly or tangentially associated with Carmen.
Simultaneously, my work is attentive to the knowledge transmission that occurs at the margins of nation-statehood as a possible counter-force to these hegemonic discourses. In this exploration I look at flamenco, specifically flamenco dancing, as a repertory of counter-hegemonic knowledge and epistemology, sustained and passed on through the female dancing body. In this process, the fragilities of Spain’s self-fashioning betray themselves, revealing the fact of Spain’s heterogeneity—of which flamenco is distinctively infused—is not peripheral but foundational to what constitutes Spanishness, both locally and internationally. Thus, this study adds to scholarship on Spain’s national identity by focusing on its use of flamenco and Andalusian cultural output to define and cohere around, which allows me to explore the contradictions at the heart of Spanish nationalism while also shedding light on broader processes of racialization, gendering, and marginalization in the formation of modern nation-states