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Flavin biology and its role in longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans
Get PDFWhile the past few decades have uncovered many of the mysteries of the molecular mechanisms of aging, new pathways, programs, and interventions continue to be discovered. Many such interventions involve the modification of cellular metabolism via dietary modification, nutrient sensing and processing, and pharmaceutical treatment, namely with the biguanide metformin, a common diabetes drug. In my thesis work, I investigated the role of a specific micronutrient, riboflavin, and a set of flavin-dependent proteins and how their modulation can robustly extend lifespan in the roundworm model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. Knockdown of the riboflavin transporter rft-1 significantly increases longevity and acts through canonical longevity pathways of nutrient sensing, stress resistance, and mitochondrial stress responses. Knockdown of the flavin-dependent enzyme cytochrome b5 reductase hpo-19 also extends lifespan in a genetic manner distinct from rft-1, revealing E2F/EFL-1 as a novel transcription factor that contributes to aging and longevity. The research in this thesis uncovers the importance of a key set of proteins in metazoan aging, and focusing on these flavoproteins and the genetic programs they activate may unveil novel approaches to fighting age-related disease and extending healthy lifespan.Biological and Biomedical Science
Femme Fatale, Freedom Fighter: Women Terrorists in Twentieth Century British Empire
No full textThis dissertation, Femme Fatale, Freedom Fighter, investigates the legal, political, and representational dynamics of women’s participation in anti-imperial insurgencies across the former British Empire in the twentieth century. Writing the narrative and thematic history of three case studies—Malaya, Northern Ireland, and South Africa—it asks how colonial and postcolonial legal systems constructed and responded to women insurgents, and how these women deployed gendered tactics to challenge or exploit imperial authority and internal patriarchies.
Bridging imperial history, legal studies, gender theory, and military historiography, this socio-legal history uses archival research from state, legal, and community repositories alongside feminist theoretical frameworks to reconstruct the lived experiences and strategic agency of women labeled as “terrorists.” Drawing on court records, emergency regulations, propaganda materials, prison memoirs, and oral histories, the project analyzes how legal categories such as “terrorist” and “enemy combatant” were produced through gendered, racialized, and imperial logics.
The dissertation argues that women insurgents—far from being anomalies—were central actors in shaping colonial emergency law and its afterlives. Their political violence exposed the gendered underpinnings of carceral regimes and reconfigured the symbolic terrain of national liberation struggles. Across six chapters, this history traces the colonial legal genealogy of terrorism, examines women’s militant and carceral resistance, and explores global networks of anti-imperial feminist solidarity. It argues that femininity itself operated as a weapon, a site of state discipline, and a mode of insurgent agency. By re-centering the insurgent woman, this project challenges dominant narratives of decolonization and military history, offering a feminist reimagining of law, war, and political memory in the postcolonial world.Histor
Subthalamic Nucleus Participation in Audition and Implications for Basal Ganglia Neuromodulation
Get PDFThe subthalamic nucleus (STN), a core component of the basal ganglia traditionally known for its role in motor control and its therapeutic relevance in Parkinson’s disease (PD), may also play a significant role in auditory processing and speech. This thesis investigates the electrophysiological response of the STN to auditory stimuli and explores its functional connectivity with cortical auditory regions, particularly the superior temporal gyrus (STG). Using retrospective intraoperative recordings from PD patients undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS), spectral analyses revealed that the STN exhibits consistent beta-band power modulations in response to speech-related sounds, suggesting its active involvement in auditory-motor integration. Comparative analysis with STG responses further supports a networked role of the STN in sensorimotor aspects of speech. Building on these findings, the thesis proposes functional requirements for next-generation DBS systems that can target both motor and auditory-motor circuits to address communication deficits in PD. This work expands the functional understanding of the STN and lays the groundwork for novel neuromodulation strategies that may improve speech and quality of life for individuals with PD.Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technolog
Studi giocosi: The Roots of Caricature in the Drawing Practice of the Carracci’s Accademia degli Incamminati
Get PDFDeformed, playful motifs are consistently found throughout the surviving corpus of Annibale and Agostino Carracci’s drawings. Largely undiscussed, the few drawings that have been considered have been conflated with caricature, owing to a misconception in scholarship that caricature in the 1580s and 1590s was a settled and defined category. Naming these playful motifs as 'studi giocosi' following Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s description of such drawings in his 'Felsina pittrice', this dissertation acknowledges that 'studi giocosi' were one of several origin points for caricature but otherwise asserts that these motifs arose from a practice of play that suffused the Carracci’s Accademia degli Incamminati. Studying the corpus of the Carracci’s drawings reveals how, in the boisterous, social atmosphere of the Accademia, the Carracci implemented play as a means to discover and disseminate knowledge. 'Studi giocosi' were games, tools of learning, and a means to explore the boundaries of representation.History of Art and Architectur
Navigating Weaponized Trade: State and Corporate Responses to Economic Coercion
No full textEconomic sanctions, tariffs, and export controls have emerged as primary instruments of geopolitical coercion. As states weaponize trade policies against rivals and sometimes even allies, these measures trigger complex adaptive responses from other states and businesses. Targeted states have applied protective industrial policies to shield domestic firms, while sanctioned firms strategically forge new partnerships to maintain market access. Meanwhile, non-targeted multinational firms also develop coping strategies, creating ripple effects through global supply chains. These responses fundamentally reshape international economic and political engagement, altering investment decisions, research collaborations, and political advocacy beyond the original intent of sanctions. By examining these multifaceted adaptations across various actors, this dissertation offers insights into how economic coercion reshapes the global economy in an era of strategic competition and weaponized interdependence.
The first paper investigates how states protect domestic industries in response to economic sanctions. When foreign economic coercion triggers security concerns, states strategically shield not only targeted firms but also their domestic partners. I collected and analyzed an original dataset of U.S.-sanctioned Chinese firms from 2008 to 2023, including 845,000 itemized subsidies, 2.3 million government procurements, and 1 million patents. I employ two sets of difference-in-difference analyses to estimate state responses to foreign sanctions. The findings reveal that China subsidizes both directly sanctioned firms and comparable firms in the same sanctioned industries. China’s protective measures provide assurance to other domestic market actors and incentivize them to continue “business as usual” with firms in sanctioned industries. This paper shows that economic coercion intensifies divisions among major economies, driving states to develop more domestically oriented strategies that fragment global trade networks.
The second paper examines how economic sanctions alter foreign firms’ strategies of influence in the United States. As direct lobbying channels face mounting scrutiny, sanctioned foreign firms develop indirect channels through strategic business partnerships. Using 41,256 firm-to-firm partnership data spanning 1997-2024, I demonstrate how sanctioned firms form new supply chain partnerships that create mutual dependencies and shared political interests with U.S. firms. These “new friends” subsequently increase lobbying activities on issues critical to their foreign partners’ interests. Using Huawei as a case study, the paper demonstrates how U.S. sanctions not only reshape a foreign firm’s political engagement within the United States but also transform its broader business strategy and political activities in Europe. This paper advances our understanding of coalition formation in trade politics by highlighting partnership formation as a strategic response to economic coercion.
The third paper, coauthored with Christina Davis and Sayumi Miyano, examines how non-targeted multinational firms evaluate whether to continue business as usual during geopolitical conflicts. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of multinational corporations (MNCs) voluntarily withdrew from Russia even when policymakers were still debating the extent of sanctions. Through a survey experiment with Japanese firm managers conducted three months after the invasion, we investigate how peer effects influence support for severing business ties with Russia. Our findings show that information about withdrawal by firms from a diverse set of countries promotes peer conformity, which in turn increases support for similar actions. In contrast, information about ongoing business with Russia by Chinese firms fosters competition that reduces support for withdrawal. Market exposure moderates these reactions, although the concern about peer behavior does not appear to be driven by a reputation mechanism. This study shows how business actors perceive the strategic interplay of peer influence and market dynamics in the context of geopolitical conflicts.Governmen
Cell-Surface RNA-Binding Proteins
Get PDFThe composition and organization of the cell surface determine how cells interact with their environment. Traditionally, glycosylated transmembrane proteins were thought to be the major constituents of the external surface of the plasma membrane. Here, we provide evidence that a group of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) is present on the surface of living cells. These cell-surface RBPs (csRBPs) precisely organize into well-defined nanoclusters enriched for multiple RBPs and glycoRNAs, and their clustering can be disrupted by extracellular RNase addition. These glycoRNA-csRBP clusters further serve as sites of cell-surface interaction for the cell-penetrating peptide trans-activator of transcription (TAT). Removal of RNA from the cell surface, or loss of RNA-binding activity by TAT, causes defects in TAT cell internalization. Together, we provide evidence of an expanded view of the cell surface by positioning glycoRNA-csRBP clusters as a regulator of communication between cells and the extracellular environment.Biology, Molecular and Cellula
Gifts from the Grieving: Objects left by the Bereaved at Burial Sites in Central Europe
Get PDFThis thesis advances an archaeology of bereavement, arguing that grief is
materially legible in Early Medieval Austrian burials. It analyzes 748 inhumations from
Pottenbrunn, Thunau Obere Holzwiese, Oberleiserberg, and Krungl using mixed methods
that combine distributional summaries and correlation by age and sex with qualitative
readings of manufacture, use, and in-grave placement. Despite Christian discouragement
of grave goods, nearly sixty percent of graves contain artefacts. Children’s burials show
distinctive assemblages. Copper-alloy and iron bells cluster with infants and children,
mosaic “eye” beads occur only in child or unknown-age graves, adult-sized iron knives
accompany some children, likely donated tokens or protective gifts. Vessels, animal
remains, grain, and hearth materials indicate enduring feasts and house-linking rites.
While heterogeneous recording, typological inconsistency, and incomplete dating and
biological profiles limit precision, convergent patterns across sites show grief and
attachment shaped funerary choices. Recognizing these affective signatures refines
mortuary interpretation and reconnects past communities with their lived emotions.Extension Studie
Musical Democratization, Sound Collectives, and Latin American Unity on the Path to Socialism in Chile, 1967-1973
No full textThis dissertation demonstrates how a wide variety of musical and sound-making practices contributed to political thought and revolutionary struggle in Chile in the years leading up to and during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-73). Over the course of this period, Chile embarked on an innovative experiment in democratic socialism, and, in turn, Chilean musicians radically reimagined music and musical culture. Drawing on extensive archival research and original interviews, I uncover transnational networks of exchange that have not yet been recognized in previous historical accounts of the Popular Unity period. I show that by tracing these transnational musical networks, a more globalized history of the Popular Unity period emerges, one that views Chile not in isolation, but rather as deeply interconnected with many actors and interests.
First, I reveal efforts to democratize the performance culture of European classical music in Chile. I show how these efforts involved the signing of formal cultural exchange agreements between Chile, Cuba, and several Warsaw Pact countries, and thus the establishment of an East-South network for musical exchange. Drawing on the literary critic and theorist Ángel Rama’s notion of the Lettered City, I reveal how Chileans attempted to leverage European traditional musical repertoire and performance for power on the global stage. Next, I show how a regional, Latin American musical network between avant-garde composers and folk musicians coalesced around the ideology of Latin American revolutionary unity, as well as around solidarity with Allende’s Chile. To do so, I trace Chilean composers and musicians as they traveled beyond national borders to participate in the inaugural meetings of politically engaged, avant-garde music festivals held for the first time around Latin America. Furthermore, I reveal how the ideological underpinnings of this transnational network were strengthened and critiqued through the practice of musical commemoration. Lastly, I mobilize the theorist and activist Franz Fanon’s theory of revolutionary radio listening to show how everyday Chileans fabricated collectives and entered into a new form of political engagement through the use of sound, popular song, and radio in street protests and counterprotests. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that music and sound were sites of negotiation, where new social worlds were imagined. Furthermore, this dissertation proposes what call a “music history of possibilities,” an approach to musicology accounts not only for what occurred, but also for possible futures that have been arrested, unrealized, and lost.Musi
Learning from the Line: The Drawing Practices of Ruth Asawa, Adrian Piper, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Sturtevant
No full textWhat can art history learn from the process of drawing? This dissertation asks why artists working in the 1960s and beyond might still be compelled to draw––to learn to draw, and to engage with longstanding, largely representational drawing techniques, such as life drawing––despite narratives that would tell us such techniques had by then become irrelevant. I argue, in turn, that art history can learn something from drawing’s staying power, but that doing so will require recognizing and resisting disciplinary habits of evaluation, categorization, and singular attribution, among others.
Each chapter demonstrates how an artist learned from the drawn line, both by closely analyzing drawings within the context and sequence of their making, and by situating these artists’ practices within and against longer histories of drawing instruction. Chapter One traces how Sylvia Plimack Mangold taught herself a subjective form of linear perspective, circa 1965–1978, by drawing the floorboards of her home and the very rulers by which she pictured those floorboards. In doing so, her practice crafts a feminist version of a device that has been central to Western systems of representation and power. Chapter Two examines Ruth Asawa’s practice of observational and often collaborative line drawing, focusing on sketchbooks she filled with drawings of her family, friends, and colleagues throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Following the artist’s own theory of learning by “digestion,” I articulate how Asawa’s line engages three modes of drawing often undervalued within art history: the comic line, so-called blind contour, and the child’s line. Chapter Three positions Sturtevant’s practice of making repetitions of the work of other artists on paper, circa 1964–1966, through the framework of memory, rather than the copy. It thereby makes a case for resisting the art historical urge to single out Great Artists (in Sturtevant’s use of the term) and to identify who did what first. Chapter Four reads Adrian Piper’s 1967 series The Barbie Doll Drawings through the lens of the artist’s extensive figure drawing experience. Unfolding alongside sequential descriptions of all thirty-five sheets of the series, this chapter experiments with narrative while demonstrating figurative drawing’s capacity as a tool through which to challenge preconceptions of the human form.
Informed by my own drawing practice, as well as fields ranging from feminist standpoint theory to cognitive psychology, this dissertation embraces the uncertainty of process through the stories of four artists for whom drawing was a practice of navigating their own embodied relationship to the world. It thereby makes a claim, beyond drawing, for approaching artists as people who are, simply, still learning. Such an approach, I argue, is one path towards countering the grand narratives and mythologized ideas of skill, genius, and singular influence that continue to persist in the writing of art history.History of Art and Architectur
Remembering the Enslaved and the Emancipated in Latin Verse Epitaphs, Epigrams, and Poems of Consolation
No full textIn this dissertation, I examine the extant Latin poetry written to commemorate enslaved and emancipated persons in the ancient Roman world. My study engages with two bodies of evidence. The first comprises the 243 surviving Latin verse epitaphs inscribed on the gravestones of persons from these social groups: these epitaphs date from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE and originate from across the Roman empire. The second body of evidence comprises the poems within the Latin literary canon (that is, the texts circulated in manuscript form rather than being incised on stone) that were written to commemorate enslaved and emancipated persons and/or to console someone on the loss of one such person. 19 poems of this nature survive: one by Lucilius, 14 by Martial, and four by Statius, ranging in length from two lines to 234. These forms of sepulchral poetry, I argue, not only served to honor deceased individuals, but also provided a space in which contrasting perspectives on slavery, including both positive and negative sentiments, could be expressed.
In Chapters 1 and 2, I demonstrate that, when slaveholders commemorate their enslaved and emancipated dependents (which is the case in all of the canonical texts and some of the inscribed epitaphs), they tend to depict slavery as benevolent and paternalistic and to position themselves as central to their dependents’ social and professional lives. In Chapter 1, I analyze how these tendencies are manifested in the inscribed verse epitaphs; in Chapter 2, I consider how they are manifested in two canonical genres of poetry (namely, the epigram and the poem of consolation).
In Chapters 3 and 4, I examine how, when enslaved and emancipated persons memorialize themselves, or are memorialized by their family and friends (which is the case in most of the inscribed epitaphs), they often challenge or reframe this worldview. In Chapter 3, I examine cases where this is done overtly, including an epitaph from Gaul that describes enslavement as traumatic, and a group of epitaphs, two from Carthage and one from Italy, that equate death with liberation from bondage. As I demonstrate in Chapter 4, enslaved and emancipated persons could also engage in more subtle modes of resistance. Many of them, when writing their own epitaphs or those of their family members, choose to tell their life stories in ways that conflict with the picture presented by the slaveholders: for instance, they may foreground their family and community rather than their relationship with their slaveholder.
Finally, in Chapter 5, I underscore the subjectivity of sepulchral poetry, and its capacity to shape perceptions of particular social groups, by examining the extant poems, both canonical and epigraphic, for a more complex social group: namely, alumni, meaning children born to enslaved or emancipated parents and ‘fostered’ by their slaveholder. These alumni may be represented in different ways (e.g., as ordinary household slaves or as adoptive children) according to the perspective and agenda of their commemorator(s).
Overall, therefore, these poems enabled persons from various social backgrounds not just to mourn their deceased loved ones, but also to participate in a broader dialogue on slavery and to shape the ways in which the experiences of enslavement and emancipation were remembered.Classic