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Informational Interventions: State-Sponsored Influence Strategies and Impacts on Public Opinion
No full textGovernments around the world regularly target information toward publics in other countries with the aim of influencing public opinion toward their own foreign policy goals. Despite almost a century of research in political science on propaganda, surprisingly little of this work draws the line between traditional propaganda and its evolving instantiations—social media mis- and disinformation—or governments’ utilization of technological advancements that enable the easy dissemination and concealment of influence. Further, despite our knowledge or suspicion of influence taking place, we have little research that tests whether and how such influence impacts public attitudes or behavior.
In this dissertation, I present three essays exploring state-sponsored informational influence and its impacts on publics. I argue that foreign informational influence can achieve real attitudinal impacts on the publics of other states, posing significant threats to publics in both established democracies and states undergoing transitions from authoritarianism or experiencing democratic backsliding.
In the first essay, I introduce the concept of an “informational intervention,” or a government’s use of information to foster attitudes or behaviors among citizens in another state. The essay presents a new framework for assessing the relative coherence and impact of government influence through information that highlights the continuities in the manifestation of such influence over time. Taking the Arab Spring uprisings as an example, I discuss the vulnerability and susceptibility to such influence in transitional political contexts, where enterprising actors can work toward achieving their foreign policy goals by impacting citizens' attitudes toward regime change, social trust, and political efficacy. I also introduce an index to measure the scope of an intervention and its effects on public attitudes or behavior and assess the success of an intervention relative to its scope.
In the second essay, I present the design and results of a survey experiment testing the impact of revealing the existence of covert informational interventions on Tunisian citizens’ belief in the credibility of their media sources and on their attitudes toward the media content itself. I demonstrate that alerting respondents to foreign influence in the media can increase support for anti-democratic policies, a finding that suggests that foreign influence—and even just the suspicion of it—can decrease support for democracy, playing into the hands of autocrats.
In the final essay, coauthored with Kevin Troy and Andi Zhou, I turn the focus of informational intervention to the United States. I present the design and results of a survey experiment testing the impact on American audiences of one overt intervention tactic, a political communication strategy which we term “ventriloquism”—when a messenger attributes their message to other sources. We find that citing an in-group source (an American professor in this case) can enhance the persuasiveness of the messaging and mitigate backlash against the source.
The two experiments provide preliminary insights into the actual effects foreign governments’ messaging strategies can have on publics; informational interventions can advance intervenors’ goals, for example, to bolster an authoritarian ally or enhance the persuasiveness of a particular message. Taken together, these essays argue for thinking holistically about state intervention strategies because of their potentially destabilizing impacts on vulnerable publics in transitioning states, contributing to scholarship on the methods and implications of foreign influence in comparative politics and international relations.Governmen
Essays on Shared Resources Under Climate Change
Get PDFIn this dissertation, I use tools from development and public economics to study the economics of shared resources (water and electric vehicle chargers) under climate change in two contexts: climate adaptation in developing countries (South Africa) and climate mitigation in developed countries (the United States).
In the first chapter, I investigate in-kind transfers as a policy option for protecting the poor during environmental crisis. I argue that the equity-efficiency tradeoff posed by in-kind transfers under scarcity is minimized when targeted households have low demand elasticities for the scarce good. I estimate the demand elasticity of households receiving limited allocations of free and discounted water during the severe “Day Zero" drought in 2017-2018 in Cape Town, South Africa. I show that, contrary to evidence on water demand in other contexts, low-income households in Cape Town decrease their water use by only 0.22% in response to a 1-Rand ($0.056) increase in the price of water, implying an elasticity between -0.9% and -9.2%. I then investigate potential explanations for this low elasticity and show via a household survey with embedded information intervention that a substantial proportion of households in Cape Town do not know their marginal water price, which may drive their inelasticity.
In the second chapter, joint with Alexander Abajian, B. Kelsey Jack, Kyle C. Meng, and Martine Visser, I study the role of publicly-provided utility services in climate adaptation in the context of a near-catastrophic drought in Cape Town, South Africa. First, to reduce aggregate water demand, the public utility increased prices, leading to large demand reductions by richer households. Prior to the drought they use twice the public piped water of poorer households. At the peak of the drought, they use less. Second, some of the differential demand reduction comes from richer households substituting away from public water toward privately financed groundwater. This private adaptation both lowers the public utility's total revenue and shifts costs onto poorer households, consequences that persist after the drought abates. Third, policy interventions mitigate some of the fiscal and distributional impacts of private adaptation. These findings highlight how climate adaptation, in the context of publicly provided goods and services, can create pecuniary and environmental externalities with equity consequences.
In the third chapter, joint with Omar Isaac Asensio, Elaine Buckberg, Luke Heeney, Christopher Knittel, and James H. Stock, I document a key barrier to the adoption of carbon emissions-mitigating electric vehicles (EVs) in the United states: real-time data on charging station status at DC fast chargers on US highways. Charging infrastructure is critical to EV adoption, but for chargers to be most useful, EV drivers need to know in real time where they are and whether they are working and available. We investigate the availability of real-time data from DC fast chargers on six major US Interstates and model the impacts of expanding access to real-time data to all DC fast chargers near highways. On average, between March and August 2024, 32.9% of DC fast charging stations adjacent to those six Interstates provided their real-time status on PlugShare, a major charge-finding app, with gaps of up to 1,308 miles without real-time data. Further, we survey potential car buyers and EV owners and find low credibility of currently-available real-time data. We incorporate this data into a two-sided model of consumer vehicle choice and charging station buildout adapted from Cole et al. (2023). If universal real-time data is accompanied by improved charger uptime and driver confidence in the accuracy of the real-time data, we predict that the EV share of new vehicle sales would grow by 8.0 percentage points in 2030, expanding the EV fleet by 13.2%, and reducing 2030 carbon emissions by 22.5 mmt, versus baseline projections for 2030.Economic
Essays on Disease Outbreaks and Health System Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa
Get PDFIn the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the concept of health system resilience, defined as the ability of a health system to prepare for, manage (absorb, adapt, and transform), and learn from shocks. Motivated in part by the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and more recently motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, this research agenda seeks to understand how health systems prepare for and absorb major shocks to their routine functioning capacity. However, many basic questions still remain about how to define health system resilience, and even more fundamentally, it is not always clear what is at stake for health systems when preparing for future events. This dissertation aims to add to the evidence base for understanding the resilience capacity of health systems by investigating the absorptive capacity of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in response to the Ebola outbreak and estimating the recovery period after the outbreak. Additionally, this dissertation provides evidence of community-level health technology adoption behaviors that can guide health interventions to prepare for and manage shocks at the local level.
The first study uses annual national childhood immunization rate estimates to quantify the causal impact of the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak on childhood immunization rates as well as the time required for health systems to return to pre-outbreak trends. The second study uses annual national maternal mortality rate estimates to quantify the causal impact of the Ebola outbreak on maternal mortality rates as well as the time required for health systems to return to pre-outbreak trends. The second study additionally uses nationally representative individual-level survey data to explore mechanisms for the elevated levels of maternal mortality seen during the outbreak. The third study uses randomized controlled trial (RCT) data from rural Kenya to identify the causal impact of the health technology adoption behaviors of neighbors on a household’s decision to adopt new technology.
The first two studies add to the evidence base on the impacts of major health system shocks on key health system indicators, while the third study provides evidence for health technology adoption behaviors that can inform contextually aware health interventions at the local level, an important aspect of building health system resilience prior to and during shocks. All three studies add to a growing evidence base required to build effective and resilient health systems.Population Health Science
Cultural Baggage: Queens, Mobility and Court Performance between Paris, Vienna, and Madrid (1612-1673)
No full textThis dissertation explores the role of mobility—of queens, performers, repertoires, and ideas—in shaping cultural life across early modern Europe. Focusing on seventeenth-century queens of Habsburg origin, whether residing within Habsburg domains or integrated into the French court, it argues that these women and their entourages were central agents of political expression and cultural production. Their movements activated networks of performance and diplomacy, where artistic practice functioned not only as entertainment but as a language of negotiation, allegiance, and identity.
The concept of cultural baggage, which gives the dissertation its title, refers to the visible and invisible content carried by these figures: songs, gestures, musical forms, theatrical traditions, courtly protocols, and embodied habits. Rather than viewing culture as something rooted and stable, the project highlights circulation, translation, and adaptability as defining features of court life. Queens did not travel alone—they brought with them singers, comediantes, instrumentalists, and playwrights who reshaped local practices and contributed to new hybrid aesthetics at the courts they entered.
The dissertation is organized in two interrelated parts. The first focuses on the royal bridal journey as a theatrical and political phenomenon. It interrogates how these transnational ceremonial itineraries—from Madrid to Vienna or Paris, and vice versa—functioned as extended spectacles of dynastic identity. Drawing on chronicles, letters, and visual records, the chapters examine how queens became protagonists of a mobile, ritualized performance across cities and borders. At the same time, they explore how the queens’ own presence and preferences shaped artistic programming, revealing moments of female agency within these meticulously scripted events. The royal journey emerges not merely as a diplomatic protocol, but as a trans-European stage for enacting political alliances and performing contested national identities.
The second part shifts from movement to residence, following what happened once the journey ended and court life began. It traces how performers who traveled with queens—musicians, comediantes, ladies-in-waiting—settled and participated in the cultural life of Paris, Vienna, and Madrid. These figures not only adapted to their new settings but helped redefine them, particularly in France, where the continued presence of Spanish theater companies complicated local aesthetics and institutions. The performance of “Spanishness” became a recurring trope in court spectacle, at times stylized, at times challenged by the reality of Spanish performers onstage. These dynamics offer insight into how national identities were constructed, embodied, and contested through court entertainment.
This study is based on archival research across Spain, France, Italy, and Austria, drawing on diplomatic correspondence, performance records, payment books, and private letters. While these documents rarely narrate the lives of women or performers directly, they offer glimpses—often fragmentary—into the systems of representation and exchange at work. The methodological challenge lies in reading these materials not only for what they record, but also for how they reflect power, omission, and perspective.
Finally, this research foregrounds the feminist and historiographical stakes of re-centering queens and female spaces. It challenges narratives that marginalize women's courts and treats queens not as symbolic adjuncts but as cultural interlocutors. Their movements and preferences shaped repertoires, influenced ceremonial forms, and contributed to the political and aesthetic vocabularies of their time. By recovering their presence, the dissertation also recovers the labor of those who moved with them: performers, servants, chroniclers, and musicians—voices often faint in the archive, but fundamental to the spectacle of power.Musi
Targeting neurotransmitter release machinery to the active zones of presynaptic nerve terminals
No full textNeurotransmitter release requires the coordinated activity of multiple macromolecular complexes within the presynaptic terminal. For example, voltage-gated calcium channels (CaVs) generate calcium transients that drive synaptic vesicle exocytosis, and active zone proteins tether these vesicles nearby to the presynaptic membrane and ‘prime’ them into a fusion-competent state. For many such complexes, their overall importance to neurotransmitter release is well-defined, but the underlying molecular mechanisms and the functions of their individual components are not. Necessity experiments that perturb neurotransmitter release have yielded compelling insight into the structure-function of its protein machinery, but the mechanistic models they inform are complicated by the functional redundancy and interdependency among presynaptic proteins. Here, I instead reconstruct presynaptic function in release-deficient neurons using two complementary approaches to determine proteins and protein domains essential for neurotransmitter release. First, I re-targeted endogenous but non-synaptic proteins to the presynaptic terminal to define protein targeting mechanisms; and second, I generated an artificial secretory complex to define the minimal protein machinery necessary for fusion.
In Chapter 2, I establish the intracellular CaV C-terminus as the primary determinant for CaV compartment targeting. I demonstrated that translocation of the C-terminus from presynaptic CaV2.1s onto somatodendritic CaV1.3s confers active zone targeting and function to CaV1.3s. In CaV2 triple-knockout neurons, chimeric CaV1.3s with CaV2.1 C-termini rescued neurotransmitter release and rendered it fully sensitive to CaV1 pharmacological blockade. Next, in Chapter 3, we constructed a minimal release-promoting protein comprising the auxiliary CaVβ4 subunit and the MUN and lipid-binding C2C domains of Munc-13 after genetically ablating the active zone in hippocampal synapses. This artificial protein primes synaptic vesicles for exocytosis and enables effective calcium triggering of release, thus bypassing the need for an intact active zone complex. Altogether, this work reveals a surprising simplicity to the presynaptic release machinery and the targeting interactions that localize it to the active zone – little is needed of its molecular and mechanistic complexity to achieve functional neurotransmitter release.Neuroscienc
Development of chemical genomic tools using DNA-modifying enzymes to profile chromatin structure and regulatory elements
Get PDFChromatin structure, accessibility, and the spatial organization of DNA within the nucleus play essential roles in gene regulation and contribute to cellular heterogeneity. There is also growing interest in understanding how genome editing affects these features. Developing new genomic tools can help elucidate this complex system, and DNA-modifying enzymes offer powerful biochemical strategies by introducing sequence changes that can be captured through sequencing. In this thesis, I develop and apply novel chemical genomic tools, primarily using double-stranded DNA cytidine deaminases, to advance our understanding of chromatin structure and gene regulation. Chapter 1 provides relevant backgrounds including the advantages and limitations of existing methods.
In Chapter 2, I present a new approach that we developed to measure chromatin accessibility: Targeted Deaminase-Accessible Chromatin sequencing (TDAC-seq). Cis-regulatory elements regulate gene expression, and CRISPR-based genome editing of these regions has enabled breakthrough gene therapies for diseases such as sickle cell disease. Understanding how genome editing affects chromatin accessibility is crucial for elucidating underlying molecular mechanisms. However, existing technologies that simultaneously perturb and map cis-regulatory elements have significant limitations in detecting endogenous edits and linking them to chromatin accessibility with high resolution and throughput. TDAC-seq addresses this by using variants of dsDNA cytidine deaminase (DddA) to mark accessible regions through cytidine deamination. These edits are detected as C•G-to-T•A mutations after targeted long-range PCR and long-read sequencing. TDAC-seq thereby provides single-molecule, single-nucleotide resolution of chromatin accessibility and protein footprints across target regions. Furthermore, TDAC-seq simultaneously captures chromatin accessibility and CRISPR edits from the same DNA molecules, and we combined TDAC-seq with pooled CRISPR-Cas9 and adenosine base editor screens targeting the HS2 enhancer of the β-globin locus. We further expanded this method to perform a large-scale pooled CRISPR screen targeting an enhancer downstream of GFI1B linked to myeloproliferative neoplasm risk in CD34+ hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, identifying key regulatory motifs of this enhancer. These results highlight the scalability and resolution of TDAC-seq for fine-mapping sequence–function relationships of target cis-regulatory elements.
Chapter 3 discusses the broader utility of DddA-based mutagenesis. Because DddA-induced edits are PCR-compatible, they can be easily combined with other sequencing strategies. I describe additional applications that we have explored, as well as those reported by other research groups. These applications include recruiting DddA11 to single-stranded DNA regions via N3-kethoxal labeling to mark transcription bubbles, site-specific labeling of chromatin-associated factors using DddA fusion proteins, and integrating DddA mutagenesis with single-cell sequencing to reveal transcription factor footprints. I also propose several future directions for expanding the chemical genomic toolkit using dsDNA deaminases, emphasizing their versatility for probing genome structure and regulation.
Appendix A describes Lamina-Inducible Methylation and Hi-C (LIMe-Hi-C), another method we developed that jointly measures chromosome conformation, DNA methylation, and lamina positioning by fusing the GpC cytosine methyltransferase M.CviPI to Lamin B1. This GpC methylation signature was integrated into a bisulfite Hi-C workflow to study the role of H3K27me3 at the boundaries of lamina-associated domains and compartments.
Overall, this thesis demonstrates multiple approaches for using DNA-modifying enzymes to develop novel chemical genomic tools for studying genome structure. These new tools generate unique datasets unachievable through existing methods and provide new insights that advance our understanding of gene regulatory mechanisms.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog
Criteria of Modern Art: W. E. B. Du Bois Experiments, 1899-1928
No full textThis dissertation investigates how the Black American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois mobilized various visual media and strategies to challenge white supremacy between 1899 and 1928. Over three chapters, I demonstrate how travel and cross-cultural exchange catalyzed, informed, or modified Du Bois’s aesthetic strategies. The general routes that I illuminate are Atlanta – Paris in 1899-1900; Eastern Seaboard – Berlin between 1906 and 1927; and Harlem – Moscow between 1925 and 1928. Though this dissertation focuses on Du Bois, it situates him in relation to and conversation with many other major figures. Some are often found in discussions of Du Bois—for example, the writer Alain Locke, painter Aaron Douglas, and photographer Thomas Askew. But others—including the Weimar artist Hannah Höch, German-Austrian anthropologist Felix von Luschan, and Soviet writer and photographer Sergei Tret’iakov—rarely appear in the existing literature. Yet as I show, these figures and Du Bois were active at the same time, shared overlapping interests, and may well have crossed paths.
Chapter One investigates the multimedia project that Du Bois and his collaborators produced for the “Exposition des Nègres d’Amerique” at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Titled The Georgia Negro, the project included 363 photographs in four albums, 36 data visualizations and maps, and three handwritten volumes of legal codes. Chapter Two examines Du Bois’s embrace of the historical pageant, a popular medium that could feature thousands of amateur participants and combined music, dance, and theater. His pageant The Star of Ethiopia appeared in New York City in 1913, Washington D.C. in 1915, Philadelphia in 1916, and Los Angeles in 1925. Chapter Three focuses on Du Bois’s declarations about art and propaganda but situates them against both the Harlem Renaissance and his trip to the Soviet Union in 1926. This dissertation not only examines Du Bois’s approaches within their original historical contexts but also tells a story about how they change over the course of three decades.
My overarching argument is that Du Bois’s aesthetic experiments are best understood as modernist ones. Each chapter explicates a particular experiment that resonates with quintessential modernist themes: uncertainty and motivation, ethnology and the ethnological museum, and aesthetic autonomy and political efficacy. In doing so, this dissertation recovers the very radicality of Du Bois’s practice and reimagines our narratives of modernisms, our criteria of modern art.History of Art and Architectur
Radical Paternity: The Resistant Masculinity of Black Fatherhood from Anti-Slavery to Early Civil Rights
Get PDFThis dissertation traces a partly intellectual, partly social history of Black fatherhood in the United States from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century. It examines how African American fathers were positioned within national debates on race, gender, and citizenship, and how those debates were shaped by and helped shape ideas about family, masculinity, and social order. Drawing on a wide range of source materials—including slave narratives, speeches, children’s literature, popular fiction, illustrations, and photography—it investigates the competing portrayals of Black fatherhood by White supremacists, formerly enslaved men and their families, and Black intellectuals engaged in abolitionist and civil rights activism. The project introduces the concept of “Radical Paternity” to describe the ways African American men resisted racist ideologies by embracing fatherhood as a site of dignity, responsibility, and political commitment. This concept also captures how fatherhood motivated acts of resistance and inspired alternative visions of masculinity that rejected domination and violence. By centering the lived experiences and intellectual contributions of Black men, this study challenges narratives of pathological Black familial dysfunction and overly celebratory accounts of heroic paternal figures. It argues instead for a historically grounded understanding of African American fatherhood as a dynamic and contested site of struggle, creativity, and care within a racist society. In doing so, the dissertation contributes to broader conversations in African American history, gender studies, and the history of the family.Histor
Investigating Ethnic-Racial Identity Development in White U.S. American Adolescents: Identifying Common Constellations and Exploring Measurement
Get PDFWhite adolescents develop within a system that confers power and advantages related to their ethnoracial group membership and identity while simultaneously marginalizing and harming their peers of Color (Rogers et al., 2021; Satterthwaite-Freiman & Umaña-Taylor, 2023). Given the collective power of White communities within the U.S. as a result of these conferred advantages (Efird et al., 2024), these inequities will continue without sustained action on the part of White communities in partnership with communities of Color. Ethnic-racial identity (ERI), a multifaceted developmental competency comprised of process (i.e., exploration, resolution) and content (e.g., affect, centrality, public regard; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014) is especially relevant to understanding how White people make sense of their ethnic-racial group membership and how ERI development can foster anti-racist ideologies and action or, opposingly, encourage investment in the current oppressive system. Therefore, this dissertation applied prior ERI theory and empirical research with U.S. adolescents of Color as well as theory and empirical understanding of white identity development to White U.S. adolescents’ ERI development, centering White youths’ unique unjust positionality within the U.S. ethnoracial hierarchy.
Paper 1 focused on a sample of 441 White adolescents (Mage = 16.0, SD = 0.88; 46% female-identified, 54% male-identified) attending two ethnoracially diverse public high schools in the U.S. Southwest and Midwest. This study used latent profile transition analysis to identify three profiles of ERI process and content across three time points (i.e., Early Closure & Untroubled, T1 n = 335, low exploration, high resolution, low negative affect, moderate centrality and public regard; Unexplored & Unsure, T1 n = 81, low exploration and resolution, moderate negative affect, centrality, and public regard; and High Negative Affect, T1 n = 25, low exploration and resolution, high negative affect, moderate centrality and public regard). Results emphasized the importance of ERI negative affect for distinguishing ERI development between White adolescents as well as for attitudes related to both approaching and avoiding peers of Color. Additionally, this study highlighted the importance of high resolution and low negative affect for positive psychological outcomes though also raised concerns regarding the long-term stability of the resolution reported by members of the Early Closure & Untroubled profile.
Paper 2 utilized cognitive interviewing methods with a sample of 15 self-identified White high school students from a large metropolitan area to investigate their interpretations of the items from a commonly used measure of the ERI developmental processes of exploration and resolution in addition to the ERI content component of negative affect (i.e., the Ethnic Identity Scale – Brief; Douglass & Umaña-Taylor, 2015). Findings affirmed the construct validity of utilizing the ERI Exploration and ERI Resolution subscales with White adolescent samples, though offered suggestions for additional measures and constructs to consider when measuring ERI exploration and resolution in White adolescents. Additionally, results provided evidence questioning the construct validity of the ERI Negative Affect subscale measuring ERI negative affect as operationalized by ERI theory in White adolescents. Further investigation and creation of a more precise ERI negative affect measure were discussed as potential solutions to more accurately measuring ERI negative affect in White adolescent samples.Educatio
All the Women are White, All the Black People are African American, But Some of Us Stay: Assemblages of Social, Cultural, and Sacred Knowledge Among Haitian LDS Women
No full textIn 1965, the passage of the Hart-Celler Act provided a pathway for Black immigrants to enter the United States on a scale larger than previous years. Their presence not only shifted the ethnic landscape of “Black” identity in the U.S. but also, the religious landscape of what was normatively accepted as “Black Religion” in America. Recent studies are attuned to these shifts in the United States’ Black religious landscape but have yet to fully cross the bounds of Black immigrants in Christian communities at the periphery of the Black religious imagination such as Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints. In this dissertation, I home in on one such group, Haitian Latter-day Saint women, who live their lives at the intersection of a number of historical as well as contemporary discourses. These discourses – which I frame as knowledge – give shape to ideas about womanhood, Blackness, as well as Christian and American identity. At the same time, Haitian LDS women cultivate and disseminate their own renderings of knowledge about these ideas. Using the Haitian concept of rasanblaj, I trace the negotiation of social, cultural, and sacred forms of knowledge among first, 1.5, and second-generation Haitian Latter-day Saint women with affiliations to Utah. I argue that these negotiations among the women in this study contribute to their understanding of themselves as Haitian Latter-day Saint women in their racial, ethnic, and religious communities. These understandings are vital to the ways they experience the United States and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In both places, however, they are subject to antiblackness and misogynoir. In these experiences of alienation, Haitian LDS women turn to alternative communal practices, such as developing their relationship with God and creating communities, to survive – and thrive – in the world.Religion, Committee on the Study o