Digital Commons Network^™

The Maghrebi Silk Road: A Medieval Exploration, Malak Ouammou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Maghrebi Silk Road: A Medieval Exploration is an interdisciplinary historical examination of a variety of intellectual and material cross-cultural interactions and connections between Asia and the Maghreb from 900 to 1492. It primarily revolves around agriculture, sericulture, and immaterial and material culture, with an emphasis on knowledge production and dissemination. In it, I focus on the Mediterranean endpoint of the Silk Road network, illustrating the Maghrebi Silk Road through an exploration of various case studies such as rice, silk, and storytelling that demonstrate the role of and the extent to which these “secondary” Silk Road routes existed and were …

Temporal Integration In Music And Aesthetic Judgments: Assessing Musical Taste Through A Transformer-Based Approach, Sophia M. Senderak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Music unfolds over time, requiring listeners to integrate information moment by moment to make aesthetic judgments. Although we know that music is likely processed on multiple timescales, it is not known which musical features contribute to short versus long timeframes. This study examined whether a computational measure of temporal integration could help explain aesthetic responses to music. Participants (N = 28) listened to 32 sixty-second clips of classical and electronic music, and continuously rated their enjoyment with a dial. After listening, they then gave an overall liking judgment for each clip. To quantify temporal integration, we derived an integration measure …

Identifying Helium Emission-Line Stars With The Condor Array Telescope, Julia Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Helium emission-line stars, including cataclysmic variables (CVs), AM Canum Venaticorum (AM CVn) binaries, symbiotic stars, and X-ray binaries, are tracers of compact object binary populations in the Milky Way, and may be viable progenitor systems of Type Ia supernovae. Their space densities are not well constrained - just over 100 AM CVn stars are known out of a Galactic population that may be closer to 100,000. Identifying such systems in large numbers requires wide-field, narrow-band photometric surveys capable of detecting faint emission-line sources across significant sky areas.

In this thesis, I present a narrow-band photometric search for helium emission-line stars …

Neural Correlates Of Recognition Memory And Metamemory In Breast Cancer Survivors: An Event-Related Potential Study, Dishari Zaman Azad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Breast cancer survivors (BCS) often report noticeable cognitive difficulties despite showing limited impairment on standardized neuropsychological tests. Some have theorized that this is simply an insensitivity of standardized testing to subtle cognitive changes (test-insensitivity hypothesis), whereas others have suggested there are early neural changes that are detected by patients but precede detection by these tests (early signal hypothesis) or that when they achieve normal performance, it is through saliently effortful compensatory processes (compensation hypothesis). The present study tested these theories by assessing metamemory and recognition memory retrieval in BCS and non-cancer controls (NCC) using both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) …

Exploring The Effect Of Babble Background Noise On Learning New Patterns In An Artificial Accent Of English In Monolingual And Bilingual Young Adults, Mariana Vasilita

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current study examined how background noise affects the learning of novel phonetic and phonological patterns in speech. While prior research has shown that bilingual participants may learn new phonetic patterns more successfully than monolingual participants under quiet conditions, it remains unclear whether this advantage persists in more ecologically valid listening environments.

We investigated phonetic learning skills in monolingual English speakers (n = 13) and early bilingual speakers (n = 13). Participants were trained and tested on an artificial English accent presented in the presence of 12-talker babble noise (+10 dB SNR). A digit span task was also administered to …

Monsters In The Gutter: Queerness And Family In Graphic Novels, Maren Beriss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis I read two graphic novels together: My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris and Black Hole by Charles Burns. Although the stories are quite different, they mirror each other quite closely: Burns’ story takes place in a homogenous suburb; Ferris’ is set in a diverse part of Chicago. Both deal with what it means to be a monster, but in different ways. Ferris has a clear framework of the different kinds of monsters – good, bad, and villager – which is at times helpful but often too narrow. Yet reading Burns with this lens in mind …

Urban Sacred Grove: A Visioning For Collective Care, Preservation, Environmental Justice, And Resilience, Oluwadara A. Ojugbele

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My capstone explores how the concept of sacred groves—a community-based practice of conserving forest areas for cultural, spiritual, or religious purposes—can be reimagined as a framework for urban environmental stewardship and community care. Sacred groves have historically varied across time and place but consistently serve as protected spaces that honor divine forces, ancestors, and community values. In the Yoruba context, groves demarcate lush forests as abodes for oriṣas (divine forces) and spiritual beings, often containing shrines and artifacts that embody cultural beliefs. My capstone draws on the sacred grove concept and aims to illustrate how urban communities might adopt sacred …

A Simulation To Compare Models For A Longitudinal Ordinal Response With A Multilevel Cross-Classified Data Structure, Rachel S. Perlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a simulation study that compares four models for analyzing three-level longitudinal cross-classified data with an ordinal outcome, treatment effect and a category-specific effect. The models include the cumulative model, the sequential model, the adjacent category model, and a metric model. Data were generated for each of the first three models with 27,000 generated datasets each, totaling 81,000. The datasets vary along three continuous variables: the number of level-3 units, the ratio of treatment groups to control groups, and the treatment effect size. The outcome has four ordinal response categories. Each model had two predictor variables: treatment and time. …

Unrepresentable Objects: Neoliberalism In The Contemporary Novel In French, Alicen Marie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation operates at the intersections of textual analysis, political theory, psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics to investigate the prevalence of uncanny imagery in ten examples of contemporary fiction, while also interrogating the notion of the uncanny as a category of analysis. Entitled “Unrepresentable Objects: Neoliberalism in the Contemporary Novel in French,” it examines a group of novels by Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Marie NDiaye, and Linda Lê, published in France between 1993 and 2017. These novels share an aesthetic of hauntedness and breakdown, incongruous affect, and a continual presence of the uncanny; they depict a world split from history and …

Essays On The Economics Of Aging: Structural And Machine Learning Approaches, Alexander S. Kwon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Population aging has made the study of older workers’ economic behavior increasingly important for understanding labor markets, retirement systems, and public policy. In many advanced economies, rising old-age dependency ratios have increased the need to understand labor-supply, retirement, and savings decisions later in life (OECD, 2025). In the United States, these issues are especially important because Social Security faces long-run financing pressure, with the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund projected to be depleted around 2033 (U.S. Social Security Administration, Office of the Chief Actuary, 2025). Longer life expectancy increases the expected length of retirement and raises the fiscal importance …

Buttressing Britain’S Financial Rise: Anglo-Dutch Brokers In Eighteenth-Century London, Jiwon Han

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the course of the eighteenth century, British financial markets developed remarkably and London established itself as the financial center of Europe, replacing Amsterdam. Scholarship on Britain’s financial developments in the eighteenth century has largely understood it as the result of British efforts and innovation. This dissertation complicates that understanding by investigating the Anglo-Dutch merchants in eighteenth-century London and their contributions to the development of British financial markets. In particular, their support was essential for the British government’s war finances, because Britain’s continuous wars against France demanded an immense amount of money and credit while its financial markets were still …

Characterization And Advancement Of Molluscan Venom Gland Cell Model Systems, James V. Parziale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Venomous mollusks, including cone snails and coleoid cephalopods, produce rich repertoires of bioactive peptides with profound effects on cellular physiology, yet there are few tractable experimental systems that exist to study their development, maintenance, and venom secretion. Although therapeutics such as the cone snail peptide Ziconotide demonstrate the biomedical potential of molluscan venoms, progress in understanding how venom glands form, function, and evolve has been hindered by the lack of reliable husbandry and the complete absence of in vitro cell models. Modern comparative genomics has revealed widespread convergent evolution across venomous lineages, but molluscan datasets remain underrepresented, limiting insights into …

Sensing Prehistory: A Framework Reconciling Scientific Modeling And Human Experience Through Affordance Theory, David S. Milley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the core of the tension between scientific and humanistic approaches to archaeological knowledge production, epitomized by the processual movement and the post-processual critique of the late 20th century, is a disjuncture between abstract models and lived reality. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and phenomenology are interpretive approaches that reflect this broader tension. Here, I contend that more authoritative knowledge claims arise not from choosing amongst conflicting methods but by integrating the strengths of contrasting methods through the application of affordance theory as developed by James J. Gibson (1979) and initially applied to archaeology by Marcos Llobera (1996).

To substantiate this …

Distribution Of Power In South Asia: Assessing Sino-Indian Conflict Propensity, Fatima Faisal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In international relations, the distribution of power is a key theme impacting the propensity for nations to break into wars; however, the vast academic literature is Eurocentric with a concentration on the United States and the Soviet Union. This paper shifts to the unexplored distribution of power in South Asian with a particular focus of Sino-Indian border conflicts namely the Sino-Indian War (1962), the Nathu La and Cho La clashes (1967), the Arunachal Ambush (1975), Sumdorong Chu standoff (1987), the Armed Confrontation (2013), and the Doklam Standoff (2017), and the Galwan Valley (2020) to determine if the region was more …

Finding Luis: A Creative Nonfiction Account Of Law & Society, Jason M. Leggett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay explores the contradictions in legal theory and human experience through creative nonfiction. Its main purpose is to argue that a truly just society requires acknowledging the profound influence of individual narratives on the law. This is supported by blending personal narratives, critical analysis, and philosophical inquiry to reveal the gap between codified law and lived realities for marginalized individuals. This unique Legal Poetics methodology employs a series of six vignettes, such as the author's and Luis's shared experiences with traumatic brain injury and the denial of justice, as data. By integrating autoethnography, law as narrative, and performativity theories, …

Mind The Gap: Morphological Defectivity And Suffixal Competition In Polish, Szymon E. Zuberek

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates morphological defectivity and suffixal competition in the genitive singular of Polish masculine inanimate nouns. Drawing on survey-based grammaticality judgments from native speakers, it examines how respondents select between the suffixes -a and -u or reject both as unacceptable, thereby signaling defectivity. Mixed-effects logistic regressions revealed that defectivity was rare overall but patterned systematically by age, education, and region, with additional baseline variability across lexical items. Suffix choice showed a strong preference for -a, modulated by age, education, and region, with additional baseline variability across lexical items. These findings inform our understanding of paradigm structure, sociolinguistic variation, and …

Systems Epistemology, Boris Ayala

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation develops a new kind of theory of knowledge, which I call Systems Epistemology (SE). Currently available theories tend to follow the TB+ format according to which knowledge is a true belief plus certain additional properties. Insofar as these theories offer a conceptual gap between the additional properties and truth, however, they are vulnerable to intuitive counterexamples. Building on work by Richard Foley and Stephen Hetherington, SE focuses not on a target belief and the properties it must have to count as knowledge, but rather on the beliefs that surround it and hold it in place. This shift in …

Mechanistic Studies Of Aerobic Photochemistry: Gold Nanoclusters, Nanoparticles, And Solution-Phase Systems, Serah Essang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comprises five chapters as enumerated below.

Chapter 1 describes our findings on the reactions of Au glutathione nanocluster (Au₂₀SG₁₆) with singlet oxygen (¹O₂) in D₂O. We noticed it underwent a self-photooxidation reaction. Leading us to mechanistic studies using photophysical, photochemical, theoretical, and indirect trapping methods. We found rapid total quenching of singlet oxygen (¹O₂) by ground-state Au₂₀(SG)₁₆, with evidence for dioxygen insertion into the nanocluster. Supported by analyses with IR, ESI-MS, and density functional theory, we propose the formation of …

Recognition At Work: How Managerial Acknowledgment Shapes Team-Level Outcomes, Annalissa Thomas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Employee recognition has become a central focus for organizations worldwide, with billions of dollars spent annually on recognition programs. Despite this investment, scientific research on the effectiveness of recognition beyond performance outcomes remains limited. Furthermore, little is known about how recognition operates at the team-level and the specific attributes that make recognition impactful. This study addresses these gaps by disentangling the nuanced attributes of recognition and exploring their influence on employee perceptions of recognition. It also examines how these perceptions affect key outcomes, including perceptions of manager support, job security, autonomy, team cohesion, and engagement, and tests whether trust moderates …

4e-Bp1 Differentially Regulates Translation Of A Subset Of Human Mrnas, Mehreen Mahbub

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Elevated 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 (p53_A, and p53_B)—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 …

The Digital Divide In Political Redistricting: Ai's Impact On Minority Representation, Jaime Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology plays a significant role in people's daily lives worldwide. It has infiltrated many aspects of our lives, from education and healthcare to politics. With our increasing reliance on technology, artificial intelligence (AI) has become well-enmeshed in our political systems, affecting people everywhere, especially minority groups. This essay will investigate the potential effects of AI on the political influence of racial and ethnic minorities, specifically focusing on its role in altering voting district boundaries— a practice referred to as redistricting. There are several areas of concern under which AI could unintentionally worsen gerrymandering, impact equity in the representation of minority …

I Wear The Past In The Cold, Cecilia Knaub

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“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 …

Computational And Functional Characterization Of Terebrid Venom Peptides, Favour T. Achimba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Venom peptides represent a natural repertoire of bioactive compounds that are potent modulators of ion channels. Teretoxins, venom peptides from terebrid snails, remain underexplored despite their structural and functional diversity. This thesis is the first to comprehensively explore the structure and function of teretoxins using a comparative computational sequence and structure model followed by experimental assays. The majority of the functional focus has been on identifying the ion channel molecular targets of uncharacterized teretoxins. Teretoxins, like other venom peptides, are hypothesized to manipulate the cellular function of a diversity of ion channels. Dysregulation of ion channels leads to several …

Dumatree: Free Online Education In Bridging The Migrant Digital Divide, Mia Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research Questions: This capstone project addresses two primary research questions. First, it examines the digital divide within the immigrant-serving non-profit sector, specifically investigating the lack of computer and digital skills training in organizations that serve refugees and migrants. Second, it asks: is it possible to build a scalable, professional-grade tech curriculum using only free, Wi-Fi-accessible online tools? To address the first question, 50 non-profit organizations serving refugees and migrants were reviewed to assess their technical education offerings. To address the second question, Dumatree.com was developed using universally accessible digital resources. A website was the most appropriate format for this project, …

Sometimes I Picture You Dreaming: How American Female Directors Use Women-In-Prison Films As A Pathway For Public Education And Activism In The Era Of Mass Incarceration, Nicolette Natale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the role of female directors in creating media that showcases how prisons perpetuate sexism or gender-based violence. As mass incarceration began to take off in the 1970s, this paper begins with an analysis of Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971), which often served as the model for women-in-prison (WIP) exploitation films. While Hill perpetuated the white and male gaze in The Big Doll House, Stephanie Rothman subverts oppressive gazes in her WIP film, Terminal Island (1973), and demonstrates a concern with the historical gendered realities of prison – moving beyond representations of prison on the …

The Behavior And Complexation Of Technetium Under Conditions Relevant For Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing, Rachel E. Greenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed by utilizing several large-scale solvent extraction processes. One of the most prevalent of these processes is the plutonium uranium reduction extraction (PUREX) process. This process involves an organic phase composed of tributyl phosphate (TBP) in kerosene and an aqueous phase comprised of concentrated nitric acid. Both uranium (U) and plutonium (Pu) are extracted into the organic phase by nitrate and TBP complexation while the various fission products remain in the initial aqueous phase. Pu is then chemically reduced to its trivalent state and back-extracted into a second aqueous phase, thereby separating the two fissile materials. …

Social Capital And The Spread Of Information On Twitter Related To Change In The Criminal Legal System, Sebastian Hoyos-Torres

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Criminal 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 …

Development Of Novel Anti-Cancer Colchicine Analogs: Synthesis And Configurational Studies, Orugbani S. Eli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Colchicine, a naturally occurring alkaloid, has long been known as a potent therapeutic agent. Despite its efficacy treating gout and other inflammatory disorders, its severe toxicity, limited selectivity, and poor pharmacological profile have restricted its broader clinical application. Reported advantages of colchicine-site ligands as vascular-disrupting agents, including reduced susceptibility to multidrug resistance, have revived interest in the colchicine site on tubulin as a validated therapeutic target for cancer. This dissertation focuses on the development of new colchicine analogs, detailing the synthetic method to functionalized AC-ring derivatives, as well as the evaluation of their configurational stability and biological activity.

In Chapter …

Replanting Hawthorns: Towards A Diachronic Translation Of À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Gerardo Bandera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A novel as long and complex as Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu poses a challenge of methodology to its translators: how should one proceed with rendering its unique style, its bifurcating sentences, its aesthetic philosophy, and the interplay between content and form? What should one prioritize? This dissertation proposes a method of translation that gives priority not only to sentence structure, as most English translators of the novel have done, but also to the repetition and diachronic development of images, themes, and phrases in order to capture and recreate certain recursive effects of the novel’s form. It …

A Work On/Of Language: Lyric And The Care Of The Self, Evan M. Knight

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing 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 …