Digital Commons Network^™

A Comparison Of Manufacturers’ Claims Of Attenuation Rates In Non-Custom Earplugs, Skyler M. Shipley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recreational and social environments frequently expose individuals to high intensity noise environments; however, the use of hearing protection devices (HPDs) remains limited. This study evaluated whether non-custom, over-the-counter musicians’ earplugs provide attenuation consistent with manufacturers’ claims and whether cost is associated with performance. Six commercially available earplug models were tested using both human participants and a KEMAR manikin system. Attenuation was measured across frequencies from 250–8000 Hz (octave and inter-octave frequencies) and were tested using different ear tip sizes. Results indicated that several earplugs achieved attenuation levels comparable to or exceeding their advertised noise reduction ratings (NRR), though consistency varied …

Imagination And The Self: A Cross-Cultural And Cross-Disciplinary Study, Qianyi Qin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary investigation of the imagination and the self that engages with cognitive science, philosophy of mind, Buddhism, ethical theories, and a variety of perspectives from Asian and Western philosophy. I address the following questions in three interrelated chapters. First, what does it mean for the self to appear in imagination? In Chapter 1, against certain narrow understandings of the self in philosophy of language, I build a multidimensional model of the self in imaginative experiences to capture the rich phenomenology, drawing on empirical findings on memory and imagination. Second, can the self be removed from imagination? …

No Reply: The Exclusus Amator Through Ancient And Modern Love Poetry, Ayla Wing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the exclusus amator, or “shut-out lover” trope as it appears in Greek and Roman texts, surveying the many examples of this motif and picking out its main elements: Intense Pain, Strong Emotions, Rejection, Interaction with the Door. It also notes the universality of the trope (anyone of any sexuality from any walk of life can be an exclusus amator) and the many references to the motif in other types of ancient media, including in graffiti, which shows that the exclusus amator was a real-life occurrence. This paper then examines modern songwriting, a genre chosen for its similarities …

Covert Scrambling To The Edge In Tshangla: An Analysis Of Wh- In-Situ, Tshering Y. Dorji

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the syntactic derivation of wh- in-situ constructions in Tshangla, an understudied Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan. Argument wh-items can remain in-situ in islands—including sentential subjects, adjunct clauses, relative clauses, and coordinate structures—while projecting their scope to the matrix level. This island-insensitivity for certain wh-items suggests a lack of movement in the narrow syntax, yet diagnostic tests, including crossover effects, reconstruction effects, and parasitic gap licensing, provide compelling evidence for a movement-based account. I propose an analysis involving covert LF scrambling to the left edge of an island clause. This movement is driven by semantic requirements …

Gramsci’S ‘Democratic Philosopher’ And The Concept’S Foundations In Marxian Social Ontology, Eli Recht-Appel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis deals with the term ‘democratic philosopher’ from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In order to lay the groundwork for my distinct interpretation of the ‘democratic philosopher,’ I begin by providing an overview of Gramsci’s theory of the role of intellectuals in civil and political society. I then argue that the ‘democratic philosopher’ emerges from Gramsci’s typology of intellectuals but is a category which is both temporally and ontologically distinct from his more well-known concept of ‘organic intellectuals.’ ‘Organic intellectuals,’ intellectuals who co-develop alongside their fundamental social group or class, occupy a variety of cultural and political roles in …

Reducing The Complexity Of The Experimental Design Attenuates Trait-Level Effects In Threat Safety Discrimination Learning, Justin M. Lazzarino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trait measures of negative emotionality have sometimes been shown to play a role in shaping threat learning, but findings are mixed. For example, Johnson et al (2023) showed that the inhibitory and prospective subscales of the Intolerance for Uncertainty Scale (IUS) were associated with diminished and enhanced threat-safety discrimination, respectively, during the acquisition phase of a Pavlovian fear conditioning task. This finding was subsequently replicated in an independent sample (Kinney-Petrucha, 2024, unpublished). However, these findings and other trait-level fear acquisition effects have not been consistently observed in the broader fear learning literature. Variation in the complexity of or uncertainty inherent …

The Soviet New Wave: A Comparative Analysis, Katarina Parks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to assert the Soviet New Wave into the global New Wave cinema movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on three Soviet films—Marlen Khutsiev's I Am Twenty (1965) and July Rain (1967), and Georgiy Daneliya's I Walk the Streets of Moscow (1964)—this study proposes that these works fully commit to the New Wave expression in form, sensibility, and content, despite the aggressive censorship of Soviet authority. By comparing the Soviet films with the French Nouvelle Vague, as well as with British, Polish, and Czechoslovakian New Wave cinemas, the thesis identifies recurring motifs: the centering of young …

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 …

Semi-Peripheral Whiteness In A Global City: Central And Eastern European Women In Dubai, Hana Rubenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone examines how Central and Eastern European (CEE) women navigate professional mobility in Dubai and asks to what extent Dubai enables them to bypass the post-socialist stigma attached to their semi-peripheral European identity. Situated at the intersection of migration studies, gender, and critical scholarship on semi-peripheral whiteness, the study addresses the limited attention paid to CEE women as economic actors outside European contexts, where they are often either absorbed into the category of “Western expatriates” or reduced to highly gendered stereotypes. Grounded in a qualitative, interpretivist approach, the study combines digital discourse analysis of 50 publicly accessible LinkedIn profiles …

Hip-Hop Hypocrisy: How Rap Music Culture And Its Lyrical Obsession With Luxury Fashion Compromises Black America, Jeffrey Ampratwum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black creative thought is often regarded as a secondary means of expression, particularly within a meritocracy like the United States of America. Many Black intellectual thinkers and writers undoubtedly communicated with a style and prose that was widely understood amongst people of the culture. One of these creative communicating styles is the art of hip-hop and the use of language to tell a story. Born out of struggle in the 1970s, this musical derivative from funk, soul, and jazz penetrated the inner city communities and forced the upper class to listen to words from Black artists. Hip-hop initially represented four …

Algorithmic Problems In Automorphic Orbits Of Free Groups, Siobhan B. O'Connor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the fundamental problems in the field of combinatorial group theory is telling when two group presentations represent isomorphic groups. Since applying a free group automorphism to the set of relators of a presentation gives an isomorphic group, we want to be able to quickly decide when looking at a relator whether a given word can be sent to it via an automorphism. We give a hands-on introduction to the automorphisms of free groups using patterns of colored beads. We show that you can make this decision correctly in constant time on average by looking for "orbit-blocking" words that …

Essays On Health And Immigration Policy, Selen Ozdogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two essays in applied microeconomics, each examining how individuals and institutions respond to policy changes. Both essays leverage natural experiments and recent advances in difference-in-differences estimation to identify causal effects. Both also speak to a common theme in public policy: the gap between intended and actual consequences of government intervention, and the role that policy design plays in shaping those consequences.

The first essay examines the impact of state-level e-cigarette excise taxes on nicotine and tobacco exposure among adults aged 18 and older. A central contribution is its use of individual-level panel biomarker data from urine …

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 …

Race And The Enduring Logic Of Exclusion In U.S. Immigration Policy, 1882–2025, Kejda Nikollaj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how immigration law in the United States has historically functioned as an instrument of racial exclusion and argues that this logic continues to shape contemporary policy and enforcement. Although overtly racist laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) or the National Origins Act (1924) have long been repealed, their underlying rationales and structures continue to survive under the modern language of legality, security, and national interest. This study argues that restrictive immigration policies tend to emerge when racial and social insecurities intersect, allowing old hierarchies to be revived under new legal justifications. Through a comparative historical …

Erosion And Accretion: Mobilities Of Sand, People, And Memory At Queer Riis Beach, Jah Elyse Sayers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens, New York, is a vibrant place of queer and trans public-space placemaking—and especially Black and working class queer and trans placemaking. A distinct queer ecology emerges in the interplay of the dynamic movement of the barrier island, queer and trans—especially queer and trans Afro-diasporic—mobilities. This queer ecology, while articulated with, also defies and exceeds logics and workings of private property. In response to a convergence of pressures on Black, queer, trans, and working-class placemaking on the beach site in the 2020s, beachgoers have mobilized longstanding provisional socialities …

G&P2p: A Multi-Source Approach To Grapheme To Phoneme Conversion, Chun-Yi Peng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis introduces G&P2P, a multi-source framework for grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion that integrates side pronunciations from multiple lexical resources. Unlike traditional single-source approaches, G&P2P fuses data from multi-sourced pronunciation dictionaries—including CELEX, PronLex, NETTalk, and WikiPron—through several fusion strategies. The goal is to improve model performance on out-of-vocabulary words through multi-source learning. Experiments were conducted with attentive LSTM, pointer-generator LSTM, and pointer-generator Transformer architectures. Models were trained on combinations of datasets and evaluated using word error rate (WER) across five random seeds.

Results show that fusing expert-curated dictionaries such as CELEX and PronLex consistently improves accuracy, achieving an 11.81-point absolute error …

Gremlin Theory: A Film Art Of Joe Dante, Frank Falisi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis seeks to establish the work of the filmmaker Joe Dante as a catalyzing and anarchic force let loose inside larger, dumber superstructures: linear narrativity, Hollywood, America, etc. It works to read the genre films he worked on—many of them made as popular entertainment for mainstream movie studios—as moments of actual subversion, allocating status quo (studio system) resources to create a biting-back against American imperial norms in the lingua franca of Marx and the Marx Brothers: gummy leisure-seeking stupidity and Gremlin transformation. This thesis seeks to argue that to understand Dante’s work is to understand pop transfiguration itself. This …

An Investigation Of The Impact Of Privacy On Sexual And Reproductive Health Using Reports On The 2010 Earthquake In Haiti, Jillian E. Myers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2010, a massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the capital city of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, causing great destruction of infrastructure and the devastating loss of about 316,000 lives and over a million homes. The earthquake destroyed agricultural production and clean water sources, causing severe resource scarcity along with the overcrowding in the relief camps. Following the earthquake, international aid organizations flooded into Haiti in an effort to help provide immediate relief. The relief efforts were unprepared and lacked coordination among each other to efficiently implement the needed aid services. Without strategic planning to ensure all people’s needs are met, women and …

Kanak-Ish Misfits: Queer Imaginaries, Racialized Borders, And The Politics Of Care In Berlin, Germany, Faruk Seref

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines queer Muslim experiences of border politics, racialization, and care in Berlin, Germany. By formulating bordering as a domineering and oppressive practice of boundary-making, I study how global bordering mechanisms shape and disrupt structures of care, caring, and being cared for. With an intersectional focus on race, gender, sexuality, and sex, I argue that borders are simultaneously materialized and challenged in varying localities, including the nightclub, the queer scene, the diasporic neighborhoods, and households. Ultimately, viewing collective care as fundamental to survival, healing, resistance, and building non-punitive lifeworlds, I theorize the counter-hegemonic practices of queers of color through …

Mapping Nucleosome Stability: Linking Oncogenic Structural Alterations To Long-Range Allosteric Communication, Augustine C. Onyema

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The nucleosome core particle (NCP) is essential for chromatin structure and function, serving as the fundamental unit of eukaryotic chromatin. Oncogenic mutations in core histones disrupt chromatin dynamics, altering DNA repair and transcription processes. How DNA communicates with histones, and how this information propagates through the histone, has been suggested to be a cooperative process. Here, I investigate the molecular consequences of two mutations, H2BE76K and H4R92T, using 36 µs of all-atom molecular dynamics simulations on Anton2. I also characterize the kinetic correlation within histone/DNA domains via conditional activity (CONDACT) using the dihedral angle as our degrees of …

Riding Two Cities: A Data Visualization Capstone Comparing Nyc's Bmt Subway And Tokyo's Yamanote Line, Andreina R. Abreu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Every weekday, millions of people trust two radically different urban rail systems to get them where they need to go. New York City’s Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) group threads through the boroughs in a branching web of eight lines. Tokyo’s Yamanote Line runs as a single, closed loop around the capital’s core. Both systems move enormous volumes of people through dense, high-demand environments, but they do it in fundamentally different ways, and they share very different amounts of information about how they’re doing it. According to federal reporting, MTA New York City Transit served over 1.1 billion unlinked passenger trips in …

Electromagnetic Counterparts To Active Galactic Nucleus Disk-Embedded Binary Black Hole Mergers, Emily Mcpike

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The accretion disks of active galactic nuclei (AGN) are promising environments for producing binary black hole (BBH) mergers, which have been detected via gravitational waves (GW) with LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK). BBH mergers embedded in AGN disks are unique among GW formation channels in their generic ability to produce electromagnetic (EM) counterparts, via interactions between the merger remnant and the surrounding disk gas (though these are not always observable). While such mergers represent valuable multi-messenger sources, the lack of predictive statistical models in existing literature currently limits our ability to select possible EM counterparts with GW detections in archival data and in …

Variational Methods For Semilinear Pdes With Dirac Singularities, Samuel J. Magill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation utilizes a variational framework for semilinear elliptic equations in two dimensions with Dirac measure data. The central objects of study are equations of the form −ΔU = f(U) + Σ_j=1^N α_jδ_pj on bounded Lipschitz domains Ω ⊂ ℝ² with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition, and on a flat torus 𝕋², where α_j is positive for the Dirichlet setting and α_j is negative on the torus. Solutions are obtained by minimizing the restriction of an energy functional to an order interval determined by explicit sub- and supersolutions; the Euler–Lagrange equation is recovered …

A Predictive Coding Account Of Spatial Working Memory Following Prophylactic Levetiracetam Administration Prior To Traumatic Brain Injury, Omeima Mutwali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) symptom prevention and remediation is an important area of research that would benefit vulnerable groups, including active-duty and veteran soldiers. These patients can sustain penetrative forces in fields of combat or in training, which result in focal lesions that trigger inflammatory and degenerative processes in the brain. Both primary and secondary injuries are associated with changes to cognition, behavior and affective state. This disease poses increased risk of epileptogenesis, as well. Given these outcomes, prior research has evaluated levetiracetam (LEV) as a prophylactic treatment for seizures, cognitive deficits and negative emotionality. LEV acts as a presynaptic …

The Exception: Refugee Camps And Governmental Control, Kyle L. Mans

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone study examines the relationship between governmental control and the state of exception in refugee camps. This connection is analyzed by examining the control mechanisms employed by the nation state to erode the sovereignty of the individual within a refugee camp space. This study also examines how humanitarian organizations contribute to the perpetuation of the state of exception and how their involvement facilitates further state control. Included in this capstone are two case studies that examine both Libya and Kenya as examples of governmental control on the sovereignty of refugees and migrants. This research contributes to the overall understanding …

Policing Sex Trafficking: 'They’Re Never Taught, You Know', Anila S. Duro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research shows that victims of sex trafficking are most likely to first come in contact with the police (Baldwin et al, 2011; Twigg, 2017) and at times police have not been able to categorize cases of prostitution as trafficking even when trafficking elements were very clear (Dank et al, 2017; Dempsey, 2017; Farrell & Cronin, 2015). Despite the legal definition of trafficking, the terms prostitution, sex work, and sex trafficking are sometimes used interchangeably by law enforcement, whereas at other times, these words refer to different sets of circumstances and have different criminalization outcomes.  Research in this area is limited …

Essays On Behavioral Aspects Of Retail Operations, Ceren Gultekin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation combines a structured literature review on availability signaling in retail with two analytical chapters on inventory disclosure. The literature review incorporates the design and key insights of a systematic review and identifies directions for future research. Inventory disclosure is a form of availability signaling through which retailers strategically communicate stock levels to influence consumer buy-now-or-wait decisions. To mitigate strategic purchase deferrals, retailers may share low stock to create urgency or mask high stock to prevent consumers from relying on abundance. Despite its importance for profitability, academic findings and industry practices vary widely, ranging from consistent sharing to consistent …

The Evolution Of U.S. Geoeconomic Grand Strategy Toward China And South Korea’S Strategic Space: A Comparative Analysis Of Neomercantilist Types In The Trump And Biden Administrations, Hyungbo Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the evolutionary trajectory of U.S. geoeconomic grand strategy toward China from the inauguration of the first Trump administration in 2017, through the Biden administration, to the second Trump administration launched in 2025, while exploring South Korea’s survival strategies in response. The findings confirm that U.S. foreign economic policy has radicalized into "Expanded Malevolent Neomercantilism," which moves beyond simple protectionism to weaponize global economic networks in the name of national security and exploit even allies.

According to the analysis, the U.S. progressed from the "Malevolent Neomercantilism" of Trump's first term, which focused on trade deficits, to the "Developmental …

Unfreezing Language: A Decolonial Reframing Of Translanguaging Pedagogies In English As A New Language & Dual Language Bilingual Education Settings, Cristian R. Solorza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This qualitative multi-case study examines how elementary teachers in English as a New Language (ENL) and Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) settings conceptualize, implement, and reflect upon translanguaging pedagogies, with particular attention to translanguaging rings as tools for language differentiation. Grounded in a rearticulation of language as a dynamic, socially, politically, and historically constructed subject and object, this study challenges monoglossic ideologies that position named languages as bounded systems at the center of language education. Instead, it centers students’ lived, embodied, and agentive language practices as foundational to language learning and to their participation as knowledge producers in ENL and …