Digital Commons Network^™

The Hope Dionysos (After Augustus): A Post-Actian Reading Of Dionysian Imagery, Jane Horman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the center of the Roman court at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York stands an almost seven-foot-tall statue of an androgynous looking figure, leaning on a smaller statue of a woman. This piece, formally known as Statue of Dionysos Leaning on a Female Figure, has been nicknamed the Hope Dionysos for both the archaic statue he is leaning on, as well as the family to whose collection he belonged for many years. However, in its day, the statue occupied a complicated place in Roman culture. This paper will examine the ways in which Dionysos, specifically through …

Elite Manipulation Of Accountability Institutions: A Comparative Analysis Of Cicig And Maccih, Kevin E. Contreras

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Strong accountability institutions are expected to limit elite manipulation. Yet elites continue to manipulate them. This paper shows that strong accountability institutions are insufficient to prevent elite manipulation. A comparative analysis of Honduras (MACCIH) and Guatemala (CICIG) traces the relationship between institutional strength and elite manipulation. The findings indicate that this relationship is contingent on context. Preventing manipulation would require accountability institutions to sustain greater mobilization and institutional leverage than elites. Accountability institutions alone are insufficient to achieve this condition.

Trans-Cyber Cinema: Digital Embodiment In Science-Fiction Films, Sophia R. Schrock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis aims to define the trans-cyber genre within cinema. By looking retroactively at a selection of nine films made across various decades and countries, this genre connects these films through their visualization and thematization of both trans and cyber embodiments, whereby the trans-cyber being emerges. Before the cinematic analysis and explanation of the three generic conventions selected for this thesis – transformation of body/gender; altered reality, memory, and temporality; and, radical death – the two intertwining theoretical frameworks will be established. This includes a brief summary of applicable transgender theory, and an introduction to cyborg theory (using Donna Haraway’s …

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) …

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. …

Contra La Guerra Contra Las Madres: Una Revisión Feminista De La Figura De La Madre En Las Obras De Gabriela Wiener, Marta Dillon Y Las “Madres De Soacha”, Fatima Velez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation critically examines how the figure of the mother appears across a set of contemporary Latin American cultural productions. Through the analysis of the work of Peruvian writer and performer Gabriela Wiener; the literary, journalistic, and cinematic production of Argentine writer and activist Marta Dillon; and the collective work of the Colombian human rights group known as the Mothers of Soacha—particularly the participation of three of its members in the play Antígonas, tribunal de mujeres—this study proposes the concept of a “war against mothers.” In dialogue with the term coined by Rita Segato (2016), “war against women,” this …

A Hot Topic:
Congressional Polarization And Climate Change, Mercedes R.P. Wilby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scholars offer competing explanations for how congressional polarization develops and operates. The literature variously points to shifting agendas, procedural change, or member adaptation or replacement. In this project, I study how congressional polarization occurs by asking what mechanisms account for the emergence of climate policy polarization. Climate policy is a useful test case to evaluate these competing theories. As a relatively low-salience, highly technical issue that is neither new nor inherently ideological, it is not an obvious candidate for deep partisan division. Yet climate policy has become sharply polarized, extending partisan disagreement even to the underlying science.

In order to …

Exploring The Influence Of Ear-Level Devices On Adult Perceptions Across Professional, Social, And Educational Settings, Lucia R. Berry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: The hearing aid market is continuously advancing to address the increasing prevalence of hearing loss and the barriers to obtaining hearing aids. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Apple AirPods Pro 2 devices to function as over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. This is an alternative option to manage hearing difficulties; however, it presents secondary complications related to headphone use and stigma.

Objective: Limited research is available regarding attitudes towards individuals wearing Apple AirPods Pro 2 as OTC hearing aids. This study intended to analyze if people’s pre-established perceptions of Apple AirPods shift once they learn they are being used …

Access Denied: Financial Aid Inequalities And The Economic Impact On Daca Students, Teresa D. Jordan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project argues that financial aid policies in the United States create a system of structural inequality that systematically denies Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients’ equitable access to higher education. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship, federal policy data, and large-scale survey research, this paper demonstrates how the categorical exclusion from federal financial aid, inconsistent in-state tuition laws, and recurring DACA renewal fees form an interlocking barrier with profound psychological and economic consequences for a population that is deeply integrated into American society. These compounding barriers force students into a framework of constrained rationality, distorting their academic major choices …

How Temporal Integration And Complexity Drive Musical Enjoyment, August Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Music is a type of aesthetic stimulus that unfolds dynamically over time. Combining approaches from previous research on musical preferences and research on spatial integration as a driver of visual aesthetic appreciation, we investigated how the integration of musical percepts over time influences listener enjoyment and the level of agreement between the enjoyment ratings of each listener. We used a DNN tool to quantify temporal dependencies in 32 music clips and also computed complexity scores for them. Subjects listened to each music clip while using a rotating dial to provide a continuous enjoyment rating, changing the dial’s position at the …

Scaling Limits Of Critical Observables Through The High Dimensional Incipient Infinite Cluster, Pranav Chinmay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We give a general construction of the incipient infinite cluster in high dimensional percolation, and use it as a decoupling tool to rigorize geometric heuristics for analyzing the asymptotics of observables at criticality. Examples include demonstrating the limiting distribution of the chemical distance and full-strength asymptotics for k-point functions, which constitute foundational inputs for scaling limit results associated to critical clusters.

Computational Insights Into Nucleosome Dynamics In Epigenetics Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations, Rutika Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nucleosome core particles (NCP) are the building blocks that form a highly organized and compact chromatin structure. Nucleosomes package DNA in the nucleus of eukaryotic cells. The NCP consists of about 147 base pairs of DNA wrapped around the histone octamer, with 1.65 superhelical turns in a left-handed manner. The histone octamer is composed of two copies of H3, H4, H2A, and H2B. Together with histone H1 and linker DNA, they further assemble into a higher-order chromatin structure. The nucleosome complex is stabilized by electrostatic interactions between positively charged histone residues and the negatively charged DNA backbone. To effectively access …

Twitteratura: Digital Social Reading And Active Reception Of Literary Texts In The Context Of Italian Contemporary Literature, Iuri Moscardi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Digital Social Reading (DSR) as a novel mode of literary engagement, focusing on the Italian project Twitteratura, a series of social reading experiments conducted on Twitter (2012–2016) and later on the Betwyll app. The research situates Twitteratura within the intersection of Reader-Response Theory, Digital Humanities, Reception Studies, and Sociology of Literature, demonstrating how digital environments reshape the act of reading and interpretation. Through detailed analyses of four DSR projects centered on major twentieth-century Italian authors—Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Natalia Ginzburg—this dissertation argues that Twitteratura provides a concrete, data-rich demonstration of Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response …

Implicit Attitudes Toward Hearing Aid Visibility: Conspicuous Versus Inconspicuous Hearing Aid Colors, Orly R. Ames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hearing aid stigma remains a significant barrier to treatment uptake, with device visibility frequently identified as a contributing factor. Although prior research has examined visibility in relation to hearing aid size and style, the role of color as a distinct aesthetic dimension has not been systematically investigated. The present study assessed whether hearing aid color affects implicit and explicit attitudes toward hearing aids and whether such evaluations differ across contexts. Twenty-six adults who were not current hearing aid users participated in an online quantitative multi-method study consisting of an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report questionnaires. The IAT measured implicit …

Enhancing Ecological Validity In Speech-In-Noise Testing: Integrating Virtual Reality For A Multisensory Audiological Experience, Paulina Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the remarkable advances in hearing healthcare technology, the speech recognition tests used in routine clinical audiological assessment have remained essentially the same for decades.  Monosyllabic word recognition tests in quiet, such as the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 (NU-6; Tillman & Carhart, 1966), have served as the audiology field’s default measure of speech understanding.  Modern speech-in-noise (SIN) tests, such as the QuickSIN (Killion et al., 2004), have emerged, yet they remain auditory-only, leaving an unignorable gap between what clinical tests measure and how patients communicate in daily life.  The present study examined whether pairing a standard SIN test …

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 …

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 …

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? …

Measuring Islamic Republic Propaganda In Western Media Coverage Of Iran: A Computational Framework, Leila Habibi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Detecting propaganda is fundamentally difficult: effective propaganda must simultaneously conceal persuasive intent while achieving persuasive effect, which means that sophisticated propagandistic discourse necessarily occupies the ambiguous middle of a rhetorical spectrum rather than its obvious extremes. This thesis defines this property as the dual constraint problem and argues that it poses two challenges for the binary classification framing that dominates propaganda detection in Natural Language Processing (NLP). First, propaganda by definition does not come with clear labels: no propaganda arm willingly accepts the designation, so reliable ground truth does not exist at the source. Second, because the producer is actively …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …