VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Repatriating Romance: Politics of Textual Transmission in Early Modern France

This dissertation reveals the central role that transcultural literary exchange plays in the imagining of a continuous French literary history. The traditional narrative of French literary history describes the vernacular canon as built on the imitation of the ancients. However, this dissertation demonstrates that Early Modern French canon formation also depends, to a startling extent, on claims of inter-vernacular literary theft. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a central preoccupation of French authors, translators, and literary theorists was the repatriation of the romance genre. Romance was portrayed as a cornerstone of French literary patrimony that Italian and Spanish authors had stolen. The repatriation of individual romance texts entailed a skillful co-opting of the language of humanist philology, alongside practices of translation and continuation usually associated with the medieval period. By looking at romance translation as part of a project of national canon formation, this dissertation sheds new light on the role that chivalric romance plays in national and international politics. We see that during this period, chivalric romance emerges as a French nationalist alternative to humanist history./nThe four chapters of the dissertation trace the phenomenon of romance repatriation from its origins in French humanist theories of genre, through its expression in translations of Spanish and Italian romance. In Chapter One, the Renaissance reception of the medieval Pseudo-Turpin is read alongside theories of genre by humanists like Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay, in order to illustrate the tension between two humanist projects: the philological reexamination of historical source texts, and the construction of national canons. In Chapters Two and Three, I trace the use of translation to transform foreign romances into French nationalist histories, looking at French translations of Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. And finally, in Chapter Four I look at how the use of translation as a tool of nationalist annexation broadens beyond romance source texts. This dynamic comes to characterize French-Spanish literary exchange in general, as we see in French translations of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and a Spanish translation of Alain-René Lesage’s picaresque Gil Blas. By showing that translation played a central role in the construction of the national canon during the Early Modern period, the dissertation challenges myths about the linguistic and literary origins of the French nation that remain potent today.

Advisor: Hampton, Timothy
Working Algorithms: Software Automation and the Future of Work

While some argue that the rise of software automation threatens workers with obsolescence, others assert that new complementarities between humans and software systems are likely to emerge. This study draws on 19 months of participant-observation research at a software firm to investigate how relations between workers and technology evolved over three phases of the company’s development./nThe empirical chapters proceed in chronological order, tracking the temporal trajectory of the firm. The company’s strategic direction was guided by its pursuit of venture capital. Executives’ priorities frequently shifted in response to investors’ expectations. Each priority generated new problems that I call “lags” to denote how managers’ vision outpaced technological and organizational realities. At each stage of the company’s development, managers deployed particular types of labor, located in San Francisco, the Philippines, and Las Vegas, to address these lags. As they labored in and around AllDone’s digital machinery, workers at each site affixed particular meanings to their labor and their place within the company./nI find two forms of human-software complementarity: computational labor that supports or stands in for software algorithms, and emotional labor aimed at helping users adapt to software systems. Instead of perfecting software algorithms that would progressively push people out of the production process, managers continually reconfigured assemblages of software and human helpers, developing new forms of organization with a dynamic relation to technology. The findings suggest how the dynamism of the organizations in which software algorithms are produced and implemented will contribute to labor’s enduring relevance in the digital age.

Advisor: Burawoy, Michael
Ecology and evolution of the mammalian gut microbiota

Symbiotic microbial communities can affect the health and fitness of the host. Recent studies in humans and mouse models have demonstrated previously unknown roles for the gut microbiota in mammalian digestion, immunity, behavior, and development. These findings suggest that the compositional variation in gut microbiotas may play a fundamental role in host biology. However, the determinants and implications of the gut microbiota in natural populations of mammals are less well understood. My dissertation aims to identify genetic and environmental factors shaping variation in the gut microbiota and to understand the role of gut microbiota in mammalian biology. First, I reviewed studies over the last decade that show links between variation in symbiotic microbiota and variation in host phenotype in natural populations of mammals to motivate the work. Next, I found obesity-associated gut microbial composition tend to be more prevalent in humans living in colder environments consistent with the ecological pattern known as Bergmann’s rule. The results suggest a link between the gut microbiota and climatic adaptation. To further investigate whether the pattern observed in humans is general, I conducted a series of studies where I combined field observations and laboratory experiments to investigate the determinants of the gut microbiota and their roles in environmental adaptation using natural populations of house mice (Mus musculus) as a model system. I have characterized the gut microbiota of wild house mice using 16S amplicon sequencing within individuals’ gastrointestinal tract and between individuals’ cecum across two altitudinal and three latitudinal transects across the Americas. Microbiotas of the lower gastrointestinal tract showed greater individual differences compared to the upper gastrointestinal tract. The individual differences in the cecal microbiota were explained by differences in host genetic distance independent of geographic distance. Several gene-bacteria associations were identified from a microbiome genome-wide association study (mGWAS) using exome sequences. The results from the altitudinal and latitudinal transects suggest that differences in partial pressure of oxygen and host body mass may cause changes in gut microbiota. Beneficial functions of the gut microbiota regulating blood pressure at high altitudes and facilitating energy harvest at high latitudes were proposed. Many of the findings here have been replicated in other mammalian systems, including humans. Together, the results suggest general mechanisms governing the assembly and function of the mammalian gut microbiota.

Advisor: Nachman, Michael W
Real-time Communication Systems For Automation Over Wireless: Enabling Future Interactive Tech

The density and frequency of interaction between society and technology is increasing and this presents us with opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods, and also to address the inequities in our society holistically. The Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G wireless com- munication technologies are the future technologies that envision to bring us closer to these opportunities. These technologies leverage the ubiquitous sensing, actuation, and comput- ing capabilities to enable smart devices to perform interesting tasks and to gain knowledge about the environment. These may include futuristic healthcare systems, affordable preci- sion agriculture systems, smart energy-efficient cities, and advanced flexible manufacturing. However, the present understanding of wireless communication is not enough to get us to this future./nIn this dissertation, we look at designing wireless communication frameworks for interac- tive applications like drone swarms, and industrial automation that require fast and reliable communication. We focus on designing frameworks that make wireless communication highly reliable while also maintaining the latency requirements of the systems being targeted. This is the missing link needed to leverage the power of wireless communication for the next generation of interactive applications./nOne of the key contributions of this thesis is the design of cooperative communication based protocol frameworks that leverage a combination of diversity techniques to achieve the target reliability and latency. The framework uses spatial diversity to combat multipath channel fading and repetitions in time and frequency to shield against unmodeled error events. We analyze these protocols using the communication-theoretic delay-limited-capacity framework and consider their sensitivity to different modeling assumptions./nAnother key contribution of this thesis is an in-depth exploration of the dynamics of wireless channels in the context of ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). We revisit some standard concepts such as coherence time and question whether some of the modeling assumptions made in the context of cellular and WLAN communications make sense in the context of URLLC. We find that our cooperative communication frameworks are robust to the nominal dynamic channel models, especially spatial dependence. However, events such as synchronization mismatch or sudden change in the channels due to shadow- causing objects need to be protected against and therefore we build in frequency and time margins./nThe final contribution of this thesis is bringing together the temporal model of channel dynamics and machine learning to build intelligent relay selection strategies. This essentially provides the reliability needed by smartly selecting a small set of relays instead of relying on using every single relay available to combat fading. Finally, we present some preliminary experimental findings that pave the way to making these systems practical.

Advisor: Sahai, Anant
Political Diversity and the Legal Academy: Three Empirical Studies

Law and politics are inseparably connected, with numerous studies showing that politics plays an influential role in legal decision-making. And law schools primarily exist to transmit and produce knowledge. So the political demographics of the legal academia has the potential to significantly influence the production of legal knowledge in the United States. Yet while previous studies have shown that the political demographics of the legal academy tilt strongly in one direction, no one has yet sought to understand what some of the mechanisms might be that cause this disparity. Further, no one has attempted to document the production of knowledge in an increasingly partisan area of the law: religion./nThis dissertation aims to begin filling those gaps. It does so through three empirical studies. The first tests several hypotheses as to why there are so few conservative or libertarian law professors: the Brain Hypothesis (lack of intellectual ability), the Greed Hypothesis (a desire for better paying jobs than academia), the Interest Hypotheses (a lack of interest in academic pursuits), and the Discrimination Hypothesis (discrimination based on political orientation). It does so by examining the publication and citation rates of law professors at the 16 highest-ranked law schools in the country. Using statistical matching techniques, the study examines a unique dataset to find that conservative/libertarian professors publish and are cited at nearly double the rate as their peers, a statistically significant difference. These findings are more consistent with a story of discrimination than the other potential hypotheses./nThe second study leverages models of discrimination developed by Gary Becker and Kenneth Arrow to measure the “rank gap” in law school hiring based on political orientation discrimination. The study draws on a unique of all newly-hired law professors from 2001-2010, and finds, using statistical matching techniques, that conservative/libertarian law professors are hired law schools averaging 12-13 ranks lower (i.e., less prestigious) than their liberal peers, after controlling for other predictors of the ranking of the law school one is initially hired at./nFinally, the third study examines in a type of quantitative intellectual history the portrayal, or treatment, of religion in legal scholarship over a watershed 15-year period as relates to religion in American law, politics and society: 1998-2012. The study finds that religion is increasingly treated as something that is problematic, as compared to something positive, that not all religions are treated the same with some getting more favorable treatment in legal scholarship than others.

Advisor: Plaut, Victoria C.
McCrary, Justin
Achievement Goals in Context: Exploring Goal Orientation in a Cross-Cultural Sample of Gifted Adolescents

This study examined four types of achievement goals (mastery goals, performance approach normative goals, performance approach appearance goals, and performance avoidance goals) in academically talented adolescents from the US (n = 526), China and Taiwan (n = 33), Singapore (n = 20), and South Korea (n = 23). Over the past 30 years, researchers in the US have moved toward increasingly nuanced understandings of achievement goals; however, achievement goals have not been measured with the same precision in cross-cultural and gifted populations. Furthermore, overrepresentation of Asian American students in U.S. gifted programs raises questions about the role of culture within the US and cross-culturally. After a detailed overview of historical and conceptual changes to the achievement goal construct, this exploratory study used existing data to determine whether there are differences in the prevalence of these goals across samples./nUsing two forced-choice measures of achievement goals (Task-choice Goal Measure and Questionnaire Goal Choice), mastery goals were most prevalent in all national samples and all U.S. ethnic groups. Performance avoidance goals were reported most by students in the US and least by students in China and Taiwan, although East Asian American students in the US reported performance avoidance goals at an even higher rate than did the U.S. sample overall. Performance approach appearance goals were largely absent in the samples from South Korea and Singapore. Among ethnic groups in the US, performance avoidance goals were most common among students who belonged to groups typically overrepresented in gifted populations and least common among underrepresented groups. Differences by sample and by achievement goal choice were examined in five theorized correlates of achievement goals: perceived challenge, self-reported learning, course enjoyment, perceived competence in the summer class, and perceived competence at their home schools. Course enjoyment was highest among students with mastery goals. Implications for measurement of achievement goals, future cross-cultural research in on motivational constructs, and differences in the cultural context of learning among U.S. ethnic groups are discussed.

Advisor: Worrell, Frank C
Unfolding Buddhism: Communal Scripts, Localized Translations, and the Work of the Dying in Cambodian Chanted Leporellos

This dissertation examines Cambodian leporellos, or folded-paper manuscripts, that contain chants for Buddhist end-of-life rites. Grounded in a catalog that details the provenance, materiality, and content of 70 such leporellos, as well as transcriptions, editions, and translations of the 195 Pali, Khmer, and Siamese texts they contain, this study reveals a corpus of chants that illuminates Cambodian Buddhism in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This textual corpus and the paratexts furnished by the leporellos themselves combine to show how Cambodians made Buddhist chants locally relevant for the end of life. By reading these data alongside Siamese, Lao, and Lanna parallels, this dissertation also highlights Cambodia’s participation in a broader Khmer-Tai Buddhist world./nPart I presents the social function of Cambodian leporellos and their texts for chanting to the sick, the dying, and the dead. Chapter 2 argues that these manuscripts are communal objects, circulated between scribes and donors, annotators and performers, and monastics and laypeople. Chapter 3 outlines how they unfold a spectrum of melodic chants, including those recited for deathbed rites and for the postmortem consecration of buddha images. Chapter 4 shows how their sequences, illuminations, and annotations, like those of their Siamese counterparts, create scripts for performance./nPart II analyzes the translation processes by which texts in the leporello corpus became localized in Cambodia. Chapter 5 focuses on how some Sanskrit incantations were remade into Pali protective chants. Chapter 6 engages the grammatical techniques for precise and cogent translations in bilingual Pali-Khmer and Pali-Tai prose texts. Chapter 7 examines the ways translators crafted locally appropriate yet equally performable Khmer poems from Pali and Tai sources./nPart III considers the obligations placed upon those approaching the end of life, as witnessed in Khmer chants in verse. Chapter 8 focuses on poems that invite the dying to reflect on the inevitability of death, the process of dying itself, and what happens immediately after. Chapter 9 explores a second set of obligations for the dying, namely the absolution of evil karma and the aspiration for a more fortunate future existence, particularly for buddhahood itself.

Advisor: von Rospatt, Alexander
Elucidating Liver Fluke Transmission Dynamics: Synthesizing Lab, Field, and Modeling Methods

Opisthorchiasis, infection with the Southeast Asian liver fluke Opisthorchis viverrini, and liver fluke-associated cholangiocarcinoma cause significant disease burden in Southeast Asia. Northeast Thailand is a particular region where this disease is a public health priority, infecting over 50% of the population in some villages and causing 5000 excess cancer cases per year. People acquire the parasite by eating raw or undercooked fish, a deeply embedded local cultural and culinary tradition. Health education is essential to preventing and controlling the disease, but the environment also plays a major role in enabling and catalyzing transmission between hosts. An emphasis on disease ecology and the environmental determinants of transmission is useful and necessary for public health understanding and for informing and designing future treatment and control interventions. This dissertation takes that approach, investigating each disease host and linkage for the role of the environment in influencing transmission./nChapter 1 describes and contextualizes liver fluke transmission and why it matters, introducing Lawa Lake and the Lawa Project, which are the background for the context and data examined herein. Chapter 2 presents lab, field, and modeling results related to infection and ecology of the intermediate host Bithynia snails and cyprinid fish. Chapter 3 introduces and presents results from the single-village mathematical model simulating transmission in six village clusters around Lawa Lake. Chapter 4 discusses the role of reservoir hosts (cats and dogs) in the transmission cycle, adds them to the model framework, and simulates the impact of regular praziquantel treatment on long-term infection prevalence. Chapter 5 introduces the rainfall-runoff hydrology model, whose output is incorporated into a metapopulation disease transmission model to connect the six village clusters around Lawa Lake, and the impacts of connectivity and upstream villages are studied and discussed. Chapter 6 concludes with some comments on engineering and public health perspectives, limitations, progress, and future directions for liver fluke and neglected tropical disease control.

Advisor: Spear, Robert C
The Market for Ethics: Human Subjects Research Oversight in the United States and Canada

An estimated 2.5 million Americans participate in clinical research annually. Participation exposes human subjects to significant physical risks including death, as it often involves ingesting or introducing drugs and devices to the body that have not yet been proven safe or effective. In the US, a set of policies around the regulation of biomedical research emerged as a politically and contextually contingent result in the post-war years. The centerpiece for oversight of human subjects research was the local, hospital- or university-based IRB. It emerged at the height of organized medicine’s political and social power and derived from a logic of professional autonomy./nMuch has changed. Today, 80% of clinical research in the US occurs outside the academic medical context, in community settings such as physicians’ offices and freestanding research clinics. These research studies are overseen by thousands of IRBs registered with the federal government, some of which are for-profit businesses. The world for which the oversight regime was built – trained clinical researchers submitting their proposed research to the scrutiny of their trained colleagues in a university setting – no longer exists. In spite of the dramatic changes in who is carrying out research and the associated changes in their motivations for doing so, the regulations governing IRBs and clinical research oversight remain stable./nLittle empirical scholarship exists regarding how the IRB oversight mechanism is operating now that the research landscape has changed so substantially. Little scholarship empirically charts the entire ecology of IRBs, which now include IRBs in diverse settings such as non-teaching community hospitals, health systems, government facilities, universities and teaching hospitals, as well as independent, central, and commercial IRBs. There exists no full accounting of how many IRBs there are, of which types, in which locations – and few analytical accounts of variations between IRBs based on organizational or environmental factors./nThis dissertation reports on the results of an original qualitative research study that involved interviews with IRB members and administrative professionals from commercial IRBs, nonprofit healthcare organization IRBs, academic and government IRBs in the US and Canada. The chapters explore various aspects of the current IRB ecology, in light of drastic changes to the institutional and economic environments in which clinical research occurs over recent decades. After a brief introduction, the second chapter explores IRB professionals’ experiences with, and responses to, the legal and regulatory environment in which these professionals and their organizations operate. The third chapter explores variation between types of IRBs, identifying governance gaps and best practices. The fourth chapter explores the attitudes of IRB professionals toward the commercialization of research ethics review in the United States and Canada. The fifth chapter provides some conclusions and steps for future research.

Advisor: Keller, Ann