VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Chemical Diasporas: Legal, Cultural, and Aesthetic Performances of Agent Orange

From 1961 to 1971, the United States military and its allies sprayed a chemical compound, popularly known as Agent Orange, across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during the wars in Southeast Asia. The compound was described by the U.S. government as an herbicide crafted to defoliate dense mangrove jungles to increase military visibility for the U.S. and its allies. However, the manufacturing of Agent Orange resulted in an unintentional byproduct—a toxic dioxin whose effects on human and nonhuman bodies continues today. As both a chemical and a concept, Agent Orange has shaped perspectives on disability in Vietnam and abroad, has inspired the creation of aesthetic and cultural forms of protest, and continues to produce new forms of living after exposure./nThis dissertation studies the performative effects of Agent Orange through an analysis of visual art, dance, music videos, autobiographies, and social movements that have emerged in response to the chemical compound’s transnational dispersal. Agent Orange has become a metonym for the continued presence of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia, a term that provokes affective abjection on the part of observers and bystanders, and also a topic of political mobilization that unites U.S. veterans alongside Vietnamese nationals in their call for reparative justice. Often, the rhetorical meaning of Agent Orange exceeds its material effects. This research consequently intervenes in cultural discourses and recent academic scholarship about toxicity in three critical ways: first, by using performance studies to center disability frameworks and disabled perspectives in order to disrupt the equivocation of all disabled and nonnormative bodies in Vietnam with wartime trauma. Second, by contextualizing Agent Orange not as an isolated phenomenon, located in a single nation-state because of a single war, but rather to highlight its circulation through capital investment and legal systems in order to demonstrate how the compound continues to affect multiple populations and environments in unexpected ways. Third, by discussing Agent Orange as a biopolitical substance—that is, a chemical that performs life-giving, life-altering, as well as life-taking acts—to highlight lives still lived after exposure.

Advisor: Kwan, SanSan
Entrepreneurs of Disorder: Gangsters, Revolutionaries, and Collaborators during the Decolonization of Vietnam (1945-1955)

This study centers on the rise and fall of a major political-military force called the Bình Xuyên. At the end of World War II, members of the Saigon underworld, seeking to thwart French reoccupation, organized local toughs, farmers, laborers, fugitives, and military deserters into a confederation of armed bands. Between 1945 and 1955, the Bình Xuyên played a key military and political role on both sides of the First Indochina War—first as part of the communist-led Việt Minh insurgency, then as an anticommunist bulwark against it. In its latter role under the auspices of the French military, the Bình Xuyên fielded an army of over three thousand, gained command of the national police, cultivated a six-thousand-member political mass organization, and built a lucrative business portfolio—all in the heart of Saigon-Cholon. As insurgent and pacifier, the group harnessed its military capacity, economic resources, and patriotic reputation to vie for political power. In the process, these erstwhile criminals came to assume the mantle of nationalism and the guise of the state./nConventionally, the study of modern Vietnam has focused on elite politics and narratives of collaboration and resistance. This study in contrast decenters traditional protagonists, complicates familiar cleavages, and in turn reframes 20th century Vietnamese political history. I trace the unheralded rise of colonial-era violence entrepreneurs—anh chị, as they were called—who came to reconfigure political and state power in the postcolony. I foreground the convergence between the political and criminal milieux, as common criminals often mingled with nationalists of all stripes inside colonial prisons and beyond. This political-criminal nexus was one of the key legacies of French colonial power./nThis project aims to explain what made the Bình Xuyên’s path to power possible and how this new reality shaped political authority, governance, and war. The first part of the dissertation, comprising two chapters, examines the transformation of gangsters into insurgents. I show that links forged between nationalist activists and criminals in the face of colonial repression laid the foundation for the political-criminal nexus of the post-1945 period. The civil war between competing nationalists amplified the importance of violence specialists. I argue that pre-1945 relations with both communist and anticommunist activists played a significant role in the empowerment and legitimation of the Bình Xuyên as a nationalist force. The second part of the dissertation, made up of three chapters, tracks the Bình Xuyên’s partnership with the non-communist Vietnamese state and its French backers. As the group cleared the city and the countryside of insurgents, it grew rapidly in manpower, wealth, and influence through clever politicking and brute force. I show how the Bình Xuyên steadily encroached on and ultimately assumed key state functions as it exposed intrastate competition and elevated its own political profile.

Advisor: Zinoman, Peter
From the Wartburg to Nuremberg: Richard Wagner, the Middle High German Blütezeit, and Early Modernity

The composer Richard Wagner was an avid reader of pre-modern literature and scholarly studies of the Middle Ages and the Reformation era; nearly all of his mature operas reflect this lifelong interest. This dissertation examines his reception of the Middle High German courtly literary tradition and its after-echoes in Early New High German textual culture in two of his operas, Tannhäuser (1845) and Die Meistersinger (1868). Chapter 1 argues that whereas Tannhäuser represents an experimental stage in Wagner’s medievalism, one that incorporates a number of ideas Wagner had encountered in his early explorations of Germanic philology, Die Meistersinger demonstrates a remarkably nuanced understanding of the differences between thirteenth- and sixteenth-century poetic idiom and style. The same chapter also discusses the barriers, both linguistic and historical, that have for many decades stood in the way of a more philologically informed assessment of Wagner’s reception of the sixteenth century, and to a lesser extent, his reception of the High Middle Ages. Chapter 2 looks at broad trends and developments within the field of Germanic philology in the 1800s, with a particular focus on the reciprocal influence between philological scholarship and the fine arts during this era. Chapter 3 discusses a representative sampling of works on Germanic philology that Wagner is known to have owned or consulted, situating them within the developments discussed in Chapter 2. Chapters 4 and 5 consider Wagner’s staging of High Medieval courtly culture and his reception of minnesong in Tannhäuser. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 consider Die Meistersinger, arguing that the views of the heldentenor character Walther von Stolzing, on both art and life, have been indelibly stamped by the chivalric literature of the High Middle Ages, which he claims as his ancestral heritage. These chapters demonstrate as well that the real challenge facing Walther is one of cultural assimilation to the urban, bourgeois milieu that Wagner depicts in his fictional early modern Nuremberg. They trace Walther’s acculturation process through a close examination of his and the other characters’ diegetic songs, comparing them with examples of authentic texts from the High Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Advisor: Tennant, Elaine C
Spectral Purification Techniques for Clock Generation Circuits

Clock generation circuits are essential building blocks that need to provide precision timing and frequency references for the whole system. Spur and phase noise are two of the most critical impairments of clock spectral purity that ultimately limit the performance of a communication system such as spectral emission, error-vector-magnitude (EVM) for transmitters and the blocker tolerance for receivers. Therefore, it would be worthwhile to develop a post-processing module cascaded after the clock source and perform the spectral purification to recover and even boost the performance./nTwo techniques for spur and phase noise cancellation have been proposed. With analog- signal-processing by delay lines we can synthesis the desired shape of the transfer function for spectral filtering, such as notches to reject far-out spurs, and high-pass filtering to suppress close-in phase noise. A fully integrated design achieves a measured spur cancellation of 15dB at 250MHz and 750MHz offset as well as phase noise cancellation from 4MHz to 200MHz offset with maximum 25-dB cancellation depth for a 1-GHz clock. The proposed ideas have been verified through a fabricated 65-nm CMOS prototype with power consumption of 11mW from a supply voltage of 1.2V./nFurthermore, we will demonstrate a novel clock multiplier architecture that achieves low jitter and also insensitive to frequency drift without a continuous frequency tracking loop (FTL). With the proposed digital spur calibration techniques, the spurs can be effec- tively suppressed down to −50.9dBc. Fabricated in 28-nm CMOS technology, this prototype presents an integrated jitter of 138fsrms while consuming only 6.5mW from a 1-V/0.8-V supplies and achieving −249dB FoM. A detailed study on the mechanisms of jitter perfor- mance affected by frequency drift is included, which provides a theoretical justification to the approach. Also, the time domain/frequency domain analysis on digital spur calibra- tion are discussed as well. Finally, an improved version with lower power consumption and generalized multiplication ratio is also realized in a test chip in 28-nm CMOS technology.

Advisor: Niknejad, Ali M
Discovery and Applications of Radical Amino Acid Halogenases

Through evolution, Nature has developed enzymes that perform challenging reactions. By exploring biosynthetic pathways in bacteria, we can discover and repurpose these enzymes for synthetic applications. Here, we have performed metabolomics and enzyme characterization to elucidate the biosynthesis of β-ethynylserine (βes), an alkyne-containing amino acid made by Streptomyces cattleya. In the process, we discovered a novel FeII/α-ketoglutarate (FeII/αKG)- dependent halogenase, BesD, with unprecedented reactivity toward amino acids. We solved the crystal structure of BesD, discovered homologs that enable the formation of nine new chlorinated amino acids, and demonstrated that the newly discovered enzymes also perform bromination and azidation. Next, we demonstrated that halogenated amino acids can be further transformed enzymatically into chlorinated heterocycles, diamines, keto-acids, and peptides. Finally, we investigated how halogenases achieve regioselectivity, substrate selectivity, and catalytic selectivity (halogenation over the closely related hydroxylation reaction). These radical amino acid halogenases set the stage for the discovery of novel natural products that are formed via halogenated intermediates.

Advisor: Chang, Michelle CY
Zhang, Wenjun
Designing the Organic Waste Management Sector in California: Understanding the Societally Optimal System, Private Sector Profitability, and the Impact of Supportive Policies

Diverting organic material from landfills can produce myriad benefits such as reduced landfill emissions and capacity requirements, renewable energy generation, and nutrient recovery. Therefore, regulators are implementing policies to achieve these goals, with California taking particularly notable action through an organics diversion mandate that is expected to require well over 100 new organic waste processing facilities to be built in a short timeframe. The need for a completely new organic waste recycling infrastructure system presents a unique opportunity to encourage sustainable development through policy. This dissertation examines the economic and climate impacts of organic waste management facilities from various scales and perspectives. The first study presented explores the economics of privately-owned large-scale dry anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities to identify the key drivers of profitability, impacts of market forces, and the efficacy of policy incentives. Assumptions are grounded in empirical data collected in California, where a small number of dry AD facilities are operating and aggressive landfill diversion mandates are driving development of organics handling facilities. Results describe the economies of scale, key costs and revenues, sources of uncertainty, and comparison of various energy utilization pathways for these facilities. A Levelized Cost of Disposal metric is presented and compared to alternative disposal options, namely landfilling.The second and third studies present two parallel models that examine the organic waste management system across all of California, considering four waste facility types, two energy utilization pathways, over 60,000 spatially explicit waste feedstock points and over 300 potential facility locations. The first of these two models, the Organic Recycling Facility Optimization (ORFO) Model, is a mixed-integer linear programming model that optimizes the waste infrastructure system according to both societal economic cost and greenhouse gas emissions optimization criteria. The second model, the Organic Recycling Facility Investment (ORFI) model, considers the private sector development opportunities in California based on the potential profitability of facilities of different types and sizes, at different locations, and under different energy-related economic incentive levels. Results from each of these models describe the statewide systems developed under both public and private sector objectives, and examine the impact of commingled municipal waste streams, opportunities for byproduct value creation, and state diversion and energy goals. Further analysis of these results in regards to current and future waste and energy policy and existing waste-related infrastructure is presented in the final analysis chapter of this study.

Advisor: Horvath, Arpad
Paths to interacting topological semimetals

Do topological electrons interact differently than normal electrons? We discuss three paths to answering this question./nOne route is to engineer a new material with nontrivial topology and long-range magnetic order. In the first part of this dissertation we present a new material, YbMnSb2, and we provide evidence from transport, thermodynamic, and spectroscopic measurements to show that it is an antiferromagnetic topological semimetal. The majority of this work was published as Kealhofer, et al., Phys. Rev. B 97, 045109./nAnother route to answer this question is to study the role of topology in strongly interacting systems. The cerium monopnictides CeSb and CeBi incorporate threads from f-electron magnetism, many-body (e.g. Kondo) physics, and topology. CeSb is a trivial semimetal, while CeBi is a topological semimetal. in the second part of this dissertation, we will untangle some of these threads and present our investigation of the relationship between topology, magnetism, and Kondo-like hybridization in CeSb and CeBi. The main tool we will use is angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), taking advantage of the MERLIN beamline at the Advanced Light Source and its ability to resonantly tune to the Ce N-edge. This capability allows us to be exquisitely sensitive to the photoemission signal originating from the Ce f electrons. We will see that the signatures of magnetic interactions in CeSb and CeBi are markedly different, a difference whose origin may be the presence of topological band crossings in CeBi. Our work on CeSb was published as Jang, Kealhofer, et al., Sci. Adv. 5(3) eaat7158./nA third route to studying interactions in topological semimetals is to somehow reduce the dimension of the material from three to one. Fermi liquids abound in three dimensions--metals (and semimetals) are everywhere. In one dimension, though, the the ground state for a large number of interacting fermions is not the Fermi liquid but the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. So it would seem that if, in the laboratory, there were a knob labeled ``Dimension'' which one could turn from "3" to "1," it would be easy to study non-Fermi liquids./nIn the final part of this dissertation, we discuss a future experiment which would attempt to turn this knob in TaAs, a Weyl semimetal. As one of the experimental consequences of the Fermi liquid is the proportionality of thermal conductivity and electrical conductivity at a fixed temperature (the Wiedemann-Franz law), the proposed experiment is to measure this ratio (the Lorenz number) in a strong applied magnetic field. Due to TaAs's low carrier density, at even relatively moderate fields of 5 T or lower the electrons will occupy only the lowest Landau level. As a result, conduction along the field direction is relatively unchanged, while the conduction perpendicular to the field is reduced, giving rise to a dimensional crossover. Measuring thermal conductivity through this crossover will allow us to observe signatures of the one dimensional conducting state, in which interactions between electrons cannot be ignored.

Advisor: Analytis, James G
Drainage in Geological Materials at Intermediate Scales

The disconnect between pore-scale processes and continuum models of porous flow is a persistent problem in hydrogeology. Here, we present two drainage studies which attempt to bridge this divide. In the first, we demonstrate the sensitivity of continuum-scale drainage simulations to the critical nonwetting saturation, which is the saturation state of a voxel when nonwetting phase permeability becomes nonzero. To give this parameter a physical basis, we use laboratory observations of drainage in thin, backlit bead packs and Invasion Percolation simulations to propose a new percolation model for saturation as a function of distance behind the drainage front, incorporating Bond and capillary number dependency. In the second study, motivated by observations of streamflow responses to earthquakes, we test the hypothesis that seismic shaking can drain water out of the unsaturated zone. To accomplish this, we construct a sand chamber and monitor pore pressure during impact-induced shaking. We identify three distinct mechanisms: consolidation of sediments in the saturated zone, release of capillary water from the capillary fringe, and mobilization of isolated pore water in the unsaturated zone.

Advisor: Manga, Michael
Representation in Force: Gender, Violence, and Policing in India

Can gender-based "enclaves" facilitate women's access to justice? I create an unprecedented dataset based on millions of police-reports from 2015, and leverage the manner in which institutions called all-women police stations were opened in Haryana state, India. I find that the creation of enclaves in law enforcement does not increase registered crime. In fact, the intervention lowers the case load at standard stations by justifying the deflection of gendered crimes, reduces responsibilities for policewomen, and increases travel cost for victims seeking redress. The institutions formalize the "counseling" of victims by encouraging reconciliation with abusers at the expense of case registration. Broadly, I argue that 'representation as separation' may fail to generate positive outcomes for victims and administrators./nIn a second paper, I highlight the patterns of exclusion faced by women in law enforcement. By classifying India's Penal Code, and leveraging an instrument, I demonstrate that policewomen are tasked with specific cases, especially non-heinous gendered crimes that the bureaucracy prefers to address informally. Nevertheless, female supervisors are able to mitigate such occupational segregation; they allocate policewomen diverse tasks, and they play a causal role in assigning female investigators more cases./nIn a third paper, Sharon Barnhardt and I examine whether the link between representation and perceived legitimacy of public officials is moderated by the roles women are seen to perform within an agency. With the help of a novel video-based experiment, we find that context matters: policewomen are seen as more legitimate when tackling non-gendered cases compared to gendered crimes - especially by other women. The findings contribute to scholarship on gender and the conditions under which representation can improve trust in public officials.

Advisor: Chhibber, Pradeep
Post, Alison
The intersection of innate and adaptive immunity to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis disease (TB), is one of the top infectious killers in the world. The sole licensed vaccine, M. bovis BCG, does not reliably confer protective immunity in adults. Although anti-mycobacterial antibiotics are available and routinely prescribed, the rise of antibiotic resistance and the shortcomings of the BCG vaccine highlight the importance of new host-directed therapies and vaccine strategies against TB. A more complete understanding of the immune response to M. tuberculosis is necessary to combat and prevent TB. Two components of innate immunity have been shown to both promote and hinder host control of M. tuberculosis: neutrophils and STING-dependent immune activation./nNeutrophil influx and infection occurs during the innate phase of infection. A lack of relevant in vitro models has historically hampered neutrophil studies, given the short half-life of ex vivo neutrophils. We overcame this problem by utilizing a model for neutrophil differentiation and responses to M. tuberculosis infection based on ER-Hoxb8 conditional immortalization of Cas9-expressing neutrophil progenitors. CRISPR/Cas9- mediated gene editing facilitated unbiased genome-wide pooled screens for genes that mediate survival during differentiation and infection. Innate immune activation is also necessary for improved TB protein subunit vaccine design. We aimed to better characterize STING activation in the context of a mucosally administered cyclic-di- nucleotide adjuvanted protein subunit TB vaccine. A previous study had correlated IL-17 producing CD4 T cells (Th17s) with mucosal vaccine protection, instead of the IFN-γ- producing CD4 T cell (Th1) response seen with subcutaneous BCG or protein subunit vaccination. We discovered that both IL-17 and IFN-γ contributed to immunity. The transcription factors STAT6 and IRF3 were not essential for mucosal vaccine-induced immunity downstream of STING, although type I IFN signaling contributed to vaccine efficacy. Dependent on vaccine antigen, our mucosal vaccine could promote durable Th17 responses and antibacterial resistance after the efficacy of BCG had waned. These results provide a clearer picture of several aspects of innate and adaptive immunity.

Advisor: Stanley, Sarah A