VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Three Essays on Empirical Evaluation of Policies and Programs Promoting Energy Efficiency and Distributed Photovoltaics in Residential Buildings in the United States

Policies and programs to encourage energy efficiency in buildings have been prevalent since the 1970s. In more recent years, concerns about global climate change have motivated increased effort toward promoting energy efficiency as well as distributed renewable energy – largely solar photovoltaics – sited on buildings. This dissertation builds on the evidence base that seeks to understand the impact of policy instruments promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy in residential buildings. Each chapter evaluates some aspect of policy or program performance in an ex post fashion, leveraging observed outcomes related to the policy instruments at issue. The first chapter explores the impact of residential building energy codes on state-level energy consumption, exploiting variation in the timing of code adoption from state to state. I find that more stringent building energy codes have led to reduced energy consumption in the residential sector. The second chapter considers the impact of alternative financing program designs – with repayment occurring on or off the utility bill – on the repayment performance of customers who take out otherwise similar loans from a program in New York State to support energy efficiency measures. Contrary to expectations, I show that on-bill loans become delinquent more often than otherwise similar off-bill loans – though this finding is likely explained by the particular structure of payment priority in this program and may not generalize to other on-bill loans. The third chapter considers whether the availability of another financing program – residential property assessed clean energy, or R-PACE – led to greater deployment of residential solar PV systems in California. I demonstrate that cities and counties that adopted R-PACE programs deployed more residential PV systems than otherwise similar jurisdictions that did not adopt these programs.

Advisor: Friedman, Lee S
Mobile Pasts: Memory, Migration, and Place in Afghan Identity, 1451-1770

This dissertation analyzes the writing of the first Afghan histories, which took place across regions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Perso-Arabic authors had long identified groups of people as “Afghan,” those who belonged to this community did not write about themselves until a specific historical context. This context, I argue, was the interface between the emerging Mughal Empire (r. 1526-1857) and the Afghan-led Lodi (r. 1451-1526) sultanates of Delhi, “the capital of all Hindustan” in the mid-sixteenth century. In light of this conflict, the Afghans who called the Indian subcontinent home felt an urgency to define what it meant to be an Afghan and how their membership in this community related to their future in this space. They considered their possibilities through a series of historical texts written in multiple literary genres, each of which attested to the Afghans’ remarkable political and spiritual role in the history of Islamicate South Asia. Although the arrival of the Mughals strongly determined the shape of Afghan claims to power and authority in India, this dissertation demonstrates the vast and varied discursive worlds that Afghans drew upon to imagine the historical significance of their community in the world. Engaging with the repositories of wisdom embedded in the classics of Persian prose and poetry, the discourses of Sufi sainthood, and Islamic historiography, the authors of the Afghan past demonstrated their familiarity with a cosmopolitan world of ideas that in turn shaped the contours of Afghan identity. Through their engagement with these resources, the writers of these texts imagined how “the Afghan way” made them ideal leaders in the diverse and distant contexts in which they might find themselves. By the end of the eighteenth century, Afghans emerged with a clearly articulated sense of identity inspired by their historical movement and animated with a desire to perpetuate that mobility in the future.

Advisor: Faruqui, Munis D.
Thick from Behind the Veil: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Philosophy of Race

Thick from Behind the Veil: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Philosophy of Race examines the philosophical contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois. I investigate and develop on the phenomenological, metaphysical, and ethical elements of Du Bois’s early writings. I show how a philosophy of double-consciousness offers critical contributions to an existential understanding of racialization. By focusing on the literary and theoretical aspects of The Souls of Black Folk, I demonstrate how Du Bois’s employs classical Greek philosophy, mythology, and ethics to support and explain the material conditions of Black folk in America. I provide a Du Boisian account of double-consciousness in relation to the making of self-consciousness. I also argue that Du Bois’s literary work in “Of the Coming of John” is a modern reimagination of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. As a result, I illustrate how Du Boisian metaphysics can be understood as a meditation of the human condition in response to metaphysical catastrophe. Lastly, I argue that W.E.B. Du Bois’s metaphorical use of “second-sight” and the concept of “the gift” should be read as an ethics and as a cosmopolitan vision for the role and value that Black and other racially oppressed people have to offer the global community.

Advisor: Grosfoguel, Ramon
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson
Perceptions of “Trouble”: An Examination of Student Sense-making and the Psychological Influence of Disciplinary Inequity

This dissertation was motivated by the individual and collective stories of young people who face injustice as they attempt to access their education. Vast amounts of studies have demonstrated that Black, Latinx, and Indigenous youth regularly face disproportionate discipline in schools across the United States. Further, punitive school level discipline has been linked to the legal system as youth who become suspended, expelled, and school police involved, are more likely to become incarcerated. The potential social emotional influence of punitive or carceral experiences on non-dominant youth has not been widely explored. Moreover, despite decades of research confirming that disproportionate discipline is ever-present in U.S. schools and increases the chances of carceral system impact, reform and policy efforts have been mostly unsuccessful in ameliorating racial and ethnic disproportionate discipline. In this dissertation, I explore how non-dominant students at a majority Black and Latinx high school make sense of disciplinary practices and how they are psychologically influenced by these experiences. I utilized a mixed-methods approach to measure and explore student perceptions of discipline. In order to quantitatively explore perceptions of disciplinary injustice, I developed a four level construct and measure titled Perceptions of Disciplinary and Policing Justice. The majority of respondents also participated in one of three hour long focus groups where participants were able to share their experiences with discipline and policing. Focus group sessions also allowed me to explore the emotional influences of discipline and policing on youth and their development. Quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrated that the vast majority of participants had received punitive discipline that was impactful or memorable to them, with Black students being the most likely to receive punitive discipline. Focus group data analysis indicated that participants were emotionally influenced by their disciplinary experiences and said experiences negatively shifted their perceptions of school in general. The most impactful finding of the study however was the community building and collective resistance that youth demonstrated through their participation in the focus groups. By rejecting negative stereotypes and labels and affirming the experiences of others, participants challenged systemic carceral practices. Through this work, I offer a measure to explore student perceptions of disciplinary justice and highlight the importance of student voice in education policy and practice. The stories shared in this dissertation speak to the experiences of non-dominant youth across the country. Despite the tragedy and injustice that was shared, participants brought light and laughter to the focus group space and reframed negative experiences into opportunities for learning and growth.

Advisor: Gutierrez, Kris
Augustine’s Romans: Reshaping Masculinity, Empire, and Social Order after 410 AD

This dissertation examines the revisioning of Roman history and manly identity propounded by Augustine of Hippo (354-430) in the wake of the sack of Rome by Alaric’s Goths in 410. It closely analyzes eight sermons of 410 and 411 in which Augustine mentions and responds to the sack, as well as the fifth book of his De civitate dei, published in 415. Previous scholarship has tended to hold that the mature Augustine sharply devalued all human societies and empires, including that of the Romans, in favor of the community of true Christian believers, and that he redirected attention from the pursuit of earthly felicity, individual or societal, toward the attainment of heavenly bliss. I show instead that the Augustine of the early 410s is fundamentally interested in rethinking the relationship between masculinity and empire, that is, between the Ro-man subject and the Roman state, and in mobilizing the exemplary value of Roman history to produce a new and Christianized version of ideal Roman masculinity. Taking account of Augustine’s previous time in Rome and Milan and his association with elite figures in both cities, I argue that his sermons and treatise address fundamental questions about Rome’s eternity, the exemplarity of the Roman past, and the nature of Roman masculinity that are thematized in the writings of his contemporaries Ammianus Marcellinus, Symmachus, Ambrose, and Prudentius. Responding to the events of 410 but also to a broader climate of crisis and contestation about the temporality of empire and the proper definition and expression of elite masculine identity, the bishop of Hippo proposes a sweeping reinterpretation of Rome’s foundation, historical development, and destined end and, reciprocally, of ideal manly excellence (virtus), recast as endurance, constancy, and humility displayed in reception of the educative discipline that God had applied through the sack of 410. His new version of Roman masculinity is distinctively contoured by his Christian faith but derives its appeal for his audience from its thorough imbrication with classic expositions of Roman imperial history and ideology.

Advisor: Elm, Susanna K
A Desert Place: Asceticism in the Aftermath of Destruction

This dissertation is an ethnography of asceticism after and amid destruction. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork at Antiochian Orthodox monasteries in Lebanon, it considers the inheritance of this form of Christian asceticism as it intersects with a particular history of dispossession following Lebanon’s civil war. Tracing out the grammar and practices of this tradition of withdrawal, the dissertation moves through the historical archive of the monastic properties, their ruination and reinhabitation, the hagiographic narratives of the ascetics, their theological and philosophical writings, as well as the reproductive and poetic labours of the broader communities that are sustained by them. These elements are not gathered under the terms of institutional monasticism, but under a singular sensibility of ascetic withdrawal. Tracing out this movement toward ‘the desert,’ as both a metaphorical place of passage for the soul and the physical space of the monastery, coordinates this tradition of spiritual struggle even as it dissolves it. Part One traces out the history of monasticism in Lebanon, attending to the waning of monastic life in the early twentieth century and its return under the impetus of an Orthodox revival movement before the Civil War. The dereliction of the present is translated by my ascetic interlocutors into a space for spiritual struggle; its estrangement beckons a return to humility. Part Two turns to the therapeutic dimensions of ascetic practice and its particular attention to stillness and the soul. The stillness in the desert of the soul here works to metabolize the traumatic effects of post-war life, opening to a shared experience of divine tribulation. Part Three considers the language of subjectivity and ethics, counterposed by the ascetic interdiction against the moral ‘self’, as it also moves to understand the staging of Islamic poetics at the monastery. The common retreat to God, a destructive limit that forms a relationship to an outside, is finally found in the repose of death. In this, the dissertation as a whole focuses on the ambivalence of destruction for my interlocutors; its paradoxical capacity to disclose through destitution.

Advisor: Hirschkind, Charles
Precarious Lines: Violence, Masculinity, and Desire in 14th Century Visual Culture of Gunpowder

Precarious Lines: Violence, Masculinity, and Desire in 14th Century Visual Cultures of Gunpowder is the first art historical study of premodern gunpowder artillery and makes critical interventions in how we conceive of the role of art in socialising both state and interpersonal violence. Central to this study is an elaborately illuminated, early 14th century manuscript called The Milemete Treatise produced on the eve of Edward III’s coronation as king of England. I consider how shifts in imaging the technologies of violence impacted the cultural construction of gender and military pedagogies across this manuscript with specific attention to how the artist constructed a visual history of human violence ending in the gunpowder-laden future. Through recontextualizing the earliest surviving Western artworks depicting gunpowder artillery, this project considers the ramifications of how elite young men were encountering the material cultures, machines, and alchemy of war on the eve of immense military change. Re-situating the manuscript’s final quire of military drawings, I argue that artists were bridging the gap between the rising profession of engineers and the sovereigns who employed them to bring their armies up to date technologically. I argue that artworks produced in the context of military pedagogy invested in concepts of imperialism and utilised the power of images to compare the conquest of a woman’s body in rape to acts of conquest carried out by the English crown through leveraging military metaphors. My study nuances our understanding of medieval masculinity, chivalric sexuality, and patriarchal cultures of obfuscating consent. Precarious Lines evidences the foundational connection between militarised masculinity and misogyny in Western visual discourse.

Advisor: Honig, Elizabeth
Undergraduate Students' Definitional Practices in Mathematics

Mathematical definitions are central to learning and doing mathematics. Research has uncovered significant differences between how mathematicians and non-mathematicians construct, reason about, and refine mathematical definitions. Various strands of research provide insight into the development of definitional practices, yet an integrated approach to addressing foundational questions of development is lacking. Further, existing approaches often fail to account for the conventional nature of mathematical definitions and the social nature of defining practices. In the first paper of this dissertation, I present a sociocultural framework in which mathematical definitions are treated as cultural forms that emerge to serve specialized functions in collective practices. Building upon Saxe’s (2012) treatment of the development of mathematical ideas, I describe the development of definitional practices as constituted through processes of micro-, onto-, and socio-genesis of definitional form-function relations. In the second and third papers of this dissertation, I present two empirical studies that utilize the framework described in the first paper to examine similarities and differences in undergraduate mathematics and humanities students’ approaches to defining mathematical terms related to rational number. Study 1 examines participants’ conceptualizations of the function and forms of mathematical definitions. Study 2 examines participants’ process of defining, with a focus on the formulation and iterative refinement of definitions for three foundational mathematical ideas – fractions, multiplication, and division. Results provide evidence of two distinct definitional practices. Mathematics students tended to define for communication and proof, as they constructed and frequently revised definitions aimed at setting a standard for how a word form could be used across a disciplinary community. Humanities students tended to define for learners, constructing definitions aimed at advancing understanding and providing procedural instructions, often defining by example. Findings imply that while college mathematics majors are being enculturated into mathematical practices of defining for a disciplinary audience, work needs to be done to provide pathways for more students to engage in mathematically authentic practices of defining.

Advisor: Abrahamson, Dor
Odd Transport Phenomena in Active Matter

The familiar macroscopic properties of matter emerge out of complex dynamics occurring at the molecular scale. Establishing this connection between microscopic and macroscopic behaviors is the principal task of statistical mechanics. But collective phenomena can emerge out of individual motion and interactions in a much broader class of systems than those with which statistical mechanics has traditionally been concerned, including systems composed of particles that move under their own power by consuming energy from their environment. Known as active matter, such systems can exhibit novel phase and transport behavior with both surprising similarities and striking differences compared to ordinary matter. In this dissertation, I present contributions to the development of a revised statistical mechanical framework describing the emergence of linear transport phenomena in active matter. In particular, odd transport phenomena, in which fluxes arise in the direction perpendicular to thermodynamic driving forces, are shown to be a consequence of chirality in the microscopic fluctuations, characterized by the breaking of time-reversal and parity symmetries. The main results presented in this dissertation consist of the derivations of Green-Kubo relations connecting microscopic symmetries to macroscopic odd transport, together with numerical validation of these relations through molecular dynamics simulations of active model systems. Through this lens, odd diffusion and odd viscosity are introduced and developed. I conclude by presenting a general framework for deriving Green-Kubo relations for odd transport coefficients in active matter. Taken as a whole, these results provide a fruitful extension of existing statistical mechanics concepts, facilitating an understanding of the microscopic origins of odd transport phenomena and indicating the physical contexts in which new types of odd transport can be expected.

Advisor: Mandadapu, Kranthi K
Epistemic Entanglements: The Exact Sciences, Environment and Empire in Early Modern India

Syncing time and clime endure as pursuits of empire. In Time and Clime, I offer one of the first critical and capacious histories of science, technology, and environment for early modern India by incisively examining the philosophies and practices of temporality and climatology in the Mughal and early British empires. Critically, early modern India boasted a population of 150 million, a complex bureaucracy and economic prosperity. Yet the history of science, technology and the environment is occluded from view. I contend that as the magnitudinal military science, astronomy was the bedrock of early modern empire controlling multiple temporalities, crafting narratives of cosmic truth, and configuring conceptions of the environment. I reveal that the utility of the exact sciences and their impact on environment and empire transformed from time-telling and astrology to meteorology and navigation in the transition from the Mughal to British empire.

Advisor: Mazzotti, Massimo
Carson, Cathryn
Strategy Development in Natural Product Total Synthesis: Part I. Function Driven Synthesis of Xiamycin Sesquiterpenoids Part II. Progress toward the Symmetry-inspired Total Synthesis of Melicolones A & B

Two major motivations can be attributed to natural product total synthesis: a search for function, and the development of strategies for complex molecule synthesis. The work described in this dissertation covers both topics with critical analysis of methodologies and synthesis practices. Chapter 1 provides a statement on the current field of total synthesis highlighting enduring contributions, motivations, and future directions. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on two total synthesis projects that arose as part of a collaboration in the Sarpong group with scientists at Corteva Argriscience for the identification and development of natural products as antifeedant molecules—a search for function. Chapter 2 describes the total synthesis and biological evaluation of xiamycin-type indolosesquiterpenoids utilizing a ‘benzannulation of carvone strategy’. Chapter 3 discusses progress toward broadening this synthesis strategy to paspaline-type indole diterpenoids. Chapters 4 and 5 initiate a discussion on strategy and tactics in synthesis. Chapter 4 focuses on symmetry inspired strategies and symmetry tactics, the distinction between the two, and how they can each be greatly simplifying in synthesis. Chapter 5 expands on classifications of C–H oxidation reactions, examines their use in natural product synthesis, and gives insights into their strategic application through case study analysis. Chapter 6 details progress toward the synthesis of the polyprenylated acylphloroglucinol natural products melicolones A & B utilizing a hidden symmetry strategy. Chapter 7 discusses a broad approach toward several bicyclic natural product cores through the divergent C–C cleavage of a common intermediate—the development of strategies for complex molecule synthesis. Overall, this work explores studies in indoloterpene function as well as symmetry and C–C cleavage strategies for complex molecule synthesis.

Advisor: Sarpong, Richmond
Spectrum-Revealing CUR Decomposition

The CUR decomposition is a popular tool for computing a low rank factorization of a matrix in terms of a small number of columns and rows of the matrix. CUR decompositions are favored in some use-cases because they have a higher degree of interpretability and are able to preserve the sparsity of the input matrix. Previous random sampling-based approaches are able to construct CUR decompositions with relative-error bounds with high probability. However, these methods are costly to run on practical datasets. We implement a novel algorithm to compute CUR approximations of sparse matrices. Our method comes with relative error bounds for matrices with rapidly decaying spectrum and runs in time that is nearly linear in $m$ and $n$.

Advisor: Gu, Ming