VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Periodicals, Portables, and the Reading Public: The Short Fiction of Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, and William Faulkner in the Literary Marketplace

This dissertation examines the effects of the literary marketplace on the production, dissemination, and reception of American short fiction between 1914 and 1945, a period that experienced both an explosion in print culture and increased anxiety about the adverse effects of the literary marketplace on artistic and textual autonomy. Combining book history, cultural studies, and literary analysis, I argue that reading short fiction of this period in multiple contexts of its publication history reveals how the literary marketplace enabled the genre’s complex “portability” – a term that evokes the materiality of the text itself, the interpretive mobility of the literary work from one publication context to another, and the movement of the work within the hierarchy of literary “brows.” Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, and William Faulkner, all successful and prolific writers of short fiction, demonstrate the range and the surprising coherence of the hermeneutic questions raised by short fiction’s portability. Chapter one examines the interpretive shifts in Parker’s satirical fiction as her stories move from The New Yorker to The Portable Dorothy Parker (1944), revealing that Parker’s satire seeks new targets as relentlessly as publishers seek new markets. Chapter two highlights how racial prejudice operated on portability within the literary marketplace by analyzing a little-known episode in Hughes’s career when Esquire asked its readers to vote on whether one of his stories should be published in the magazine. Following this publicity stunt through Esquire’s “letters to the editor,” I demonstrate the magazine’s tactical consolidation of its readers through exploitation of divergent interpretations of Hughes’s story. Chapter three probes Faulkner’s anxious engagement with the mass-market magazine by examining the publication history of the generically ambiguous Go Down, Moses (1942). I argue that Faulkner seized upon the portability of his stories and repurposed them in a higher-brow, more authorially controlled form—the novel. I conclude the dissertation by demonstrating how recent periodical digitization initiatives, like the Modernist Journals Project, facilitate the study of short fiction in its various versions and contexts, and how integrating my theory of portability and its methodology into our pedagogy invigorates teaching practices of American short fiction.

Keywords: American modernism
book history and print culture
digital humanities
literary marketplace
periodical studies
short fiction
Advisor: Dolan, Neal
Wilson, Sarah
Impact of Hyperglycemia on Rat Cortical Bone Microstructure and Osteoprogenitor Cell Exhaustion

Uncontrolled diabetes has been associated with an increased risk of bone fracture and implant failure. However, the underlying reasons have yet to be entirely understood. Our group previously reported that osteocyte number appeared increased in the peri-implant bone of hyperglycemic rats, which might increase cellular level cortical porosity. In this context, since there are examples of increased proliferation of cells in hyperglycemia from other tissues, we hypothesized that increased osteocyte cell number due to the excessive proliferation of osteoprogenitors increases osteocyte lacunar density in hyperglycemic bone. To address the hypothesis, changes in bone porosity, due to osteocyte lacunar density and vascular canal volume, in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced hyperglycemic Wistar Albino rat bone were quantitatively assessed with synchrotron radiation (SR) micro-CT. Additionally, the effects of hyperglycemia on bone formation in osteogenic cultures of rat bone marrow stromal cells (rBMSCs) was quantified. To elucidate the mechanism by which hyperglycemia affects progenitor cells, colony forming capacity, glucose consumption, motility, and whole transcriptome of rBMSCs were compared with euglycemic controls. As opposed to the hypothesis, lacunar density was significantly higher in STZ than euglycemic group (67,195±3,206 vs. 61,126±1,457, lacuna number/mm3, p

Keywords: Bone Biology
bone formation
cellular exhaustion
cortical porosity
Hyperglycemia
Synchrotron radiation micro-CT
Advisor: Davies, John E
NKCC1 Regulates mTORC1 and p38-MAPK

The Mammalian Target Of Rapamycin Complex1 (mTORC1) is a key regulator of cell growth and survival. It is activated by growth factors and by essential amino acids such as Leu. Influx of Leu into cells is mediated by the Leu transporter LAT1-4F2hc (LAT1). Here I show that the Na-K-2Cl cotransporter NKCC1 (SLC12A2), a known regulator of cell volume, is present in complex with LAT1. I further show that NKCC1 suppresses mTORC1 by independently inhibiting its key activating signaling pathways: (i) Leu influx via LAT1; and (ii) growth factor signaling pathways (PI3K/Akt and Erk1/2). Moreover, I found that suppression of mTORC1 by NKCC1 leads to reduced cell volume mass and increased cell proliferation. Thus, my studies implicate NKCC1 in the long-sought link between cell size (volume) and cell mass regulation. After cell shrinkage by hyperosmotic stress, NKCC1 transport ions (including Na+) into cells followed by water to restore normal cell volume, by a process called Regulatory Volume Increase (RVI). RVI is regulated by the hyperosmotic-stress response p38-MAPK. I show that NKCC1 depletion abolished RVI by reducing intracellular Na+ concentration ([Na+]i) and inhibiting p38-MAPK activity. Further, I investigate the effect of [Na+]i on the p38-MAPK in the presence of high or low [Na+]i concentrations. My data show that [Na+]i is a positive regulator of p38-MAPK activity. Further, I find that [Na+]i is sensed by the upstream activators of p38-MAPK: TRAF2/ASK1 and MEK3/6/4, thus establishing [Na+]i as a signaling ion that activates the p38-MAPK stress response pathway. Independently, I also show that WNK kinases (also activated by hyperosmotic stress) inhibit p38-MAPK, but via a distinct pathway. Together, these studies illuminate the signaling role of NKCC1, [Na+]i and WNK kinases in p38-MAPK activation and cell volume regulation.

Keywords: Hyperosmotic
LAT1
mTORC1
NKCC1
p38
WNK kinases
Advisor: Rotin, Daniela
Complicating Race in the Study of Mental and Physical Health

Racial disparities in health are large and persistent. While decades of research have clearly established race-based disparities in health, less attention has been paid to the way in which race is conceptualized and measured in the study of health disparities. The three empirical studies comprising this dissertation move beyond current sociological work in this area by complicating how race is used in health disparities research. First, I consider the simultaneous effects of race and skin tone stratification in the patterning of physical health. This paper offers a new approach that better specifies the contribution of each status to health inequality, by providing a method that partitions the impact of race from skin tone in the same analysis. Second, I disaggregate combinations of mixed-race groups (i.e. Asian-White, Black-White, and Black-Asian) to better understand whether the social distribution of mental and physical health outcomes varies by specific combinations of mixed-race relative to monoracial groups. Finally, I consider whether Black-White differences in mental disorder have changed across cohorts of Black and White Americans – introducing social change into the study of racial disparities in health. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates how thinking about race in more specific and complex ways allow us to uncover new empirical realities.

Keywords: Cohorts
Mental Health
Multiracial
Physical Health
Race
Skin Tone
Advisor: Wheaton, Blair
Laser Therapy to Treat Hypertrophic Scars in Children with Burn Injuries

Introduction: Laser therapy has emerged as a valuable treatment option for hypertrophic burn scars. Currently, the two most commonly used lasers include the ablative fractional CO2 laser to improve scar thickness and stiffness and the pulsed dye laser to reduce scar redness. However, research regarding the use of laser therapy in the pediatric population has been limited by poorly designed studies. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using laser therapy to improve hypertrophic burn scars in pediatric patients using a comprehensive set of subjective and objective scar assessment tools. Methods: A single-centre, prospective observational study was carried out at a tertiary pediatric hospital. Twenty participants with hypertrophic burn scars that had not received previous laser treatment were included. Laser therapy sessions were administered over the course of one year and all treatment parameters were tailored to meet the needs of each participant. A comprehensive set of scar assessment tools including the Vancouver Scar Scale, the Patient and Observer Scar Assessment Scale, conventional ultrasound, acoustic radiation force impulse ultrasound elastography, and the DermaLab Combo® colour and elasticity probes were used to evaluate scar characteristics at each study visit. Results: Seventy-one laser procedures were carried out with the majority of participants receiving treatment with both the ablative fractional CO2 laser and the pulsed dye laser at the same session (83%). All participants received at least three sessions of laser therapy with no complications noted. From baseline to study completion, statistically significant improvements in all scar measures, both subjective and objective, were observed (p

Advisor: Fish, Joel
Intimate Partner Violence and Gender Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis

Introduction: Individual experience of intimate partner violence (IPV) occurs in a socio-political context that varies internationally. This dissertation examined (1) how gender-specific policies impact women’s risk of IPV; (2) whether gender norm transgression increases women’s risk of experiencing IPV; and (3) how women’s experience of violence in the home impacts their access to pregnancy-related health care. Methods: A sample of 28 countries’ Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) were analyzed using multilevel modelling. Women’s experience of lifetime IPV and past-year IPV were examined considering national factors, such as geopolitical region, economy, and gender-based policies, while controlling for women’s sociodemographic characteristics. The final analyses used women’s experience of physical IPV to predict their use of professional prenatal care and delivery assistance during pregnancy and the immunization of their infants. Results: Women were at higher risk for violence if they were the sole income earner for the household compared to situations where the man was the primary provider. The presence of gender non-discrimination legislation was protective against physical IPV experience. Polygamy legalization was a significant risk factor of all forms of IPV experience. Women who experienced violence were less likely to receive prenatal care when pregnant and to fully vaccinate their children, even when controlling for household income. These women were more likely to experience unwanted pregnancies, which was also associated with lower use of health care services. Conclusions: Gender-specific policies aimed at protecting women from violence and discrimination are possibly having a positive impact on women’s self-reports of IPV. Further, the finding that employment differences between partners is associated with an increase in women’s risk for violence should be used to inform intervention and prevention programs. The consequences of violence experience are associated with insufficient healthcare use not only by women, but also their children.

Keywords: female empowerment
gender equality
Intimate partner violence
Advisor: Fallon, Barbara
Responding to Major Institutional Change: The Fall of the Soviet Union and Higher Education in Central Asia

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly independent Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan inherited a shared legacy of higher education, institutionalized during the twentieth century under Soviet rule. All three countries were struck by the same fundamental challenges in the wake of the Soviet collapse, and all three brought forward the same normative models of government and governance. Yet in the space of just a few years, each of the three higher education systems had diverged, often extensively. By examining the immediate period following the major institutional change of 1991, this study advances our understanding of how organizations respond to such dramatic moments, moving beyond a simplistic binary of transformation or stagnation. Where higher education in Central Asia experienced some major shifts, in other areas it adjusted more incrementally, and in many respects higher education continued to be organized and structured just as it had been in the Soviet era. Theoretically, the study compares the extent to which the rational choice, sociological and historical strands of new institutionalism can be used to analyse these responses to major (as opposed to minor or incremental) institutional change. Yet more than this, being able to explain both the differences and the similarities in the way higher education in these three countries shifted as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union also tells us about how actors grapple with the legacies of previous organizing templates. Understanding how higher education changed – or did not change – despite or because of this inheritance also deepens our understanding of the value placed on higher education, which, given the criticality of higher education across countries, helps us understand how states envision their future. Drawing extensively from 36 interviews with experienced faculty members and supplemented by descriptive statistics, this study makes an important contribution to comparative studies and to filling the gap in theory-driven explanations of organizational responses to major change. As the first study to set higher education in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan into comparative perspective, it directly addresses the clear disparity between research on contemporary Central Asia as compared to other world regions.

Advisor: Sá, Creso
Perversions of the Capitalist Fantasy: The Agrarian Question and Japanese Colonialism in Manchuria

This dissertation analyzes the agrarian question in Manchuria during Japan’s occupation. Instead of conceptualizing Manchuria’s rural society in terms of its essentialist connotations, such as being backward and opposed to the capitalist industrialization, I analyze the articulation of the so-called feudal remnants in the countryside with Manchuria’s industrial economy, which was driven by Japanese finance capital and the expansion of the Japanese empire in the wake of the domestic and world economic crisis in the early 1930s. The unprecedented economic crisis forced Japan to export its excess capital to Manchuria under the name of the rationalization of capital. The tendency of rationalization, however, did not dismantle the social conditions of Manchuria’s countryside and replace the old, feudal economy with a modernized capitalist economic sector. Feudal conditions in the countryside disrupted the fantasy of rationalization. In the meantime, the articulation with the rationalized economy exemplified capital’s enclosure of heterogeneous, political, cultural, and social elements for the sake of the latter’s own accumulation. To this end, my project addresses the shifting discursive configurations of Chinese peasants, who were not only the main markers of the feudal economy but also targets of different agrarian programs instituted by Japanese colonial agents. These discursive changes reflected the massive social upheavals resulting from the capture of the countryside by Japanese colonial agents, and as well as the often invisible dynamics of finance capital. In my dissertation, I make visible the process of capture and accumulation by analyzing four salient and inter-related problems: the colonial industries’ reliance on rural workers (chapter 2); the institutional reforms to screen and individuate peasants through a biopolitical regime of competition mediated by rural credit programs (chapter 3); the reinvention of traditional communitarianism as an ideology instrumental to the establishment of the capitalist landownership (chapter 4); the tension between dispossessed peasants and Japanese agrarian immigrants centering around the question of landownership and its implications for Chinese revolution in Manchuria (chapter 5 and 6).

Keywords: agrarian question
Chinese peasants
Chinese revolution
Japanese finance capital
Manchuria/Manchukuo studies
Advisor: Kawashima, Ken
Facing Inequity: Social Justice Education in the Training of Pre-service Workers in New York City

This study uses a qualitative approach to construct and examine the impact of a critical social work curriculum delivered to pre-service social workers in New York City, United States. It argues that social justice education principles, specifically critical theories pertaining to race, racial identities and racial formation position social workers-in-training for relational and transformative social work with members of racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, and those living in poverty or without citizenship status. Such relational social work, the study suggests, forces especially self-identified White-social workers to take responsibility for the historical oppression of others and ultimately view the field of social work as a space to foster non-violent and caring relations that do not duplicate and extend injustices faced by racial minorities in the United States. Despite emotional discomfort, White learners who took part in the training also exhibit readiness to engage in critical dialogue about issues of racial inequality and their role in oppressive systems of power. Pre-service social workers identifying as Black or as people of color, appreciate tremendously how the critical social work curriculum opens a space where they can voice out their experiences, and engage White people in facing together the history of racial, gender, ethnic and class inequalities that separate social workers from each other and from those marginalized communities who receive their services. The study discusses the experiential, emotional, and cognitive approaches embedded in the Critical Social Work Curriculum presented here so other educators in the field of social work could use, test and enrich the approach further. The full curriculum is provided in the Appendix. The analysis also documents limitations of the approach, the emotional labor involved in its delivery, as well as the need for institutional and organizational support for social justice education in the training of social workers not just in New York City but across the United States. University programs in social work must commit to critical pedagogies in order to position social workers for delivering services that support others in non-oppressive and meaningful ways.

Keywords: anti-oppression education
critical social work curriculum
pre-service social workers
racial inequality a
social justice education
social services
Advisor: Todorova, Miglena
Elucidating the Role of the Pluripotency Regulator Prdm14 in Cancer Initiation Using Mouse Models of Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Molecular mechanisms underlying high-risk subtypes of leukemia remain elusive. PR-domain containing 14 (Prdm14) is a potent oncogene implicated in the initiation of many cancers, including leukemia. During development, Prdm14 maintains pluripotency by regulating expression of self-renewal and differentiation genes, and promoting global epigenetic changes. Prdm14 expression is restricted to pluripotent cell types; however, PRDM14 is mis-expressed in numerous human cancers and is associated with poor patient outcomes. To understand the molecular mechanisms driving cancer initiation, I studied mouse models of Prdm14-driven leukemia. I characterized a model of T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) expressing FLAG-PRDM14 to show PRDM14 binds to the Notch1 locus prior to acquiring Notch1 activating mutations and leukemia onset. Further, I identified CBFA2T3 as the primary protein interaction partner of PRDM14 in leukemic bone marrow (BM), and demonstrated that Cbfa2t3 is required for PRDM14 to expand progenitor-like cells and initiate T-ALL. The interaction between PRDM14 and CBFA2T3 that occurs in conserved family motifs suggests this complex provides a platform to recruit chromatin modifying enzymes to initiate leukemia. I used CyTOF to deeply profile the phenotype of expanded pre-leukemia progenitor-like cells and demonstrated that Prdm14 can initiate parallel cancer programs in different lymphoid lineages. Single-cell RNA-sequencing revealed that pre-leukemic T cells expressed Notch1 and its target genes, while pre-leukemic B-1-like cells expressed AP-1 proto-oncogenes coupled with mis-regulated DNA damage response and cell cycle genes. B-1 cells are an unconventional, self-renewing type of B cell established in early embryogenesis. To test the capacity of Prdm14-expressing pre-leukemic B-1-like cells to initiate leukemia/lymphoma, cells were isolated and injected into syngeneic host mice, leading to B-1 cell leukemia/lymphoma development. Consistently, I showed that Prdm14 can initiate infiltrative B-1 cell leukemia/lymphoma in a second model where Prdm14 expression is restricted to B-lineage committed progenitors, supporting a novel link between Prdm14 and transformation of B-1 cells. These findings are clinically relevant, as relapsed pediatric B-ALL patient tumours that express PRDM14 have significantly worse outcomes. Collectively, my results provide a mechanism for Prdm14-driven cancer initiation in hematopoietic cells that may inform how Prdm14 initiates cancer in solid tumours and how it could be targeted therapeutically.

Keywords: B-1 cells
Cancer
CBFA2T3
Leukemia
Mouse models
PRDM14
Advisor: Justice, Monica J