VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Moving Words, Managing Freedom: The Performance of Authority in Malagasy Slam Poetry

Through an analysis of slam poetry performance in Madagascar, where poets are encouraged to express themselves freely but also to “manage” this freedom, this dissertation illuminates how speakers determine what kinds of speech are possible and appropriate in various contexts, how they perform authority, and how they anticipate and manage the consequences of their speech. Slam—a performance poetry competition created in Chicago in the 1980s—has become a popular literary and social movement around the world, but in Madagascar it has flourished in a context that includes pre-colonial genres of verbal art that are central to everyday life and to politics. In many of these genres, and especially in kabary—a form of oratory that ceremonializes major social and political events—public speech has long been reserved for elder men. Slam’s insistence on “free expression” thus constitutes a radical break from long-standing notions of the social roles and risks associated with public speech. As slam poets and audiences navigate the terrain of “managed freedom” in live events as well as videos that circulate online, they forge an entirely novel mode of authoritative public discourse on the slam stage and the Facebook page in a plurilingual and rapidly urbanizing postcolonial context./nThis research, based on a total of twenty-two months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in multiple cities across Madagascar and in Paris, France, advances scholarly debates on performance, aesthetics, media, embodiment, and politics. It is also a timely intervention into the fierce debates currently raging around the possibilities and limitations of liberal framings of “free speech.” This dissertation treats the concept of free speech as historically and contextually specific rather than abstract and generalizable, and illuminates how speakers balance liberal discourses of individual freedoms with notions of responsibility and accountability, dialogic authority, and embodied relationality.

Advisor: Briggs, Charles L
Hanks, William F
Wailaki Grammar

Wailaki, a Dene language of northwestern California, is known as what is referred to in academic literature and sources such as the Ethnologue as an “extinct” language. While Wailaki descendant people may remember an older generation of relatives who spoke Wailaki to one another, as far as is known, there are no people alive today who grew up speaking this language (Golla 2011:81). This term extinct used to describe such languages, however, does not reflect the desire of communities for languages to be spoken again, and the efforts many are taking towards language revitalization. Extinct conveys finality to language loss and shift; however, the term sleeping is today used to describe dormant languages with substantial documentation that may be spoken again (Leonard 2011). Wailaki is one such language./nFor Wailaki, documentation exists; however, no detailed description of the language exists prior to this work. For any scholar and language learner interested in the language, published materials on related languages such as Hupa or Mattole are referenced in order to make sense of available Wailaki documentation. This dissertation puts forth a phonological, morphological, and limited syntactic description of Wailaki, which is a cover term, used by many tribal descendants, for a dialect continuum also known as Eel River Athabaskan/Dene (Golla 2011)./nChapter 1 gives background information regarding the people, the resources available for analysis. Chapter 2 is a description of phonological processes within the dialect continuum. Chapter 3 is a description of word classes in Wailaki, and what criteria and behavior (either morphological or syntactic) that may be given to delineate classes. Chapter 4 describes the verbal morphology, and Chapter 5 describes the nominal morphology. Chapter 6 titled Clitics and Syntax describes clitics that express categories such as tense, aspect or mode, or perform syntactic functions. In addition, Chapter 6 gives limited description of aspects of Wailaki syntax such as conjunctions, negation, question formation, and some discussion of word order.

Advisor: Spence, Justin
Garrett, Andrew
Efforts Toward the Arcutines and Related Diterpenoid Natural Products

This dissertation describes our approaches toward a variety of natural products, including the arcutine family and the related diterpenoid atropurpuran. A methodology developed to access several interesting terpenoids is also discussed. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the diterpenoid alkaloids, a large class biologically active natural products possessing highly caged scaffolds. Arcutine is the prototypical member of a small family of these molecules consisting of arcutine, arcutinine, aconicarmicharcutinium and the diterpenoid atropurpuran. This section includes a discussion of the biosynthesis of these molecules as well as our biosynthetic proposal. Previous work toward these molecules, including two total syntheses of atropupuran, is also discussed./nChapter 2 describes our initial approaches toward arcutine and demonstrates many of the limitations of these approaches. In particular, much of the discussion focuses on synthetic disconnections that build on our groups previous approaches toward the diterpenoid alkaloids./nChapter 3 describes our current approach toward the arcutines. While this approach has not led to a total synthesis to date, it has led to the first synthesis of the hexacyclic arcutine scaffold. Many of the transformations needed to access the arcutines from this scaffold have been completed and a total synthesis of all of the natural products in this family is well within reach. This approach hinges on an oxopyrrolium Diels–Alder cycloaddition that was developed to improve upon many of the shortcomings of previous approaches. This in turn led to a scalable synthesis of the hexacyclic arcutine framework./nFinally, Chapter 4 describes some previously published work that utilizes carvone derived cyclobutanols as precursors toward a variety of natural product and natural product like scaffolds. This work builds on our groups initial report based on these cyclobutanols, and extends it to allow further C–C bond formation. We use these new C–C bonds to forge a variety of interesting targets as well as a 4 step synthesis of the taxoid core. This work has spawned projects toward various diterpenoid natural products.

Advisor: Sarpong, Richmond
“Path(s) of Remembrance: Memory, Pilgrimage, and Transmission in a Transatlantic Sufi Community”

The Mustafawiyya Tariqa is a regional spiritual network that exists for the purpose of assisting Muslim practitioners in heightening their level of devotion and knowledges through Sufism. Though it was founded in 1966 in Senegal, it has since expanded to other locations in West and North Africa, Europe, and North America. In 1994, protegé of the Tariqa’s founder and its most charismatic figure, Shaykh Arona Rashid Faye al-Faqir, relocated from West Africa to the United States to found a satellite community in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. This location, named Masjidul Muhajjirun wal Ansar, serves as a refuge for traveling learners and place of worship in which a community of mostly African-descended Muslims engage in a tradition of remembrance through which techniques of spiritual care and healing are activated. This dissertation analyzes the physical and spiritual trajectories of African-descended Muslims through an ethnographic study of their healing practices, migrations, and exchanges in South Carolina and in Senegal. By attending to manner in which the Mustafawiyya engage in various kinds of embodied religious devotions, forms of indebtedness, and networks within which diasporic solidarities emerge, this project explores the dispensations and transmissions of knowledge to Sufi practitioners across the Atlantic that play a part in shared notions of Black Muslimness.

Advisor: Ferme, Mariane
Multidimensional Late-Time Modeling of Type Ia Supernova Spectra

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) have been used successfully to derive constraints on the expansion history of our universe. They are also a source of kinetic energy and iron-group elements in galaxies, and they are inherently interesting cosmic events whose study requires the application of sophisticated algorithms and computational architectures. Late-time, or nebular, observations of SNe Ia are taken during the phase in which the ejecta are optically thin and are heated by radioactive decay of iron-group elements. They are a powerful and unique probe of ejecta properties and may be used to infer information about the explosion itself. In this thesis, I present a three-dimensional radiative transfer code to calculate the properties and synthetic data of optically thin, homologously-expanding gases illuminated by radioactive decay energy and apply it to a variety of SN Ia explosion models. I derive the relationship between key explosion properties and nebular spectra using a suite of parametrized models, which results in the identification of a number of degeneracies. I also present the first-ever multidimensional nebular spectra of SNe Ia interacting with a binary companion, which leads us to rule out classic single-degenerate systems as SN Ia progenitors.

Advisor: Kasen, Daniel N
Carlo Borromeo's Itineraries: The Sacred Image in Post-Tridentine Italy

This study follows the austere Catholic reformer Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584) on five different Italian pilgrimages in the decades following the Council of Trent. It aims to address the noticeable gap between theory and practice regarding image devotion in late sixteenth-century Italy. Treatises and decrees tend to rehash the oft-cited position of the Council of Trent, in which images are useful meditative and didactic tools, but must avoid ‘licentiousness’, inaccuracy, and any idolatrous confusion between the devotion to the material image and that owed to its heavenly prototype. However, the reality of religious art during this period bears little resemblance to this official position. It instead witnessed a growth in miraculous image cults, revived devotion toward freestanding sculpture, and placed unprecedented trust in the testimonial and sacramental power of art./nCarlo Borromeo, cardinal-archbishop and later saint, is often considered an archetype of Tridentine piety. Although he wrote no artistic treatises, his use of images became a model to the Italian populace through many celebrated pilgrimages and devotions. This project sketches out a theory of art by looking at Borromeo’s image-based behavior during five broadly defined pilgrimages, each using a particular destination to examine one facet of sacred images. We follow Borromeo as he renovates his titular church of Santa Prassede in Rome, revealing a sacramental definition of art, where images functioned, like ritual instruments, to perpetuate the antiquity of the liturgy. Borromeo’s pilgrimage to the Shroud of Turin shows how narrative artworks were pressured to account for artifacts in this period of reform. We trace his devotions at the polychrome terracotta sculptures of the Sacro Monte of Varallo, which Borromeo viewed as the very antidote to idolatry. Borromeo’s pilgrimages to the Holy House of Loreto demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between artists and replicas of miraculous images. Finally, we trace one final itinerary, carried out not by Borromeo but through his posthumous portraits, agents of his sanctity and witnesses in his trial for canonization. Together, Carlo Borromeo’s itineraries carved out a landscape of sacramental, antique, artistic, and evidentiary sacred images that would direct the next century of Catholic image culture throughout its global territories.

Advisor: Olson, Todd P
The Republican Dilemma: Rhetoric, Violence, and Representation in Early Modern England

This dissertation argues that English literature refigured the central dilemma of Renaissance republicanism: should tyranny be met with submission or with violence? For poets and playwrights, I contend, representation offered a third way. Faced with the twin specters of tyranny and civil war, writers like Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, and Robert Herrick imagined new forms of political representation that might effectively balance rulers against ruled. “Poesy” was itself the vehicle for this political critique. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there was no distinct concept of political representation. Members of parliament instead borrowed the mimetic vocabulary of neoclassical rhetoric and poetics to describe their own acts of representation. That vocabulary, however, affirmed a clear hierarchy: word over image, representation over represented. Neoclassical theorists asserted the aesthetic and even epistemological primacy of their poetic representations, while MPs used the fiction of popular presence to efface the constituents whom they supposedly represented./nI argue that literature contested this absolutist construction of representation. If the hierarchical tropes of neoclassical poetics proved influential, so too did other models of literary—and political—representation. From the narrative and ideological “variety” of Sidney’s Arcadia to the clamorous commons of Shakespeare’s histories to the polyvocal poetry of Herrick’s Hesperides, English literature could represent an embodied, and at times radically inclusive, politics of participation. Even Ben Jonson, who in his Roman plays struggled to defend the hierarchies of neoclassical representation, solicited popular judgment by writing for the commercial theater. In these writers’ “feigned commonwealths,” however, enfranchisement often seems like the effect or cause of bloodshed; and in England’s own commonwealth, ideological polarization and ultimately civil war threatened to dissolve the barrier between speech and violence altogether. Yet from the Renaissance to the present, the possibility of separating rhetoric from violence has remained the positive condition of republicanism, and the promise of literature.

Advisor: Kahn, Victoria
Convergence Analysis of Randomized Block Lanczos Algorithms for Low-Rank Matrix Approximations

The low rank approximation of matrices is a crucial component in many data mining applications today. A competitive algorithm for this class of problems is the randomized block Lanczos algorithm - an amalgamation of the traditional block Lanczos algorithm with a randomized component appearing in the form of a randomized starting matrix. While empirically this algorithm performs quite well, there has been scant new theoretical results on its convergence behavior and approximation accuracy, and past results have been restricted to certain parameter settings. In this thesis, we present a unified convergence analysis for this algorithm, for all valid choices of the block size parameter. We give an overview of how the Lanczos algorithm has developed historically and how past and adjacent results in the convergence analysis of these algorithms tie in with the current work. We present novel results on the rate of singular value convergence and show that under certain spectrum regimes, the convergence is superlinear. Additionally, we provide results from numerical experiments that validate our analysis.

Advisor: Gu, Ming
Understanding Electrothermal Physics in Complex Oxide Thin Films

Advances in materials displaying strong electrothermal phenomena can enable next-generation devices that besides powering themselves utilizing ambient waste heat can also cool down electronics that, in times to come, will dissipate nearly all the input energy into heat. Pyroelectrics is one such class of materials that exhibits a complex interplay of electrical polarization and heat that has the potential for waste-heat energy conversion and solid-state cooling. While pyroelectricity and its thermodynamic converse, the electrocaloric effect have been known for decades, there remains a significant gap in the fundamental understanding of how to control and exploit this electrothermal phenomena, including significant differences between theoretical and experimental observations, under utilization of advances in the design and synthesis of complex-oxide ferroelectric thin films, and inadequate characterization techniques (particularly for thin films). The research presented here, therefore, aims to bridge this gap by employing a comprehensive approach to the design, synthesis, and characterization of complex oxide thin films and explore routes to enhance electrothermal responses. First, new insights into the nature of growth of these complex ferroelectric materials will the developed. This will include understanding the role of epitaxial strain in exerting control over the film morphology and the ferroic domain structure. Next, a direct technique for measuring both pyroelectric and electrocaloric effect in epitaxial ferroelectric thin films will be demonstrated. Combined, this will facilitate a thorough investigation of how domain structures effect the electrothermal and electromechanical susceptibility in thin films of the canonical ferroelectric PbZr$_{1-x}$Ti$_{x}$O$_{3}$. Next, the potential of thin-film ferroelectrics in high-power waste-heat harvesting will be explored in the relaxor ferroelectric 0.68Pb(Mg$_{1/3}$Nb$_{2/3}$)O$_{3}$-0.32PbTiO$_{3}$ using solid-state thermodynamic cycles that mimic traditional gas-phase thermodynamic cycles. Using field- and temperature-dependent pyroelectric measurements, the role of polarization rotation and field-induced polarization in mediating the large pyroelectric effect will be explained. Finally, moving beyond the prototypical pervoskite ferroelectrics like PbZr$_{1-x}$Ti$_{x}$O$_{3}$ and (1-x)Pb(Mg$_{1/3}$Nb$_{2/3}$)O$_{3}$-xPbTiO$_{3}$, electrothermal response in new lead-free and CMOS-compatible ferroelectric HfO$_{2}$ will be explored.

Advisor: Martin, Lane W
Computationally-Driven Investigations Towards Better Gas Adsorption Materials

In this thesis, I investigate nanoporous materials such as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) for various gas adsorption applications using a wide array of computational methods. These types of materials are ideal for gas adsorption and separation applications due to their large internal surface areas and tunable chemistry. They are also ideally suited to study using traditional computational methods due to their well-defined structures. In the first chapter, I introduce nanoporous materials and the various molecular mechanics methods which can be used to study them. I also introduce the topic of in silico materials design. Then, in the next chapter, I discuss the development of a DFT-derived force field to accurately study the gas adsorption behavior in materials which contain coordinatively unsaturated metal sites. In such materials, the most commonly used methods fail to accurately model adsorption behavior, and the introduction of the DFT-derived force field has allowed the study of flue-gas mixtures in these frameworks. Following this work, in the third chapter we discuss the use of the DFT-derived force field to study the dynamical behavior of greenhouse gases in the same MOF series. Much of this work was done in collaboration with experimentalists who used NMR as their primary tool to probe the dynamics of these gases in the materials. Our molecular dynamics simulations complemented their NMR experiments. In the fourth chapter, I switch gears and discuss the use of computational methods for the design of new materials, first to characterize experimentally synthesized materials, and then to construct a database of thousands of new COF structures. Finally, I conclude by sharing a summary of my findings from the various investigations discussed in this thesis and my future outlook for the field.

Advisor: Smit, Berend
Order and disorder in metal-organic frameworks

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline porous materials, in which the pores represent most of the materials’ volume. Characterization of guest molecules within the pores and the interactions between MOFs and the guests are important research topics in this field for various industrial applications and for deepening our fundamental understanding of the bonding nature that takes place within MOFs. Although the crystalline nature of MOFs allows for atomic level characterization by x-ray diffraction techniques, heavily disordered guest molecules often limit the full characterization of the framework materials. In this dissertation, I present a strategy to make the guests ordered across the unit cells of MOFs in order to determine their structures, including absolute configurations. A chiral metal-organic framework (MOF-520) was used to covalently bond and align disordered molecules. The reduced motional degrees of freedom obtained with this covalent alignment method allowed the structures of molecules to be determined by single-crystal x-ray diffraction techniques. The chirality of the MOF backbone also served as a reference in the structure solution for an unambiguous assignment of the absolute configuration of bound molecules./nAn additional problem that the disordered guests cause is a reduction of MOFs’ diffraction intensities, which prevents atomic resolution characterization. The disordered guests interact with the frameworks making them disordered, thus reducing the scattering power of MOFs at high angles. Although there are many reports concerned with guest induced phase transitions - such as breathing effects, unusual thermal expansions, and symmetry changes, where the interactions and changes of the structures are ordered across the unit cells - the disordered interactions have not been the main focus of study in this field. To emphasize the significance of the disordered interactions, UiO-66, which is known for its architecturally robust induced mechanical stability, was chosen and its diffraction qualities with and without guests were compared. UiO-66 without guests exhibited considerably increased mean I/σ values around the resolution limit when compared with UiO-66 with guests. This finding indicated that the disordered interactions significantly impacted the diffraction intensity of UiO-66. To glean additional insight into the nature of the interaction, the unusual phase transition and twinning of MOF-5 was also studied as a function of temperature variation. A single crystal of MOF-5 with guests displayed merohedral twinning accompanied by a phase transition upon temperature decrease, whereas the evacuated MOF-5 did not show such a transition nor twinning.

Advisor: Yaghi, Omar M