2009-2010 Graduate Dissertation Fellows

Daniel Cabarcas

Project Title: Mutant Algorithms for Solving Polynomial Equations
With the growth of the Internet, information security has changed from being only of national security interest, to becoming of everyday life concern, with multiple issues that range from preventing electronic theft to defending the right of privacy. The security of today's society is being jeopardized by a new generation of attacks known as algebraic attacks. For virtually any cryptosystem, the problem of finding the secret key can be translated into the problem of solving a system of polynomial equations. System of polynomial equations have been used to model science and technology for thousands of years, but to find an exact solution to such a system is in general very difficult. This project aims to improve the state of the art in algorithms for exact solving systems of polynomial equations. In 2007 Jintai Ding proposed the concept of mutant polynomials and based on this concept, a new generation of solvers has been developed. We propose to develop further the theory of mutants aiming at new algorithms based on this concept. We estimate a great impact, especially in cryptography and coding theory, so we will use the new techniques to address challenges in Multivariate Public key cryptography and algebraic cryptanalysis.

John Callaghan

Project Title: Slavery and Major Power Warfare: Similar Paths to Obsolescence?
This dissertation examines the thesis that war among major powers is in decline. That thesis challenges both our understanding of security dynamics in world politics and many of the assumptions of core international relations theory. This effort builds upon and adds to the work of John Mueller, who has offered a particularly persuasive argument that likens the decline of war to that of the once pervasive institution of slavery. This historical analogy implies both that major state institutions can become obsolete and that such change can come about through changes in ideas, beliefs, and norms. This dissertation will critically assess the historical record of slavery to examine whether it represents an analogous case and process as Mueller and others have implied. By determining if the slavery-major power warfare decline analogy is valid, this dissertation serves as a foundational piece in a larger research agenda on modern warfare. This is a qualitative dissertation utilizing a congruence/process-tracing methodology.

Jesseca Cornelson

Project Title: Difficult History: Alabama in Poems
My dissertation, a poetry collection entitled Difficult History: Alabama in Poems, explores the individual and intersubjective experience of Alabama's historical legacies. It draws on Alabama's rich and often troubled history, connecting the lives of the original native inhabitants, European explorers and settlers, and African slaves to the generations that have followed. Individually, each poem re-imagines a moment or aspect of Alabama's difficult history that might otherwise be forgotten from popular memory; collectively, the poems allow readers to weave their own alternate historical narratives through the poems' interconnected accumulation. The project and its procedure of making use of documentary source material whenever possible reflect my scholarly interests in documentary poetry, Southern literature, and cultural studies.

Erica Dawson

Project Title: The Rabbit Patch
The Rabbit Patch will present a collection of poetry informed by Early Modern British Literature and American Poetry since 1900, focusing on their definitions of self-fashioning discourse and authorship while highlighting respective important themes and popular poetics, revealing the ways in which the Early Modern period is a foundation for today's poetry. The Early Modern poets, in their attempts to define the Self vs. Other (attempts mediated by changing perceptions of public and private space as mid 17th century bourgeois society increasingly places the body within the confines of cozy, candle-lit chambers), initialize the search for a more complex understanding of life's subjective quality coupled with experiences dependent on subjectivity and predicated on interactions with others. The collection of poems will display a contemporary author's writing of the self, utilizing theories of a Neoplatonic World Soul where the intellectual realm is very much linked to the material (real) realm and the individual (the poet) is very much a Foucauldian author whose work does not obliterate the self but rather builds it; a compilation of a marginalized self (black and female), reliant on the careful manipulation of language in a specific, transformative, and present historical moment in our country's narrative.

Michael Ennis

Project Title: The M.S. Wilhelm Gustloff and the "Germans as Victims" Debate in German Memory Culture
The sinking of the German M.S. Wilhelm Gustloff in the last year of World War II is the deadliest maritime disaster in recorded history. Although the ship sank in wartime, most of the passengers were refugees fleeing the Soviet advance. Yet the greater context of Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity have complicated and politicized any attempts at remembering and mourning the tragedy publicly in Germany. Recently, however, the ship has received increased attention in German high and popular culture. The dissertation investigates the shifts in textual and visual representation of the ship from the time of its sinking to the present in an attempt to locate and understand this cultural phenomenon within the greater historical context of a society coming to terms with its dark past.

Rafael Garcia

Project Title: Textual Horizons and Religious Interpretive Communities in 16th Century Spain: the Reception of the Works of Fray luis de Granada (1504-1588)
In my dissertation, I am researching the reception of the works of Fray Luis de Granada, who was one of the best-selling authors in sixteenth-century Spain, especially, though not exclusively, his three most important works: The Book of Prayer and Meditation (1554), The Sinners Guide (1557) and Introduction to the Symbol of Faith (1582). No less important is the contribution these works bring to Spanish prose of the sixteenth-century and the important role that rhetoric plays in his writing. These works were received joyously by some and suspiciously by others, and my task principally consists in giving an answer to this interesting phenomenon by establishing the different interpretative communities that received his works and the horizon of expectations for these communities.

Evan Hart

Project Title: Guerrillas in the Midst: The National Black Women's Health Project
In 1983, Black female activists hosted a national conference on Black women's health issues in order to expand the scope of the burgeoning women's health movement. The conference, held at Spelman College, was the first meeting of Black women discussing their own health care. Many of the women, who had been involved in both the feminist movement and the women's health movement, used their experience in activist groups to begin advocating for their own needs. Conference participants noted that the goals and ideology of the movement were too narrow because it did not address the needs of Black women. The National Black Women's Health Project (NBWHP) was born as a response to those concerns.

My dissertation will demonstrate that the NBWHP was a departure from the larger women's health movement because it recognized the connections between Black women's health and the health of the larger community, while encouraging Black women to become activists for their own health. Moreover, NBWHP activists were deeply conscientious about how the triple jeopardies of racism, sexism, and classism affected black women's health and access to health care. Combining Black feminist theory, along with the long history of activism in Black communities, NBWHP activists attempted to address the needs of Black women, Black communities, as well as forwarding a notion of health care as responsive to all Americans, regardless of race, class, or sex. Thus, by understanding the distinctive Black female experience, the NBWHP redefined "women's" health, not only for the Black community but for the larger women's health movement.

Michael Hutchins

Project Title: W.G. Sebald's Melancholy Messianism
My dissertation offers a new paradigm for understanding the works of the late W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) drawing not only on Sebald's fiction but also on his own scholarly writing. Sebald wrote his prose exclusively in German, but quickly gained an international reputation, and has become one of the most widely read contemporary German authors. His oeuvre, encompassing a great variety of topoi such as melancholia, memory, photography, homeland, travel, and trauma, has proven to be an increasingly fruitful field of scholarly research. However, though this attention points to Sebald's importance and scope, there is little consensus on how these themes interconnect to form a whole. To address this problem—what Sebald scholar J. J. Long recently referred to as the "meta-problem" of Sebald's literary production—my dissertation proposes that Sebald's early research into Jewish messianic traditions not only affected his scholarly studies of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin, but also shaped the way he interacted through fiction with what he called a "history of catastrophe." Using the vocabulary of Jewish messianism, Sebald draws attention to the specifically redemptive role he thought his writings could play, describing his fiction as "an attempt at restitution" for a long history of human atrocities. My project investigates reading Sebald's oeuvre as a kind of idiosyncratic, messianic attempt to mend the world—Sebald uses the Hebrew term Tikkun—that casts a new light on his well-documented use of literary tropes such as melancholia, peregrination, and exile.

Clement Loo

Project Title: Ecosystem Health Reconsidered
In this project I will outline a novel strategy for developing an account of ecosystem health. Appeal to the notion of ecosystem health as being a core concern for environmental ethics is found as early as the work of Aldo Leopold in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet, no serious attempt was made to define it as a concept until the development of conservation biology and restoration ecology in the mid 1980s. Further, it seems that the strategy that has been commonly adopted to work out a theory of ecosystem health has three fundamental problems. First, it adopts a teleological stance that seems untenable given the lack of a clear notion of function that is applicable to ecology. Second, current accounts of ecosystem health rely upon questionable essentialist assumptions. Finally, many have argued that the received approach to defining ecosystem health confuses evaluative judgments with objective fact. I will contend that the problems of traditional attempts to define ecosystem health can be avoided if one adopts a strategy that is more similar to those employed in medicine and psychiatry to define and categorize diseases and disorders. That is, rather than working towards a general broad theory of ecosystem health, it may be more fruitful to adopt a more bottom-up strategy that consists of the organizing and categorization of clusters of observed "symptoms" in particular biotic communities into more general ecosystem "diseases".

Julianne Lynch

Project Title: Mother, Mother
Continuing a tradition of literary retellings, the creative portion of my dissertation—a novel currently titled Mother, Mother—is a very loose reimagining of the Grimm's fairytale "Snow White." Set in modern day, the novel does not simply revisit each element of the original tale, but instead explores the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics, as well as the cultural definitions and demands on female beauty and the ways women are (de)formed by such forces. Beginning with Blair's miraculous birth in a snowstorm, the novel follows her childhood and early adult years as she attempts to come to terms with the death of her mother and her thorny relationship with her stepmother, Vivian. Rather than creating a distinct polarization of "good" and "evil," as the original does, this version attempts to present its characters as fully-developed women who struggle with their roles—both as (step)mother/daughter, as well as women in a contemporary society obsessed with youth and beauty. The novel is particularly concerned with mirrors and how they shape not only our present but also our past and future selves. The first-person, retrospective narrative also creates a certain amount of ambiguity surrounding the "truth" of the magical experiences of Blair's early childhood and asks the reader to consider the artificial aspect of all memory. The critical portion of my dissertation will employ a feminist/narrative theory approach to explore, through the texts of Jane Austen, the ways silenced communities, particularly women, attempt to transcend an established form in order to subvert repressive cultural forces.

Ying Ma

Project Title: Ethnic Language Maintenance among Second-Generation Immigrant Children at Their School Ages
In this project, I propose to examine the acquisition and maintenance of a non-English language among second generation immigrant children when they reach school ages. Previous studies have found that the ethnic languages began to lose its popularity in the second generation immigrants. However, most of these studies focused on immigrant adolescents. I propose to study immigrant children at a younger age when they experience the transition from home to school. The time is critical for minority children since they will experience conflicting demands from a dominant language (English) and their own ethnic language. I will examine multiple contexts (home, school, neighborhood) in which children’s lives are embedded through their early life course. Three research questions will be addressed: 1) how would parents’ racial/ethnic background interact with their SES to affect their children’s likelihood to speak a non-English language? 2) How would the parent-child relationship affect the likelihood of speaking a non-English language by the children? 3) How would the transition from home to school affect children language usage at schools? I will use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) as the major data source and multivariate analysis and logistic regression to answer these questions.

Ivonne Rivas

Project Title: Analysis and Control of the Boussinesq Equation
I propose to study the Boussinesq equation posed on a finite domain with initial and boundary conditions. The Boussinesq equation is a well-know mathematical model for water waves. In particular, it is used to describe propagation of long-crested waves on large lakes on the ocean. In this project, I aim first at proving the well-posedness of the corresponding initial-boundary value problem of the Boussinesq equation to guarantee that there exists a unique solution, which is also well behaved from the physical point of view. Then I will study the Boussinesq equation from the control point of view for its exact controllability and stabilizability.

Rachel Sebastian

Project Title: Child Care/Mother Care: Social Class, Gender Ideology, and Child Care Choices
Child care plays a pivotal role in the intersection of work and family life. Subsequently, a great deal of research has emerged attempting to explain the choices parents make regarding the care of their children. Much of this research, however, has focused on the practical influences of child care choices, such as cost and availability. Fewer studies have examined the effects of parenting beliefs and practices or gender ideology. Those that have indicate that there may be a connection between class-based parenting orientations and non-parental child care arrangements, and that gender ideology may also play a role in child care choices. This study examines the effects of both class-based parenting orientations and gender ideology on the child care choices of working- and middle-class mothers.

This research is an extension of my thesis research in which I examined the relationships between social class location, parenting orientations, and child care arrangements using data from the 2001 National Household Education Surveys (currently under review at the Sociological Inquiry). The present research will extend this idea by interviewing mothers directly to gain a fuller understanding of the ways in which women understand their own roles as mothers, how parents view the role of non-parental child care in children’s growth and development, what forms of non-parental care they believe to be appropriate (if any), and how these beliefs intersect with gender ideology and social class location. Theoretically, this work builds on the work of Annette Lareau by applying her class-based parenting orientations to parents of young children. Specifically, my work contributes to our understanding of how parents choose child care for young children.

Yan Sun

Project Title: Regularization for Stationary Multivariate Time Series
Analyzing multivariate time series has been a very important topic in statistics, econometrics and finance. In practice, most time series data arising from resources such as finance, biomedicine, meteorology, and social networks are best analyzed by multivariate models. For example, in finance, many popular univariate models such as ARMA, ARCH (GARCH), CAPM and dynamic hedging models are being investigated for possible extensions to their multivariate counterparts, because the multivariate models better represent market dynamics under the conditions of the globalized economy. However, the issue of computation efficiency arises as the number of parameters easily explodes with increasing dimension of the model. In order to address the problem and make possible the analysis of high-dimensional multivariate time series, we propose to develop a regularization technique for stationary multivariate time series by penalty, which simultaneously selects variables and estimates parameters, and eventually produces a sparse estimator. Our method is general in the sense that it can be applied to a large class of stationary multivariate time series models. Furthermore, we expect our method to be capable in assisting large covariance estimation and generate sparse covariance matrices. This will be very important because it provides a basis for clustering or sub-grouping, by which a large problem can be reasonably split into several smaller ones and so the analysis will be much simpler.