Dissertations Defended: April 26
ANTHROPOLOGY
Akshay Ragupathy
Kabza and the spirit of commodity fetishism in Hyderabad, Telangana
Advisor: Rosalind Morris
Chazelle Rhoden
Afro-religious animations: Spirit, space, and climate change conservation in Brazil
Advisors: Vanessa Agard-Jones and Paige West
ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Katherine Gobel
Child's play in Jan Steen's comic paintings
Advisor: David Freedberg
Hannah Pivo
Data, form, and the future: Graphic methods in the United States, 1910s–30s
Advisor: Zeynep Çelik Alexander
Rebecca Yuste-Golob
Building the Enlightenment: Mexico City at the end of empire
Advisor: Barry Bergdoll
ASTRONOMY
Maryum Sayeed
Rebels of the night sky: Studying anomalous stellar populations with spectroscopy and asteroseismology
Advisor: Melissa Ness
CHEMICAL PHYSICS
Kelsey Harrison
Structure-property relationships in organic materials for Li and Mg-metal batteries
Advisor: Colin Nuckolls
CHEMISTRY
Chun-Ying Huang
Polarization waves in two-dimensional vdW ferroelectrics NbOX2
Advisors: Xiaoyang Zhu and Xavier Roy
CLASSICAL STUDIES
Shenda Kuang
Reading Herodotos's Historiai phenomenologically
Advisor: John Ma
CLASSICS
Valeria Spacciante
Bodies of knowledge: Norm and resistance in the Greek novel
Advisor: Nancy Worman
EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Huy Le
Deep electromagnetic imaging of fluid distribution in sedimentary basins
Advisors: Kerry Key and Michael Steckler
Maheenuz Zaman
Experimental constraints on frictional and poroviscous processes on icy moons
Advisor: Christine McCarthy
EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES
Hana Lethen
Choreographies of eccentricity: Madness, dance, and gender in Medieval Noh theater
Advisor: Haruo Shirane
ECOLOGY, EVOLUTION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL BIOLOGY
Rupinder Kaur Bakhshi
Evaluation of socio-ecological outcomes of governance and management of forest and non-forest commons
Advisor: Ruth DeFries
Ayanna Butler-Hooker
Controls on post-disturbance nitrogen losses in tropical forests
Advisor: Duncan Menge
Rachel Cohen
The genetics of recognition: Parasitism, reproduction, and genome evolution in flowering plants
Advisor: Deren Eaton
Erich Eberhard
Considering the role of disturbance legacies in shaping tropical peat swamp forest responses to novel fire regimes
Advisors: Ruth DeFries and Shahid Naeem
Marie Lilly
Ticks in the city: Socio-ecological dynamics of tick-borne disease across an urbanization gradient
Advisor: Maria Diuk-Wasser
ECONOMICS
Nikhil Basavappa
Essays in development economics
Advisor: Jack Willis
Giovanni Bonfanti
Essays in European integration
Advisors: Jesse Schreger and Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé
Luigi Beneduci Caloi
Essays in transfer systems and development
Advisor: Eric Verhoogen
Andrea Ciccarone
Essays on political and organizational economics
Advisor: Andrea Prat
Sai Krishna Kamepalli
Essays in macroeconomics of microeconomic frictions
Advisors: Christian Moser and Hassan Afrouzi
Tushar Kundu
Essays on the development and measurement of human capital
Advisor: Eric Verhoogen
Daniel Di Martino
Immigration policy as industrial policy: Evidence from post-legalization occupational upgrading, heterogeneous fiscal impact, and ethnic innovation
Advisor: Eric Verhoogen
Ricardo Pommer Muñoz
Essays on information and climate economics
Advisors: Mark Dean and Jack Willis
Kate Musen
Essays on the economics of vulnerable children
Advisor: Sandra Black
William Nober
Essays in public economics
Advisor: Jonah Rockoff
Shuhua Si
Essays in behavioral economic theory
Advisors: Alessandra Casella and Michael Woodford
ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Margaret Banks
Burdened becomings: Black girlhood, temporal constraint, and the literary makings of something else to be
Advisor: Farah Griffin
Levi Hord
Tracing the nonbinary present: Self-definition and the genre of contemporary gender claims
Advisor: Jack Halberstam
Evelyn MacPherson
Culture slick: The Nation, the text, and the multinational corporation
Advisor: Jennifer Wenzel
HISTORY
Roxanne Houman
Agents of Decolonization: NGO educators, EU regulators, the European consumer 1942–2024
Advisor: Emmanuelle Saada