Dissertations Defended: June 2026
ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Sunmin Cha
Netherlandish Images of the Man of Sorrows during the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt
Advisor: David Freedberg
ASTRONOMY
Jingyao Zhu
Gas content, ram pressure stripping, and star formation in low-mass satellite galaxies
Advisor: Mary Putman
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Sergio Bernal-Garcia
SRGAP2 limits experience-dependent structural plasticity in the adult sensory cortex
Advisor: Franck Polleux
Brittany Bistis
Sensory processing in the periphery in chronic social isolation
Advisor: Ishmail Abdus-Saboor
Elias Gumnit
Developmental cell types across the evolution of the vertebrate forebrain
Advisor: Maria Tosches
CHEMISTRY
Haoyu Jiang
Modular construction of perylene diimide-based helical architectures for chiroptical and electronic applications
Advisor: Colin Nuckolls
Minhee Lee
Substrate-derived peptides for selective covalent inhibition of protein tyrosine kinases
Advisor: Neel Shah
EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Hyun Joo Lee
Reconstructing primary mantle carbon isotope: Methodological developments and applications to intraplate volcanism
Advisor: Yves Moussallam
Clare Randolph
Shallow reefs, deep history: The environmental archaeology of medieval Swahili coral harvesting on the Kenya coast
Advisor: Kristina Douglass
ECOLOGY, EVOLUTION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL BIOLOGY
Anubhav Vanamamalai
Navigating challenges and opportunities in India's afforestation initiatives: Balancing forest restoration, biodiversity conservation, and livelihood benefits through effective evaluation of private and public afforestation programs
Advisor: Ruth DeFries
ECONOMICS
Jason Chen
Essays in the economics of professional education
Advisors: Jonah Rockoff and Gautam Gowrisankaran
ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Mieko Anders
The art of work: Asian Anglophone literature after "Japanese" capitalism
Advisor: Denise Cruz
Sophia Pedatella
An orthodoxy of sensibility: Conversion in British literature, 1925–1965
Advisor: Sarah Cole
FRENCH AND ROMANCE PHILOLOGY
Eleanor Grabowski
“Métissage,” war, and memory in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Algerian and Vietnamese literature
Advisor: Madeleine Dobie
HISTORY
Elya Assayag
Embroidering histories: Women, craft, and colonial powers in Morocco, nineteenth–twentieth centuries
Advisors: Camille Robcis and Emmanuelle Saada
Victoria Greene
Gendered warfare in the polis landscape: The experiences of women in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE)
Advisor: John Ma
Nancy Ko
Absorbent empire: Death, disability, and the deep-sea diver in the global Aegean, 1840–1956
Advisor: Rashid Khalidi
Heath Rojas
Written in the heart: Sentimental deism in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution
Advisor: Charly Coleman
Jamil Sbitan
Intimate crises: "Prostitution" and queer history in Egypt, 1834–2001
Advisors: Marwa Elshakry and Rashid Khalidi
ITALIAN
Luca Abbattista
Cesare Pavese and spoken style: The invention of US literature under Fascism
Advisor: Elizabeth Leake
MIDDLE EASTERN, SOUTH ASIAN, AND AFRICAN STUDIES
Mamadou Diallo
The religion of Senegalese laïcité: Conceptual secularization and religion building 1810–1960
Advisor: Mamadou Diouf
PHYSICS
Aaron Holman
Strontium tweezer arrays via holographic metasurfaces
Advisor: Sebastian Will
Emma McLaughlin
Mapping initial-state energy distributions in Au+Au and p+p collisions with sPHENIX
Advisor: William Zajc
Jordan Pack
Investigation of correlated states in high-mobility tungsten diselenide
Advisor: Cory Dean
Siwei Zhang
Strongly dipolar quantum gas of molecules
Advisor: Sebastian Will
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Sinéad Carolan
From efficiency to dynamism: Capitalism's triumph in market-socialist Eastern Europe (1956–1995)
Advisor: Karuna Mantena
Martin Devaux
Essays in the political economy of immigration
Advisor: John Huber
PSYCHOLOGY
Danika Geisler
Self and other processing: Neural classification and implications for depression and inflammation
Advisor: Meghan Meyer