Dissertations Defended: March 2026
ANTHROPOLOGY
Stephanie Ratté
Flooding forestalled: Environmental planning, infrastructure, and disrepair in Honolulu
Advisor: Paige West
ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Virginia Girard
Geomyths in early Netherlandish landscapes, 1500–1600
Advisor: David Freedberg
Eric Mazariegos
The coastal ecologies of El Dorado: Aesthetics, materiality, and the unmaking of Tairona gold, c. 1000–1500 CE
Advisor: Lisa Trever
Ashley Williams
Unfree artists on the borders of US empire, 1850–1930
Advisor: Elizabeth Hutchinson
ASTRONOMY
Shifra Mandel
A comprehensive study of the X-ray point sources in the Galactic Center and beyond
Advisors: Lorenzo Sironi and Charles Hailey
CHEMICAL PHYSICS
Yiliu Li
A time-domain view of moiré quantum matter
Advisor: Xiaoyang Zhu
CHEMISTRY
Jordan Cox
Chemical control of optoelectronic properties in van der Waals materials
Advisor: Xavier Roy
CLASSICS
Nicholas Koudounis
Athens' barbaroi: Case studies in non-Greek integration in classical Athens (500–300 BCE)
Advisor: John Ma
EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES
Constantine Lignos
Dancing Tantra: Body, text, and performance in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
ECONOMICS
Nadia Ali
Essays on markets and firms in Tunisia
Advisors: Suresh Naidu and Eric Verhoogen
Laura Caron
Essays on disability, inequality, and causal inference in education and labor economics
Advisors: Alessandra Casella and Simon Lee
Tianhao Liu
Three essays on information: Learning, fragility, and privacy
Advisor: Navin Kartik
Yifan Shi
Essays in financial economics: Determinants of corporate financial policy
Advisor: Wojciech Kopczuk
Hanyao Zhang
Essays on decisions under risk
Advisor: Mark Dean
Yangfan Zhou
Information and incentives under uncertainty
Advisors: Maria Doval and Navin Kartik
GERMANIC LANGUAGES
Didi Tal
Papers and trails: Holocaust refugees and US immigration control
Advisor: Claudia Breger
HISTORY
Evan Brown
Organizing baseball: Reworking the transnational circuit, 1946–1965
Advisor: Frank Guridy
MATHEMATICS
Kevin Chang
Hurwitz spaces, Nichols algebras, and Igusa zeta functions
Advisor: William Sawin
Georgy Gaitsgori
Explicitly solvable problems in optimal stopping, stochastic control, and sequential inference
Advisor: Ioannis Karatzas
Zongrui Yang
Boundary interactions for models in the KPZ universality class
Advisor: Ivan Corwin
MUSIC (DMA)
Camila Agosto
Tuning the body: Perception in motion in Catherine Lamb’s Prisma Interius V and Pauline Oliveros’s Primordial Lift
Advisor: Zosha Di Castri
PHILOSOPHY
Michael Holmes
The autonomy of the oppressed: A pragmatics-first account of discursive injustice
Advisor: Karen Lewis
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Lionel Ong
Local candidate selection in patronage democracies
Advisor: John Marshall
David Vilalta
Power, profits, and votes: Essays on the political economy of firm-state interdependence in the twenty-first century
Advisor: John Marshall
SLAVIC LANGUAGES
Uma Payne
The genius of unhappiness: Queer literary heroism and critical self-regard
Advisor: Mark Lipovetsky
SOCIOLOGY
Katy Habr
Precarity after crisis: The political economy of the post-COVID workplace
Advisor: Adam Reich
STATISTICS
Andres Ignacio Riveros Valdevenito
Totally inaccessible stopping times, path-dependent volatility, and quadratically regularized optimal transport
Advisors: Marcel Nutz and Philip Protter
Yizi Zhang
Learning representations under data heterogeneity: Scalable self-supervised models for generalizable neural encoding and decoding
Advisor: Liam Paninski