Dissertations Defended: May 2026
ANTHROPOLOGY
Maxwell Grear
Reparto returns: Music and capital in reform-era Havana
Advisor: Rosalind Morris
Emily Hoffman
Child protection, eastern Oklahoma
Advisor: Rosalind Morris
Jenny Ni
Re-making place: Comanche politics, rock art, and the shaping of landscapes
Advisor: Severin Fowles
ASTRONOMY
Jennifer Mead
From the first stars to the Milky Way: Fingerprints of chemical enrichment across cosmic time
Advisor: Greg Bryan
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Vanesa Getseva
Leveraging relatedness in genomic datasets to study variation in germline mutation rates
Advisor: Molly Przeworski
Zhengyuan Lu
Structure of the human sweet taste receptor
Advisor: Charles S. Zuker
Sakina Plumber
The role of nuclear hormone receptors in mediating basal to luminal differentiation in bladder cancer
Advisor: Cathy Mendelsohn
Qiulin Zhu
A mitochondrial lipid-peroxidation-to-apoptosis cell signaling cascade centered on complex I
Advisor: Brent Stockwell
CHEMICAL PHYSICS
Wenrui Lei
Structure and transport engineering of perylene diimide-based organic electrodes for metal batteries
Advisor: Colin Nuckolls
CHEMISTRY
Margalit Feuer
Interlocking charge and magnetic orders in 2D materials
Advisor: Xavier Roy
Yuzuka Karube
The optical properties of infrared-active nanoparticles
Advisor: P. James Schuck
Junho Kwon
The impact of radicals embedded in singlet fission systems
Advisor: Luis Campos
Shayan Louie
Engineering charge and ion transport across length scales in organic electronic materials
Advisor: Colin Nuckolls
Meghna Maiti
The mechanism of reading-frame maintenance by tRNA modification
Advisor: Ruben Gonzalez
Saya Okuno
Chemical control and materials design of emergent properties in superatomic materials
Advisor: Colin Nuckolls
Mariah Ramos
Expanding blue-light methodologies for the formation of reactive radical intermediates
Advisor: Tomislav Rovis
Jacklin Smith
Designing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons with potassium metal
Advisors: Colin Nuckolls and Xavier Roy
CLASSICAL STUDIES
Jacob Haagenson
Language, knowledge, and self-knowledge in the Platonic Alcibiades
Advisor: Katja Vogt
CLASSICS
José Antonio Cancino Alfaro
Latin histories of the Americas
Advisor: Katharina Volk
Brett Stine
Skin deep: Bodily representations and surface poetics in Homer, Hesiod and the Theognidea
Advisor: Nancy Worman
EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Avriel Diaz
End-to-end climate services for public health: A novel Earth-system forecasting framework and operational toolkit for vector-borne disease prevention in Latin America and the Caribbean
Advisor: Ángel Muñoz
EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES
Yong-Ha Kim
Rethinking unification: Ideology, standardization, and local accommodation in the Qin empire (221–207 BCE)
Advisor: Feng Li
Crismon Lewis
Bronze Inscriptions and the beginnings of early Chinese literature
Advisor: Feng Li
ECOLOGY, EVOLUTION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL BIOLOGY
Kathleen Carreras Pereira
From falling leaves to forest soils: Investigating the Effects of Mycorrhizal Dominance on Biogeochemical Cycles in a Temperate Forest
Advisor: Duncan Menge
ECONOMICS
Bruno Velloso
Essays on technology, growth, and financing in developing economies
Advisor: Eric Verhoogen
ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Katherine Bergevin
Pleading the belly in early eighteenth-century literature
Advisor: Julie Crawford
GERMANIC LANGUAGES
Luca Arens
The indecent imagination from Kant to Kafka
Advisor: Oliver Simons
HISTORY
Charis Marantzidou
Politics of displacement: Russian refugees in Bulgaria and the European order, 1917–1934
Advisors: Catherine Evtuhov and Mark Mazower
James Nadel
Jewish commerce: Jewish merchants, capital formation and financial governance between Russian Empire and Polish nation, 1850–1931
Advisor: Catherine Evtuhov
Karolina Partyga
Starting from scrap: Material politics of Polish reconstruction and the industrial remaking of East Central Europe, 1944–1950
Advisors: Malgorzata Mazurek and Mark Mazower
Marie Robin
War and sex: French military brothels, sexual violence and decolonization in Vietnam and Algeria (c.1945–1962)
Advisor: Emmanuelle Saada
Lucy Sharp
Au pairs in postwar Britain
Advisor: Susan Pedersen
LATIN AMERICAN AND IBERIAN CULTURES
Miguel Ángel Blanco Martínez
Artivist geographies for feminist worlds: A cultural analysis of social justice in contemporary Spain (2010s–2020s)
Advisors: Alberto Medina and Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Vered Engelhard
Sowing and harvesting water: Mutuality and cosmotechnics in the Andean highlands
Advisors: Bruno Bosteels and Ana Maria Ochoa
Arnau Sala Sallent
A strait of the avant-garde: Spain, Morocco, and the transcolonial imagination, 1898–1936
Advisor: Alberto Medina
MIDDLE EASTERN, SOUTH ASIAN, AND AFRICAN STUDIES
Basma Radwan
The politics of eating well: France, Egypt, and the making of modern alimentary knowledge
Advisor: Timothy Mitchell
MUSIC
Gareth Cordery
Gender, mechanization, and the étude: Discourses of pedagogy in the nineteenth century
Advisor: Walter Frisch
David Farrow
Ephemeral autonomy: The politics of place in illegal art spaces
Advisor: Aaron Fox
MUSIC COMPOSITION
Artun Cekem
Mea Pulpa: A musical response to the problem of moral agency and determinism
Advisor: Marcos Balter Martins da Silva
PHILOSOPHY
Amogha Sahu
The significance of ethical foundationalism
Advisor: Justin Clarke-Doane
PHYSICS
Gabriel Bridges
Shock and awe: Probing the galactic mass reservoir with NuSTAR measurements of white dwarf masses and searches for dark matter with GAPS
Advisor: Charles Hailey
Jinyu Dai
Laser cooling and magneto-optical trapping of diatomic metal hydrides and deuterides
Advisor: Tanya Zelevinsky
Brandon Iritani
Precision spectroscopy of Sr2 for metrology, quantum chemistry, and tests of fundamental physics
Advisor: Tanya Zelevinsky
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Beatrice Bonini
“Lite Politics”: Political participation in the era of social media
Advisor: John Marshall
Aaron Christensen
Legibility and statebuilding in North and West Africa
Advisor: John Marshall
PSYCHOLOGY
Craig Poskanzer
Switching between internal and external attention
Advisor: Mariam Aly
SOCIOLOGY
Seungwon Lee
The matrix of criticism: How critique propels the social science field
Advisor: Peter Bearman
Monika Yadav
Judging claims: Discernment, skepticism, and the social organization of truth evaluation
Advisors: Peter Bearman and James Chu