Dissertations Defended: September 2026

October 19, 2026

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Naomi Klickstein
Systematic discovery of regulators of mtDNA maintenance and organelle morphology
Advisor: Jellert Gaublomme
 

HISTORY

Elizabeth Branscum
Mothers, midwives, and medicine: Gestation in early modern England, 1540–1700
Advisor: Pamela Smith
 

PHYSICS

Jose Ignacio Cevallos Aleman
Baryons hiding in plain sight: Kinematic mapping of nearby galaxies with integral field spectroscopy
Advisor: David Schiminovich

Yikai Huo
Enhanced lattice quantum chromodynamics studies of the neutral kaon mass difference and indirect charge-parity violation
Advisor: Norman Christ

Ki Ryeong Park
Emerging from the dark: A search for dark matter in emerging-jet final states with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
Advisor: P. Michael Tuts
 

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Carolina Bernal Uribe
What makes a benefit political? Spillovers, saturation, and incentive design
Advisor: John Marshall
 

RELIGION

Tianran Hang
Embodying oni: Demons, spectacle, and ritual performance in early medieval Japan
Advisor: Michael Como
 

SOCIOLOGY

Jonathan Ben-Menachem
Twenty-first-century crime news work
Advisor: Bruce Western

Ludovico Genovese
Beyond altruism: The social and genetic determinants of large-scale cross-group cooperation
Advisors: Thomas DiPrete and Mario Small

Eugene Grey
The American duel: Status contestation and role structuring in honor settings
Advisor: Peter Bearman

Jacob LaViolette
Toward a real sociology of fictional personhood: Social difference in commercial American literature, 1861–1899
Advisor: Peter Bearman

Hannah Pullen-Blasnik
Places, technologies, and transitions: Contested regulation in urban development and the criminal legal system
Advisor: Bruce Western