The dissertation examines aesthetic, scientific and occult evocations of fluids such as air at the turn of the 20th century. Eighteenth century experimental philosophy postulated so-called "imponderable fluids" understood as instances of a subtle matter that fills empty space. The…

Despite earlier evidence to the contrary, recent inquiries appear to reach a consensus that the poor
pay more for food. However, these studies utilize samples drawn on the basis of prior
knowledge of unfair pricing strategies, proximity of volunteer surveyors,…

Although we represent other people in terms of both what they look like and how they behave, these two aspects of person knowledge have rarely been studied together. While vision scientists have focused on the processing of faces and bodies,…

This dissertation explains how the Indian Constitution that came into force in 1950, became part of the lived experience of ordinary Indians during the transition from the colonial state to the postcolonial republic. The Constitution by expanding the powers of…

Detecting and characterizing extrasolar planets has become a very relevant field in Astrophysics. There are several methods to achieve this, but by far the most difficult and potentially most rewarding approach is direct imaging of the planets. Coronagraphs can be…

My dissertation centers on the meaning of dreams as interpreted by literati in the late Ming (1368-1644), viewed through the lens of the 1636 encyclopedia Forest of Dreams. This thirty-four-juan tome is the largest extant Chinese dream encyclopedia and includes…

This dissertation examines the historical evolution of Korean print culture by studying the ways in which the reading public expanded its boundary beyond the confines of canonical texts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this dissertation, I analyze…

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan forced a revolution in military thinking that brought
stability operations to the forefront while coloring the military as one-part warrior, one part reluctant architect of peace. Despite years of experience in stability operations of…

We describe an adaptation of the knowledge gradient, originally developed for discrete ranking and selection problems, to the problem of calibrating continuous parameters for the purpose of tuning a simulator. The knowledge gradient for continuous parameters uses a continuous approximation…

Amidst the disintegration of the Qing Empire (1644-1911), men and women in China began to understand their differences in terms of modern scientific knowledge. Why Sex Mattered provides an explanation for the relatively recent emergence of a psycho-biological notion of…