This dissertation examines the administration of Islamic family law in the British Straits Settlements and the Netherlands Indies through the lens of Arab merchants in colonial courts from 1860 till 1942. During this period, Arab communities tended to seek justice…

This dissertation investigates "geological" literature in the 19th century, and aims to describe a poetics of the earth sciences. Focusing on the work of Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), whose literary experiments translate and transform scientific knowledge, the dissertation argues that the…

The use of clocks for timekeeping seems to be a straightforward and almost intuitive routine. Glancing at mechanical clocks designed in Edo period Japan, however, we witness how modern-day intuitions betray our attempts to understand devices created in a culture…

Over the course of the twentieth century, how were real estate developers and architects involved in transforming their own professional practices and the built form of American cities? My dissertation uses historical, architectural, and urban analysis to show how real…

In healthy cells, cytochrome c (cyt c) acts as an electron transport protein peripherally bound to the inner mitochondrial membrane lipid cardiolipin, but it has an important role in apoptosis - upon apoptotic stimuli, it is released from the mitochondria…

Michel Foucault, Thomas Mann, and more recently, Sven-Olov Wallenstein have argued that the modern European hospital of the early twentieth century acted as a research laboratory for a new way of governing human populations. This dissertation studies a subsequent phase…

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,…

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…

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…