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…

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…

The range of habitats a plant species is able to occupy is determined by a combination of
biotic and abiotic factors. Herbivores have long been predicted to play an important role in
species sorting by exaggerating the differences between soil…

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…

Visual recognition remains one of the grand goals of artificial intelligence research. One major challenge is endowing machines with human ability to recognize tens of thousands of categories. Moving beyond previous work that is mostly focused on hundreds of categories,…

This dissertation is about family history and the constitution of the social among the Abenaki, an aboriginal people often associated with the Odanak reserve in southern Quebec. It is an ethnography of belonging among a people whose status as aboriginal…