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…

Malaria and diarrhea are major causes of illness and death in Africa. These preventable diseases take the biggest toll on children, mostly due to lack of education and adequate resources in the home. The purpose of the reported research project…

This dissertation will focus on the processing and learning of abstract, phrasal argument structure constructions. Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework for abstract constructions, and illustrates the importance of such representations in speakers' linguistic knowledge. Chapter 2 reviews the evidence…

Conflicting reports have emerged as to whether entry of alpha-herpesvirus particles occurs by receptor-mediated membrane fusion or pH-dependent endocytosis, and whether the method of entry differs by cell type. At the other end of the virus replication cycle, it is…

The central goal of compressed sensing is to capture attributes of a signal using very few measurements. The initial publications by Donoho and by Candes and Tao have been followed by applications to image compression, data streaming, medical signal processing,…

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,…

With the advancement of technology, we are able to collect, store, and transmit an ever-increasing volume of data. However, our ability to extract useful patterns from this massive amount of data is still lagging behind. Machine learning and signal processing…

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, based on roughly eighteen months of fieldwork in two laboratories at Princeton University, examines how practitioners of synthetic biology orient themselves vis-à-vis organic systems, by both engaging with and displacing biological knowledge. It also explores experimental methods in…

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…