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Though Virginia Woolf’s and Kathe Kollwitz's personal histories and specific cultural circumstances were quite different, their aesthetics share fundamental qualities. This dissertation demonstrates that both artists affirm memory, the maternal, and creativity as coalescent, and through doing so assert a principle of connectivity that counters the turmoil of their times. Through this constellation, Woolf’s and Kollwitz's aesthetics exude faith in the continued viability of beauty and of possibility, faith that a commitment to becoming will undermine the sources of hopelessness that enshroud the modem world. Channeling their losses into their creative endeavors, Woolf and Kollwitz appropriated crises from their pasts for moments of personal and cultural edification. They establish maternity as exemplary of the human need for mutuality and maternal desire as a search for interrelation that must be exercised imaginatively. Charting the cataclysms of modernity evident in thought, technology, and warfare, Chapter I demonstrates modernity's collective sense of homeless ness. Chapter II situates theoretically the presences Woolf and Kollwitz assert as potentializing a rediscovery of home; Svetlana Boym's reflective nostalgia and Grace Jantzen's ethic of natality prove especially instrumental here. Chapters III, IV, and V interpret Woolf’s "A Sketch of the Past" and To the Lighthouse as manifestations of Woolf’s creative memory work, of her search for her mother and her lost home. Sketching her mother as an artist, Woolf identifies Julia Stephen as the source of her daughter's creativity and suggests art as a regenerative expression of love. Chapters VI and VII transition to a consideration of Kathe Kollwitz's autobiography and diaries, and of her War series and The Mourning Parents memorial. These chapters illuminate her alignment of the sensuality of mothering with the sensuality of creation, and establish that she experienced her son's death in World War I as a death of becoming. Chapter VII in particular probes the depths of Kollwitz's grief and describes the creative process as a means through which she soothed herself. Creating art enabled her to work toward a world that does not desecrate interconnectivity, imagination, and childhood, a world worthy of her deceased son and of her own mothering.

A growing body of literature links religion to a variety of beneficial health outcomes, but many aspects of the influence of religion on health attitudes and behaviors remain uninvestigated. Most existing work linking religion to health focuses on the United States and other Western contexts, and examinations of reproductive, maternal, and child health are notably absent from research seeking to clarify the relationships between religion and health. This dissertation explores the influences of religious beliefs and behaviors on reproductive, maternal, and child health in Uzbekistan, a theoretically and practically useful context for this study. In this project, I seek to enhance understandings of connections between religion and health by incorporating insights from demographic literature on religion and reproduction and from the body of work on the religion-health connection. In order to answer questions about overall associations between religion and reproductive, maternal, and child health as well as questions about the specific pathways through which religion comes to affect health, I draw on both quantitative and qualitative analyses. I conduct quantitative analysis using secondary survey data collected in 1996 and 2002 in order to address questions related to patterns in the observable relationships between religious affiliation and aspects of reproductive, maternal, and child health in Uzbekistan. To answer questions about mechanisms of religious influence, I turn to qualitative data (observation, focus groups, and in-depth interviews) collected over an 11 month period in two locations (urban and rural) in Uzbekistan. The findings indicate that religion constitutes an important influence on women’s and men’s decisions relating to multiple aspects of reproductive, maternal, and child health in the Uzbek context. The effects of religious beliefs and behaviors on these decisions have the potential to be both beneficial and detrimental to health outcomes, often operating through ideas about gender and familial roles, attitudes about health care utilization, and conceptions of health as a factor of overriding religious importance. The findings are relevant for assessing the utility of previously hypothesized mechanisms linking religion to health and reproduction and suggest several new directions for theorizing about these connections.

A growing body of literature links religion to a variety of beneficial health outcomes, but many aspects of the influence of religion on health attitudes and behaviors remain uninvestigated. Most existing work linking religion to health focuses on the United States and other Western contexts, and examinations of reproductive, maternal, and child health are notably absent from research seeking to clarify the relationships between religion and health. This dissertation explores the influences of religious beliefs and behaviors on reproductive, maternal, and child health in Uzbekistan, a theoretically and practically useful context for this study. In this project, I seek to enhance understandings of connections between religion and health by incorporating insights from demographic literature on religion and reproduction and from the body of work on the religion-health connection. In order to answer questions about overall associations between religion and reproductive, maternal, and child health as well as questions about the specific pathways through which religion comes to affect health, I draw on both quantitative and qualitative analyses. I conduct quantitative analysis using secondary survey data collected in 1996 and 2002 in order to address questions related to patterns in the observable relationships between religious affiliation and aspects of reproductive, maternal, and child health in Uzbekistan. To answer questions about mechanisms of religious influence, I turn to qualitative data (observation, focus groups, and in-depth interviews) collected over an 11 month period in two locations (urban and rural) in Uzbekistan. The findings indicate that religion constitutes an important influence on women’s and men’s decisions relating to multiple aspects of reproductive, maternal, and child health in the Uzbek context. The effects of religious beliefs and behaviors on these decisions have the potential to be both beneficial and detrimental to health outcomes, often operating through ideas about gender and familial roles, attitudes about health care utilization, and conceptions of health as a factor of overriding religious importance. The findings are relevant for assessing the utility of previously hypothesized mechanisms linking religion to health and reproduction and suggest several new directions for theorizing about these connections.

The ability of an upflow, denitrifying biofilter using a fermentation generated carbon source to treat the high nitrate concentrations typically seen in recirculating aquaculture systems was studied using a synthetic nitrate wastewater supplied at two nitrate loadings, 1.13 and 2.52 kg NO3-N/m3/day. A supplemental carbon source was provided primarily through the fermentation of fish food which generated volatile fatty acids (VFA) in the form of acetic, propionic, isobutyric, n-butyric, 2-methylbutyric, 3-methylbutyric, and n-valeric acids. Acetic and propionic acids were the predominant constituents generated, while lower concentrations of the longer carbon chain butyric and valeric acids were produced. The VFAs proved to be a viable carbon source for the denitrification process as indicated by the ability of the biofilm to assimilate all of the constituents generated. Carbon limiting the system resulted in an increase in effluent nitrite and incomplete nitrate removal. During the low nitrate loading condition, influent COD to NO₃-N ratios greater than 5 typically achieved high total nitrogen removals greater than 95%. This influent ratio corresponded with a COD to NOx -N consumption ratio of 4.62 ± 0.28 mg/L as COD per mg/L as N for complete nitrogen removal. Under the high nitrate loading condition, influent COD to NO₃-N ratios achieving high nitrogen removals showed great variability and did not correspond to a distinct value. The COD to NOx -N consumption ratios were often below stoichiometric values, which was attributed to the hydrolysis of influent fermentation solids captured within the column to generate a COD source not measured by filtered samples. The column biofilm kinetics were modeled using a half-order reaction rate and denitrification coefficients (k) of 0.70 ± 0.02 (mg NOx-N/L)1/2 / min and 1.18 ± 0.12 (NOx-N /L)1/2 / min were determined for the low and high nitrate loading phases, respectively.