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Several theories have been presented over the last century regarding the canonical history of the letters traditionally associated with the apostle Paul. For some, the letters of Paul most likely did not begin to circulate as a literary collection until the late-first or early-second century, while for others the collection began to take shape closer to the time of Paul's death and was further developed in subsequent decades. Variations of these two basic viewpoints have been presented along with a number of alternative theories. The objective of this thesis is to provide a fresh examination of the formation, publication, and circulation of the Corpus Paulinum in early Christianity by examining a wide range of internal and external evidence. The initial portion of the thesis examines several relevant passages from the Pauline letters and concludes that several of Paul's associates played an important role in the composition and delivery of his letters. With regard to the external evidence, the thesis analyzes several Greek manuscripts, the titles of the Pauline epistles, the earliest translations of the epistles, the reference to the letters in 2 Pet 3:15-16, the testimony of the early church fathers andancient secular writers, and the earliest canonical lists of New Testament writings. Following a discussion of how these subjects inform our understanding of the early development of the corpus as a whole, what may be known of the early canonical history of the Pastoral Epistles and Hebrews is treated. On the basis of the internal and external evidence discussed throughout the thesis, several conclusions are offered, perhaps most notably that at least three major editions of the corpus (i.e., corpora containing 10, 13, and 14 letters) emerged fairly early, each of which circulated simultaneously for several centuries until editions containing 14 volumes became nearly universally recognized.

This thesis examines the theology of the fourth-century bishop, Hilary of Poitiers, concentrating particularly on two commentaries written at different times in his life. The thesis starts by examining the texts, and demonstrates that Hilary's commentary on Psalm 118 is loosely speaking a translation of Origen; by comparing both authors with Ambrose, the relationship between Origen and Hilary appears much closer than previously thought. The main body of the thesis examines Hilary's anthropological theology. Three chapters look at created human nature, looking at the relationship between body and soul, human nature as imago dei, and the extent to which human nature can be treated as a platonic universal. The general conclusion is that Hilary is not particularly platonic, and at this stage is not particularly stoic either, but rather is eclectic in his choice of philosophical ideas. The influence of Origen is clear but Hilary only uses Origen's theology critically. There follow four chapters on the Fall and its impact, focussing particularly on its effects on human nature. In particular it is shown that Hilary presages Augustine's teaching of the fallen will; in Hilary the Will is described as being in thrall to her mother-in-law Disobedience. Another human malady is the effect of the passions or emotions, where Hilary is influenced by Stoic ideas of the process of human action; nevertheless, concepts such as apatheia or the propatheiai do not appear in his work. These constraints on human action point towards Hilary's theology of original sin; indeed he appears to be the first author to use the phrase peccata originis in this sense. In the concluding chapter, Hilary's place in the continuum between Origen and Augustine is demonstrated; at very least, original sin cannot be called an African doctrine, since it first is named by Hilary, a Gaul.

One of the most understudied frontiers, the Kentucky frontier was also one of the most violent. For twenty years this region was affected by a bloody war that came to involve the new settler population, numerous Indian tribes, the British, and the American government. More than a border war, the battle for Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian west came to define the communities which grew up in its midst, altering world views, attitudes, and compounding prejudices. It is the purpose of this thesis to accomplish two goals: first, this work will tackle the lack of recent scholarship on this region by providing a detailed history of the Kentucky frontier during the American Revolution and its subsequent period. The second goal of this thesis is to study, analyse and understand how the violence generated by the war with the Indians helped to shape settler society. By thinking of violence not purely as the result of other, more potent social forces – racism, economic fears, competition for land – it is possible to study and understand its formative impact upon early American society. From the short term development of vendetta fuelled warfare to the long term impact this war had upon relations between white and Native America, the war for the trans-Appalachian west saw violence taking on a particularly important, particularly formative role.

Abstract: Researchers have suggested that trauma-informed practice can lessen the impact of trauma on children during their development. No studies have examined the practices that Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) implement when working with teenage parents' children. This qualitative study examines the trauma-informed practices and experiences of ECEs working with teenage parents' children at the Terra Centre. This project was co-created with the Terra Centre through a community-based approach. The participants of this study include ECEs who work with teen families, infants and young children. Through this qualitative study, six semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed using thematic analysis. Participants shared their experiences and trauma-informed practices in line with two main themes, Lifework and Learning and A Web of Relational Care. Within Lifework and Learning, three main areas were explored: Experiences and work with children and teens, Overcoming bias and Adjusting to logistical challenges. Within A Web of Relational Care, five main topics are discussed: Acknowledging history and intergenerational trauma, Stigma and challenges, Developmentally informed care, a Strengths-based approach and Trauma-informed care. Implications for research and practice are discussed in an effort to allow for practical use of findings by teachers, ECEs, and anyone with an interest in working with teen families.

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to understand early resignation of Salvation Army officers in the Southern Territory by investigating their lived experiences with the phenomenon. The theories guiding this study were role identity, as it explains the differences in perceptions and actions that accompany a role and emotional intelligence (EI), which refers to a generic competence in perceiving emotions, both in oneself and in others. The central research question addressed how former Salvation Army officers in the Southern Territory perceive that their officership experiences impacted their decision to resign early. The subquestions for this study addressed (a) how former Salvation Army officers in the Southern Territory who resigned early perceive that their training prepared them to handle the challenges of officership; (b) how former Salvation Army officers in the Southern Territory who resigned early describe the impact of role expectations on their officership; and (c) how former Salvation Army officers in the Southern Territory who resigned early perceive that they exhibited EI in their officership. Through purposeful sampling, 10 participants were selected. In addition, data collection included individual interviews, focus group interviews, and archival records. Data analysis involved the review of interview transcripts and identifying significant statements for coding and analyzing purposes in order to understand the lived experiences of officers who resigned early. Findings indicated that officer development in practical administrative responsibilities, along with EI training and in-depth biblical studies, increased resiliency, ability, self-confidence and self-care, thereby reducing the attrition rate of officers in the Southern Territory.

This study investigated the effects of high-quality early childhood program dosage by measuring its associations with low-income children’s vocabulary and social-emotional characteristics. The current study also examined the different patterns of annual change between monolingual English-speaking children and Spanish-speaking English Language Learners (ELLs) in two dimensions of language development. The purpose of this study was to explore program impact at two levels of dosage per measure, Group 1 (single year of program) and Group 2 (two or more years of program). Results revealed significant increases in fall-to-spring PPVT-IV scores for English-speaking children in Group 2, significant decreases in Spanish PLS-5 scores for 48-month-olds in Group 2, and significant increases in DECA Total Protective Factors scores for 48-month-olds in Group 2. Limitations of the current study, future directions, and implications for practice are also discussed Adviser: Helen Raikes

A watershed of knowledge about how very young children learn and develop has been revealed through the science of child development. The science of child development has demonstrated that immediately from birth, babies need supportive relationships and responsive environments in order to build strong brain circuits and lay the foundations for both physical and mental health. Increasingly very young children (under three years of age) in the United States depend on early childhood teachers for their care and education. Studies of early childhood teacher preparation programs, that focused on preparing teachers of children from birth to grade three, have found that pre-service students may not take even one course about infants and toddlers (birth to three years of age) or that the coverage of infants and toddlers is marginalized within the curriculum. This post-intentional phenomenological study (Vagle, 2014) examined the phenomena of how infant and toddler content might take shape in bachelor’s degree (BA/BS) programs that offer Early Childhood teacher (birth to grade three) licensure in Minnesota. The phenomenon was studied though investigating the experiences of six faculty members who teach courses about infants and toddlers and seven staff members of university-sponsored child development centers who host students in their classrooms as an infant or toddler practicum connected to the courses taught by the faculty. Findings from this study are depicted through six tentative manifestations of the phenomenon: Swimming against the Current, Complexity, Un-like, Mentoring Students, Perspectives on Parents and Beyond Standards. The tentative manifestations were produced as a synthesis of the experience of faculty and staff: attending to the Minnesota Board of Teaching’s Early Childhood Teacher Preparation Standards (87100:3000); in dialogue with participants’ personal preparation, experiences, beliefs, and convictions; in consideration of the demographics of the pre-service students; and in response to current information and issues within early childhood education. This research contributes to an understanding of how infant toddler content took shape in five early childhood teacher preparation programs and also yielded significant practical implications for teaching pre-service teacher candidates about infants and toddlers.

Early diagnosis of HIV in infants is critical because it can remarkably impact an infant’s survival. DNA PCR is the standard test for diagnosis of HIV-1 in infants and young children less than 18 months of age. For settings that lack the adequate infrastructure for processing whole blood and cold-chain transportation, the collection of dried blood spots (DBS) has facilitated the detection of HIV-1 in infants as early as 4-6 weeks after birth. Molecular testing using DBS provides an accurate method for the identification of HIV-1 but quality testing depends greatly on adequate quality assurance. A voluntary, cost-free external quality assurance program established by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Global AIDS Program was implemented to monitor the performance of laboratories conducting HIV EID from DBS in an effort to provide the critically needed external quality assurance measures in resource-constrained settings. Known HIV- positive and negative DBS specimens to be used as internal controls and ten blinded DBS specimens are shipped internationally tri-annually with a 30 day testing result turnaround. Peer comparison is provided after each testing time point. Advances by resource-constrained countries to conduct EID have resulted in more children being tested, which resulted in enrollment and participation expanding significantly to include greater than 104 laboratories from 36 countries. Mean test scores have improved with each testing but false negative results are twice as likely as false positive discordant outcomes.

As the first compulsory grade in the elementary school program, kindergarten is designed to prepare students for the numbered grades. Students are eligible for entrance into kindergarten if they turn five before a state-determined cut-off date. These dates range from the June before the start of school until the January after. Because some states do not require that children attend kindergarten until 6, 7, or even 8 years old, some parents are delaying their child’s entry into the program on the assumption that their child will benefit from an extra year to grow cognitively, physically, and emotionally. The result is a large age spread for kindergarten students nationwide as well as an increased average age. In this paper, I survey research done into the practice of delayed entry into kindergarten. For my research, I intend to address the deficiency in current research concerning the experiences of students prior to their entry into kindergarten. Which is the best scenario for students to increase their academic achievement in kindergarten: on time entry with no formal preschool experience, on time entry with preschool experience, delayed entry with no formal preschool experience, or delayed entry with formal preschool experience. Using the National Education for Statistics Kindergarten cohort, I will compare the achievement of students across theses categories. Specifically, I will focus on literacy achievement including placing students along a hierarchical line of literacy ability Adviser: Guy Trainin

Spatial mobility, whether free or coerced, was an increasingly prominent fact of life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America. This dissertation investigates an understudied aspect of that state of affairs by placing mobility infrastructures at the center of early American history. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, it traces the evolution of a complex system of social organization consisting of diverse mechanisms, channels, spaces, and networks of movement and exchange, and argues that that system was an integral component of social, economic and political development. Challenging standard interpretations of early transportation as static, limited, and inconsequential, this dissertation demonstrates that mobility infrastructures shaped colonial and state development in three fundamental ways. First, networks of improved roads extended European settlement and commerce hundreds of miles inland, altering the ethnic composition of the borderlands and generating diversified internal economies. Second, colonial and imperial infrastructure projects sparked bitter inter-colonial rivalries over land, resources, and trade that would persist into the early national period. Third, disparate European-American and Native Americans understandings of the social function of transport created patterns of structural marginalization, which in turn generated conflict over control of the movement of people, goods, and information. This dissertation makes several important contributions to the study of Early America. By showing the centrality of infrastructure to the settlement, expansion and integration of early American societies, it demonstrates that meaningful internal improvement began well before the transportation revolution of the nineteenth century. Similarly, it complements the growing body of scholarship on the movement of people, goods, ideas, institutions, and practices in the Atlantic world, showing how patterns of circulation normally associated with Atlantic communities were reproduced within North American colonies. Furthermore, in offering a more nuanced understanding of Native American systems and practices, it accords a meaningful place for Natives as active agents in the evolution of American transportation. Lastly, it contributes to the study of economic development in early North America, showing that infrastructure was critical to the diversification of inland economies and their integration into colonial, regional, and Atlantic markets.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Benjamin Britten's operas remain in the opera repertory worldwide. Whereas scholarship before Britten's death treated him and his works with deference, scholarship after Britten's death addressed undiscussed aspects of his life and implicit themes in his works. Some scholars brought Britten's sexuality to bear upon interpretation of his operas; other scholars cautioned against employing this analytical strategy. Lost in the fray were discussions of his musico-dramatic technique, the artful nature of which might explain the effect his operas have on audiences perhaps unsympathetic to the themes they explore. After the crosscurrents of Britten studies are mapped in chapter 1, the ontology and narratology of modern opera are considered in chapter 2. Seeking to locate Britten's early operas---Peter Grimes (1945), The Rape of Lucretia (1946), and Albert Herring (1947)---within an operatic tradition that celebrates narrative, this dissertation engages with works by Edward T. Cone and Carolyn Abbate. Aspects of operatic narratology are explored in dialogue with the work of literary narratologist Mieke Bal; in particular, a model of focalization, the musico-dramatic process by which listeners come to hear operas through the ears of focal singers, is developed with reference to the operas under study. Seeking then to locate these operas within an operatic tradition that explores notions of subjectivity, this dissertation engages with the work of Gary Tomlinson and others on the externalization of subjectivity in operatic music. A model is proposed in which the subjectivities of Britten's (often masculine) focalizors are externalized musically through webs of tonal symbols, the central areas of which mimic the Freudian tri-partite psyche. Chapters 3 through 5 are case studies: a coherent tonal web is found in Grimes that tints the opera with the paranoiac subjectivity of the titular fisherman; interactions between the Choruses and mythic characters of Lucretia are explored, and one mythic character is suggested to be peculiarly deaf; and the comic conclusion of Herring is shown to hinge on focalization. Chapter 6 presents conclusions regarding narrative and masculine subjectivity in these operas and suggests how a similar case study of Billy Budd (1951) might begin.

Developing accurate construction estimates is critical for electric utilities to make reliable financial plans for their future. Parametric estimating is just one of several techniques available to help estimate the cost of a construction project. Other estimating methods may have some advantages over parametric estimating in the latter stages of a project but parametric estimating is possibly the most accurate method in the very early stages of a project. This report delves into the analysis and development of a parametric equation for use primarily in the very early stages of a construction project. The result of this research is a functional equation that can be used for estimating future electric substation construction cost with a fair level of confidence.

Generally speaking, scholarship in the field of Germanistik has taken an interest in Friedrich Schlegel’s early publication, “Vom aesthetischen Werte der griechischen Komoedie” (1794), either because of its perceived influence on German Romantic Comedy [(Catholy 1982), (Kluge 1980), (Holl 1923), (Japp 1999)], or else because of its relevance as an example of Schlegel's still inchoate aesthetic philosophy [(Dierkes 1980), (Behrens 1984), (Schanze 1966), (Michel 1982), (Dannenberg 1993), (Mennemeier 1971)]. As a theory of comedy in its own right, Schlegel’s essay has garnered little attention, in part because of its supposed inapplicability to comedic praxis and at times utopian implications, in part because of its seemingly contradictory argument, and lastly in part because Schlegel himself abandoned the essay’s central premise soon after its publication. However, it is the central argument of the present study that Schlegel’s essay can be shown to be interesting and relevant precisely for the theory of comedy it contains. Through a close reading of Schlegel’s essay on Old Greek Comedy, as well as an examination of Schlegel’s early political and aesthetic beliefs, which will help render Schlegel’s theory more intelligible, it will be shown that Schlegel’s theory of comedy is novel in so far as it is one of the first aesthetic theories to claim that comedic practice is necessarily deprived of aesthetic validity unless it exists in a social atmosphere of freedom of expression, namely, such as that of the Athenians. The implication is that Schlegel here predicates an aesthetic theory upon one of society. Schlegel’s theory is also interesting for the peculiar type of comedy it advocates, namely a joyous comedy (Comedy of ‘Freude’), which stands in direct opposition to the ‘Satirische Verlachskomoedie’ of the Enlightenment and makes use of a comedic mechanism (joy) that is anathema to traditional negative comedic elements (satire, derision, mockery etc.). The conclusion discusses what the relevance and value of these implications might be for future research.

Expressing fondness between individuals, friendship also registers larger cultural trends and affinities. This dissertation argues that in early modern France, friendships between putatively non-equal individuals---masters and servants, rulers and subjects, elders and youths---expressed the culture's new and shifting appreciation of difference. Looking beyond classically-inspired topoi of ressemblant, egalitarian friendship (also prominent in the era), I question the adequacy of the single amical soulmate as a Renaissance cultural ideal. I show that underling friends appear textually valued as purveyors of insight about courtly behavior. Moreover, humanist esteem for encyclopedic knowledge and breadth of identity valorized certain off-the-beaten-path friends. Examining the textual staging of unequal bonds as unions which realize humanist prerogatives, I revise our understanding of the cultural work which service performed in the Renaissance. Chapter One engages early modern writers (Marot, Montaigne) as well as modern-day network theory to conceptualize non-equal friends' relevance in a Renaissance culture at once more demanding and more gentle. Chapter Two develops this notion through a reading of Rabelais, showing that Rabelais figures friendly ties as irrevocably but also humanely grounded in service. If Panurge is the friend of the kindly, humane, progressive Pantagruel, he is also his servant. The vast implications of this service, which play into the full range of Rabelais' literary modes and moods, bespeak the socially encompassing and literarily trans-generic nature of such friendships' relevance. Chapters Three through Five evoke this scope by considering the figuration of unequal friendship in several genres. Memoirs by Marillac, Sully, and La Fayette, novellas by Jean-Pierre Camus, a dialogue by Marie de Romieu, and the writings of Marie de Gournay variously idealize (and show ambivalence toward) unequal friends. Thematically, these chapters address three specific relational types: bonds between secretaries and their masters, between non-equal youths raised together or nourri ensemble, and between young women and aged, Celestina-like mentors. By noting unequal friendships' departure from the praise of sameness and imitatio, as well as from figurations of difference taken to be subversive, such as those addressed by deconstructionist scholarship, I evoke a new, more normative understanding of difference in the Renaissance.

This dissertation examines the relationship between graphic culture and the making of a colonial regime by arguing that English East India Company rule in the early nineteenth century Tamil region was quintessentially a Document Raj. The Company established its domination in this region of Madras Presidency through a new style of statecraft: a punitive rule of paper that reorganized the power of written documents and transformed extant scribal practices by generating a new textual habitus. Through an analysis of the micro-practices of document use, the dissertation demonstrates that although the form of documents under the Company regime derived from pre-existing document genres, Company rule re-wrote the normative relationship between written recordkeeping and memory, and written and spoken declarations. By studying the petty economy of documents that emerged during Company rule, it thus draws attention to the very creation of the documentary archive of the English East India Company in Madras. The spatial milieu of the dissertation is the Company kacceri , or office. Here, new scribal practices were fashioned from older ones, producing the skeins of correspondence that linked the debates in metropolitan Britain to the Tamil hinterland. At the same time, these practices transformed the very meaning of what it meant to write and to posses documents in the Tamil region. Documents secured the kacceri's power to punish and discipline its subjects by yoking the technology of writing to new ways of securing oral testimonies, taking confessions, and defining authentic evidence. Because of the new value of documents, kacceri writers and scribes themselves derived power by brokering a traffic in documents, a document bazaar. The dissertation consists of five chapters. Of these, the first three examine the refashioning of scribal practices and skills. These chapters demonstrate how Company rule transformed recordkeeping practices in the kacceri and shaped a new orientation to writing pedagogy. The last two chapters address the creation of the Company's Document Raj. Chapter IV considers how the Company secured the authenticity of documents by reorganizing the protocols of forgery and perjury. The final chapter examines the growing importance of the petition, both as mode of communication and as a new form of sociability in Madras. It investigates the manner in which a document bazaar sprang up through the explosion of document use and how petitioning practices redrew acceptable norms of civil address.

My dissertation re-examines long-held assumptions about the nature of the master-student relationship in early China, focusing on one exemplary master, Kongzi (Confucius) and his students. The standard picture holds that the master-student relationship was always hierarchical and demanded strict obedience from the student. In the first part, I examine representations of Kongzi and his disciples in several early texts: the Analects, sections of the Record of Rites (Liji), and the Garden of Sayings (Shuoyuan). The Analects depicts Kongzi accepting and encouraging student questioning and disagreement. In other texts he is a sage and has perfect understanding. His students seldom disagree with him and never have the knowledge to correct him. However, it is likely that the Record of Rites and Garden of Sayings depict Kongzi this way because they want to show that he is infallible, not because he is a model for masters in general. Having his students correct him would show that he was not a perfect sage, so for hagiographic reasons the relationship became more deferential. In the second part, I look at the chapters on masters and students in the Spring and Autumn of Mr. Lu (Lushi chunqiu) and the biographies of teachers and students in the Han shu. These sources also show that complete obedience was not demanded or expected. Masters had to treat their students properly and students had the option of changing teachers, showing more freedom in the relationship than previously thought. In short, there were several competing paradigms in the early period, and hierarchy was not always a point of emphasis. On the contrary, students often disagreed with their masters and offer their own opinions. My dissertation demonstrates that the proper master-student relationship was a matter of debate.

In recent years, the nature of cultural mediation in colonial and imperial settings has attracted renewed scholarly attention. This dissertation expands the chronological, geographical, and analytical framework for understanding mediation by focusing on trans-imperial subjects, men and women who straddled and brokered political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It explores how early modern Mediterranean trans-imperial subjects---colonial emigres, redeemed slaves, converts, and Christian and Jewish Ottoman subjects in Venetian service---articulated geopolitical and ethnolinguistic categories. By examining the links between changing notions of East and West, specific groups of trans-imperial intermediaries, and their institutional settings, this dissertation underscores intermediaries' dynamic and active role in fixing the boundaries of the objects they purport to mediate, rather than simply bringing into contact pre-existing, immutable, and disparate civilizations. The dissertation thus contributes to the literature on the making of Europe and its Others. Moreover, it traces the genealogy of our own analytical vocabulary of mediation, hybridity, and indigeneity to early modern colonization, state formation and imperial rivalry in the Mediterranean. The dissertation consists of four parts; the first three deal each with a specific trans-imperial group, while the fourth considers the interactions among them. Part I addresses the growing role of commercial brokers in institutionalizing ideas of brokering foreignness in Venice. Part II considers how different conversion narratives articulated the notion of transformation of Other into Self, as well as converts' socialization in and lifelong ties with the Pia Casa dei Catecumeni (Holy House of the Catechumens). Part III reconstructs the emergence of a highly endogamous and powerful group of dragomans (diplomatic interpreters) in Venetian service in Istanbul, and charts how they articulated for their patrons the relation between Ottomans and Venetians. Finally, Part IV focuses on several interactions between these various groups to highlight how traps-imperial life trajectories, social ties, and institutions were constitutive of notions of difference. By tracing the genealogy of categories such as Turks and Levantines, it demonstrates how the defining properties and prototypical centers of these categories shifted historically as traps-imperial mediation became institutionalized.* *This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Adobe Acrobat.

The anatomy of the Dmanisi sample is systematically described and compared with other Plio-Pleistocene hominid mandibles. Within the Dmanisi sample, a combination of similarities and differences are found. The mandibles share several distinctive characters to the exclusion of other Plio-Pleistocene hominid samples, including features of the lateral corpus, medial corpus, anterior symphysis, dental arcade, and foramina. Most notable among the characters that differ within the sample are the overall difference in size, especially noteworthy in aspects of corpus and ramus height, and the size of the posterior teeth. The morphology of the Dmanisi specimens, together with their context, suggest an appropriate null hypothesis is that the variation in the sample is the result of a process of sampling different age and different sex individuals from a single evolutionary group. Specifically, the large D2600 mandible is proposed to be an adult male, the small edentulous D3900 mandible an adult female, and the remaining two mandibles, D211 and D2735, subadult females. This hypothesis is tested through a series of comparative analyses with extant humans and great apes using a random resampling procedure. This procedure is designed to directly address the likelihood of observing the pairwise differences found within the Dmanisi sample (i.e. male/female, adult/subadult) relative to known comparative models of variation while operating within the constraints posed by a small sample size. The results of these analyses suggest that the Dmanisi variation is greater than expected based on a model of sampling different age and different sex individuals using a low dimorphism, human or chimpanzee comparative model. In particular, the differences seen in corpus height and posterior tooth size within the Dmanisi group are exceptional relative to these comparative models. However, the results are consistent with a high dimorphism model of intraspecific variation found in gorillas. An alternative hypothesis that the variation is the result of mixed-taxa sample is also quantitatively examined. Building on the previous analysis, a novel nested resampling procedure is developed to test whether or not the magnitude or profile of variation observed in the Dmanisi sample are consistent with that of a mixed-taxa sample. For each of three possible mixed-taxa pairings (Human-Chimpanzee, Human-Gorilla, Chimpanzee-Gorilla) and three underlying comparative models (Human, Chimpanzee, and Gorilla), this procedure generates a distribution of the expected number of significant trait differences and a distribution of which traits are expected to differ. These simulated distributions allow for a test of whether the observed Dmanisi pattern of variation is consistent with an expected mixed-taxa sample. The results of this analysis suggest the pattern of variation seen in the Dmanisi sample does not likely represent a mixed-taxa sample. Taken together, these results and the observed anatomy of the Dmanisi mandibular sample support the notion of single hominid taxon at Dmanisi, but one with greater variation than could be reasonably sampled from either extant humans or chimpanzees. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The basic properties of several early transition metal nitride catalysts were investigated. The Mo2N, W2N, and VN catalysts all exhibited acid-base character of activity and desorption studies. Due to its higher surface area, adsorption capacity, and activity in comparison to the other nitrides, Mo2N was mainly studied as a representative case. The primary analytical tools used in this work were the gas phase reaction of 2-methyl-3-butyn-2-ol (MBOH) as well as carbon dioxide and ammonia temperature programmed desorption (TPD). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and in situ Diffuse Reflectance Infrared Spectroscopy (DRIFTs) analyses were also conducted to characterize the Mo2N catalyst. The effects of different pretreatment and synthesis conditions on the acid-base properties were detailed and the influence of oxygen and nitrogen on basicity was elucidated. The MBOH reaction was also used to reveal the acid-base character of several molybdenum and tungsten based bimetallic nitrides. The rates and selectivity of base catalyzed product formation on Mo 2N were higher than those for W2N and VN but lower than those for benchmark solids CaO, Mgo, and ZnO. Basic centers on the nitrides were of comparable strength and density as those on ZnO. However, they were less dense than those on CaO and MgO while exhibiting comparable strengths. The acid-base character of Mo2N was significantly affected by different types of pretreatment. According to results of the MBOH reaction and TPD experiments, the basic character of Mo2N increased following pretreatment in the following order: degas < reduction < unpassivated < renitridation. The results of XPS showed that such changes in the base character are linked to changes in the relative amount of nitrogen and oxygen at the surface. The renitridation of Mo2N resulted in the highest N/O atomic ratio as well as the highest base site density according to CO 2 TPD and the highest selectivity to acetylene during the MBOH reaction. Renitridation of the bimetallic nitrides was found to significantly enhance basic character as well. The results of in situ DRIFTs experiments linked surface nitrogen to Bronsted base sites on Mo2N, while Lewis basicity was attributed to the presence of oxygen species.

More than a hundred years of scholarship on the fragments of Epicharmus have produced many analyses of the influence of Athenian theater on Sicilian and vice versa. Likewise, the paintings on the Sicilian and South Italian comic vases, produced a couple of generations after Epicharmus, are now being traced back to Athenian comedies. Though this association between Sicilian and Athenian drama remains an intricate and important problem, the local, social history of Sicilian theater in Sicilian cities also deserves attention. These western traditions have not been studied as a coherent and independent development before, because the evidence has seemed too sparse and fragmentary. In recent years, however, significant discoveries have been made by archaeologists, papyrologists and philologists, and, by drawing on all these kinds of evidence, it is possible to piece together the outlines of the development of western theater. Incorporating methodology from recent archaeological and literary studies, this thesis expands the traditional history of Attic theater to the West. Central to the thesis are questions of Sicilian cult and religious practice, especially that of Demeter; the Sicilian tyrants', Gelon, Hieron, and, later, Dionysius I, use of theater for propaganda; and the threads of continuity between Epicharmus at the beginning of the 5th century and the proliferation of theaters and comic vases in the 4th century. This study concludes that theater in the Greek West, especially in Syracuse, developed relatively independently of Athens and flourished in periods of tyrannical rule.

Objectives. This research examined the relationship between the occurrence of middle ear infections (OM) and the intake of systemic antibiotics during the first year of age, and after the first year with the development of early childhood caries (ECC) during the follow-up period. It also sheds some light on the effect of other infections including respiratory (RTI) and urinary tract (UTI) on early childhood dies. Methods. The research is a secondary analysis of Medicaid medical, pharmacy and dental claims data during the years 2001-2004 for healthy children born in 2001, who had continuous Medicaid enrollment. Children's medical, pharmacy and dental claims data were merged by children's unique identifying numbers, which were identical in all data files. Middle ear infections (OM), RTI, and systemic antibiotics usage during the first year of age (and after the first year) were included as predictors in proportional hazards survival models to predict the risk of ECC after the first year of age. All models were controlled for gender and race. Results. The study included 29,485 children, all born in 2001 with continuous enrollment during the study period. Of the included children 51.27% (n=15,113) were mates, and 48.73% (n=14,372) females. By the end of the first year of age, 47% (n=14,036) of children had a diagnosis of OM, and 67.11% (n=19,787) had filled an antibiotic prescription. The proportion of black children who had OM during the first year of age was significantly lower than that among white (chi2=223.79, p=0.0001), or Hispanic children (chi2=42.68, p=0.0001). Also, the proportion of black children who filled antibiotic prescriptions during the first year of age was significantly lower than that among white (chi2=569.73, p=0.0001), or Hispanic children (chi2=157.52, DF=1, p=0.0001). Children who had at least one episode of OM or RTI during the first year of age were at 29% increased risk for developing ECC after the first year of age than those who did not have OM or RTI (p=0.0001). When stratified by race, white and black children who had OM or RTI were found to have a 56% (p=0.0001) and a 20% (p=0.05) increased risk for ECC compared to white and black children who did not have OM or RTI. Children who took antibiotics during the first year of age were at 19% increased risk for ECC after the first year of age than those who did not take antibiotics (p=0.002). When stratified by race, white children who took antibiotics during the first year of age showed a 23% increased risk for ECC (p=0.03) than white children who did not take antibiotics. Having OM or RTI after the first year of age increased the risk for ECC during follow-up by 19% (p=0.002), and using antibiotics increased the risk of ECC by 20% (p=0.001) if taken during the age of 13-18 months. Conclusions. OM, RTI, and systemic antibiotics intake during the first year of age, are associated with significant increase in the risk of ECC during follow-up. This association is affected by children's race and ethnicity.

This dissertation examines the impact of the accumulation of stress and psychosocial risk factors in the lives of families with young infants on parental perceptions and behavior. The dissertation consists of three separate longitudinal studies that explore different aspects of negative caregiver perceptions of infant behavior. The goal of the first study was to integrate models of cumulative risk with empirical research on the etiology of child maltreatment. We compared the capacity of individual risk factors and a cumulative risk index assessed during the neonatal period to predict maltreatment reports in the first 4 years of life and found the cumulative risk score to offer the best predictive power. The total load of risk in the neonatal period was also related to maternal cognitions surrounding her new role, including feelings of happiness about the pregnancy, sense of empathy for the baby's needs, and a view of the newborn's temperament as unpredictable and difficult. The second study explored whether negative caregiver perceptions of infant crying behavior or actual infant crying itself at 7 months-of-age were more important to child behavioral outcomes at 33 months-of-age. Caregiver perceptions of crying as problematic were more predictive of later behavioral problems than actual infant crying. Risk factors such as measures of maternal mental health, life events and social support, were found to be associated with these negative crying perceptions. There was also evidence for a goodness-of-fit moderation effect involving crying behavior and caregiver relationship representations. For burdened mothers with unbalanced relationship representations, caring sensitively for a fussy infant who cries excessively may present a special challenge. The third study explored the association between psychosocial risk factors and negative maternal perceptions of infant crying at 3 months-of-age, and the impact of those negative perceptions on infant behavioral and physiological regulation at 15 months-of-age as mediated by maternal caregiving behavior. Negative caregiver perceptions were found to moderate the association between maternal behavior and infant cortisol expression. There was a significant association between maternal anxious behavior at 7 months and infant cortisol levels at 15 months only for mothers holding negative perceptions of infant crying at 3 months.

Modern studies of early Roman religion have generally been based upon the works of ancient authors such as Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Varro---authors who wrote about early Rome some five hundred years or more after Rome's earliest centuries. In this dissertation, I focus instead on contemporary archaeological data from the eighth to sixth centuries BC as a source of information about early Roman religion. I discuss the role that archaeological data can play in informing us about ancient religious beliefs and rituals, and I examine archaeological evidence for sacred sites, ancestor worship, and animal sacrifice in early Rome. In addition, I compare the religious practices and beliefs represented by the early Roman archaeological remains with the religious concepts discussed by the later ancient authors in order to determine the extent to which the later texts are relevant to discussions of early Roman religion. I demonstrate that significant changes took place in the Roman sacred landscape in the sixth century BC, and I argue that the later Roman religious terminology can be applied to the time period before the sixth century BC only with extreme caution. Indeed, despite many continuities between Roman religious practices and beliefs of the earlier period and those of the later period, Roman religion was ultimately a reflection of the needs and concerns of the inhabitants of Rome, whose interests changed significantly as Rome grew from a small farming hamlet in the eighth and seventh centuries BC to a cosmopolitan urban center in subsequent centuries.

This dissertation investigates the significance of food storage and its relation to the emergence of institutionalized socioeconomic inequalities in societies with little or no socioeconomic stratification (also known as middle-range or transegalitarian). Is storage (as evidence for surplus) a reliable measure of socioeconomic inequality for such social formations? Furthermore, is storage the best material evidence for surplus in such societies? I investigate these issues on the basis of the Late Bronze-Early Iron Age (1700/1500--700 BC) communities of central Northern Greece. Little is known about Northern Greece in later prehistory. Although archaeological research in the area has intensified during the past thirty years, prehistoric Northern Greece is still considered a backward, marginal area compared to the palatial centers and the later city-states of southern Greece. In this dissertation I put aside issues of similarities or dissimilarities with southern Greece. My goal is to assess the evidence among the main sites known from the area thus focusing on the region itself. My research focuses on storage in large vessels known as pithoi from the mounded site of Thessaloniki Toumba. I discuss pertinent material from the sites of Kastanas and Assiros Toumba. Food storage has been viewed as one of the main sets of evidence for the existence of a small-scale hierarchy among Northern Greek communities beginning in the Late Bronze Age. Here, I propose that food storage needs to be better refined if we are to understand its role in the generalized economies of such non-state formations. I propose a methodology that permits us to discriminate between the many dimensions of storage and suggest ways in which these can be retrieved archaeologically. Using this methodology I study the storage jars from Thessaloniki Toumba and compare them with a similar assemblage from Kastanas. I also analyze other evidence for storage from these two sites as well as from the site of Assiros. Although storage may not provide the best evidence for surplus, especially in the absence of studies of consumption in the prehistoric communities of this region, it affords a better understanding of socioeconomic relations within these communities in later prehistory.

Interference with the progression of phagolysosome biogenesis allows Mycobacterium tuberculosis to survive inside the macrophages. The molecular mechanisms underlying this process are yet to be fully elucidated. Using four-dimensional confocal microscopy, the roles of phosphatidylinositol 3-phosphate (PI3P) and Rab22a in phagosomal maintenance and phagosome maturation arrest have been identified. Modulation of these two molecules on mycobacterial phagosome brings about phagosome maturation arrest. PI3P is a phosphoinositide that is crucial for phagosome maturation. All types of phagosomes examined were positive for PI3P immediately after phagocytosis. Phagosomes harboring live mycobacteria experienced a loss after the initial PI3P burst and remained PI3P negative. In contrast, both model phagosomes containing latex beads, and heat killed mycobacteria do not experience a loss and remained positive for PI3P during the later stages of maturation, although the PI3P levels were dissimilar in amount and in production dynamics. The lack of PI3P on phagosomes containing live mycobacteria was due to: (i) the inhibition of the calcium/calmodulin/calmodulin kinase II cascade that recruits the Type III phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase hVPS34 to the phagosomes, and (ii) the secretion of a heat-sensitive mycobacterial PI3P phosphatase, SapM, that hydrolyzes PI3P to PI. Taken together, these results suggest that mycobacteria have developed two independent means to remove PI3P from the phagosome resulting in maturation arrest. Rab22a is a less studied member of the group V Rab family of early endocytic GTP-binding proteins. Time lapse confocal microscopy revealed that phagosomes harboring live mycobacteria accumulated Rab22a in contrast to model latex bead phagosomes. Rab22a is also differentially retained for extended periods of time when compared to the transient recruitment of other members of the group V family of Rabs, Rab5 and Rab21. Recruitment of Rab22a to model phagosomes harboring dead mycobacteria increased the presence of recycling endosomal markers, reduced phagosomal acidification and diminished the activity of degradative hydrolases. Our findings assign a function in mycobacterial phagosome maturation arrest to Rab22a; M. tuberculosis specifically and actively recruits this GTPase to orchestrate maintenance of the mycobacterial phagosome maturation arrest at an early endocytic stage.

In the early secretory pathway newly synthesized proteins are transported sequentially through the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), vesicular-tubular clusters (VTCs) and the Golgi complex. Traffic between these compartments is mediated by vesicular and/or tubular carriers that tether and fuse with their appropriate target membrane. Membrane fusion is promoted by SNARE complexes. When this work began, only the exocytic SNARE complexes were characterized in detail; the structural features shared by SNARE complexes from different fusion steps were not known. I contributed in characterizing the subunit structure, assembly and regulation of a quaternary SNARE complex that mediates early ER-to-Golgi transport. Recombinant syntaxin 5, membrin and rbet1, three Q-SNAREs, assemble cooperatively to create a high affinity binding site for sec22b, an R-SNARE. This organization is remarkably similar to the synaptic complex, suggesting a common pattern for all transport steps. The syntaxin 5 amino terminal domain potently inhibits SNARE complex assembly. Interestingly, although sec22b binds to the combination of syntaxin 5, membrin and rbet1, it can only bind if present while the other three assemble; sec22b cannot bind to a pre-assembled ternary complex, suggesting a potentially important regulatory step in the specific fusion event(s) this SNARE complex catalyzes. Finally, the quaternary complex is demonstrated to be a bona fide species in living cells. COPII-coated vesicles deliver secretory cargo from ER exit sites to VTCs in the initial steps of the secretory pathway. However, the precise origin of VTCs and the membrane fusion step(s) involved have remained experimentally intractable. I documented in vitro direct tethering and SNARE-dependent fusion of ER-derived COPII transport vesicles to form larger cargo containers. The assembly did not require Golgi membranes, pre-existing VTCs, or COPI function. Thus, COPII vesicles appear to contain all of the machinery to initiate VTC biogenesis via homotypic fusion. However, COPI function enhanced VTC assembly, and early VTCs acquired specific Golgi components by heterotypic fusion with Golgi-derived COPI vesicles. My biochemical reconstitution provided direct evidence that the first membrane fusion event in the secretory pathway is the homotypic fusion of COPII vesicles and paves the way for future mechanistic studies of ER/Golgi SNAREs.

This dissertation presents a re-evaluation of the imagery of three ninth-century Psalters---the Corbie Psalter (Amiens, Bibl. Mun., Ms. 18), the Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Ms. 32), and the Stuttgart Psalter (Stuttgart, Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Ms. Bibl. Fol. 23). This imagery visualizes the contents of the psalms, a biblical text unique for its extensive use of unspecified first and second person forms. The open referents of the I and you of the psalms made identifying with their voices an area of intense exegetical speculation. Yet the abundant imagery in the much-studied Utrecht and Stuttgart Psalters is often seen as literal illustration, that is, a direct translation of the words of the text into visual form, and left at that. This dissertation posits that in visualizing both the speakers and the contents of the psalms, the illustrators of these manuscripts provided an interpretation of the act of prayer in which the reader participated in complicated ways. In a series of close analyses of select illustrations an effort is made to map the reading process whereby images were brought together within and across pages to provide opportunities for and encourage extended meditations on the nature of God, the self, and the soul. By focusing on the strategies and themes of biblical exegesis, this dissertation calls attention to the interpretive capacities of the images and suggests that their creation be seen as providing a stimulus for the reader's devotional engagement with the text. Chapter 1 presents background on psalms illustration and a review of the scholarly literature. Chapter 2 focuses on the Corbie Psalter, the illustrations of which reveal a deep concern with figuring the ideal reader's encounter with the text of the psalms in the act of prayer. In Chapter 3 attention centers on the visualization of the figurative language of the psalms in the Utrecht Psalter and re-evaluates the role played by these images in the reader's attempt to discover their spiritual meaning. Chapter 4, focused on the Stuttgart Psalter, presents a thematic study of the representation of the act of prayer and examines its relationship to the reader before the text. The illustrations in all three manuscripts are understood to be fundamentally exegetical and to have offered to the reader of the psalms interpretive glosses not just on the text but on the spiritual life itself.

In the early eighteenth century, Britain was awash with questions of what counted as art, how to value it, and whose evaluations of it mattered. Philosophical aesthetics was just coming into being under the new empiricist regimes of experiential knowledge and sense perception, and the Collier controversy raged. During these decades, a new kind of representation made its way into the national urban popular consciousness. This dissertation investigates the eighteenth century concept of farce in a variety of visual, performative, and textual materials. I argue that farce emerges as a dominant conceptual category for the eighteenth century, but one that is significantly fraught with taxonomical angst; its instabilities are productive sites for the study of categorical thought, aesthetic valuation, and corporeal normativity. The discourse of farce is uniquely suited to this kind of inquiry because it uses the pleasures and problematics of human embodiment to both galvanize and explode distinctions between good and bad art. Farcical entertainments, enjoyed by patricians and plebians alike, become central to the emerging aesthetic vocabularies taught in the public sphere. The first chapter, The Body of Farce, argues that farce is inseparable from the body somehow deformed, diseased, less-than-human. The second chapter, 'Dextrously Counterfeiting': Farce, Fraud, and the Case of Mary Toft, examines a 1726 hoax that took on significance through the rhetoric of a single farcically reproductive body. In the third chapter, The Farcical (An)Aesthetic, I analyze play prefaces and other texts that shape a surprisingly coherent theory of farce as bad mimesis. The fourth and fifth chapters analyze a variety of popular stage farces. In the fourth, Tales that Dead Men Tell, I examine the patterns of excessive embodiment they exhibit, and in the fifth, The Aesthetic Consciousness of Farce, I turn to the sites at which farce self-consciously deploys language, creativity, authorship, and performance. Finally, I close the dissertation with a coda in which I look briefly at the farcical imperative in the novel.

This dissertation argues that there is an archive of early modern olfaction and that it provides a rich account of early modern materiality, the history of the body, and cultural experiences of embodiment. Early modern men and women, like modern men and women, understood themselves and the culture of every day life through their bodily senses, including the sense of smell. Of all the senses, smell is usually understood as the most base, the most ephemeral, and thus the most resistant to traditional historical methodologies. Only very recently have scientists discovered how the human body recognizes and remembers over 10,000 different smells. Yet, smell's role in the past remains a mystery, virtually ignored in historical scholarship. Implicitly, this makes sense: early modern smells, and any meanings they once held, surely must have faded long ago. I argue, however, that unlike other material objects lost to the historical record, smells were always conceived as ephemeral, invisible objects. Scent thus provides a unique methodological opportunity to expand understanding of historical relationships between the histories of the body, as a material entity, and the senses, as embodied, phenomenological responses to the material world. Despite understandings of scents as object-less, fleeting, and illusive, there are substantial archives documenting how early modern men and women produced, consumed and represented scents and their bodily effects. Each chapter analyzes the production, consumption, and representation of scents in one of four locations: the stage, the market, the sickroom, and the pleasure garden. Surveying a wide variety of evidence, I analyze literary texts such as the Digby Mary Magdalene, Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night, Philip Massinger's The Renegado, Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, book three of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Margaret Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure alongside texts and objects, including manuscript and printed cookbooks, guild records, herbals, medical anatomies, gardening manuals, censers, gloves, pomanders, and potpourri vases. This cultural history of scent thus elucidates how early modern men and women understood---and navigated---the invisible, odiferous environments that circulated between, around, and inside their bodies. The cultural history of perfume demonstrate how early modern men and women comprehended the boundaries between their bodies and the material environments of their everyday lives.

An overview of the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project is presented. The operating principles of the instrument are discussed. Our contributions to the data acquisition and the analysis pipelines are described. They include a data monitoring software package, and a program that displays the real-time state of the interferometer in the control room. LIGO has carried out four scientific data runs. We present the results from early exploration of the resulting data pertinent to a search for continuous-wave gravitational radiation sources. We discuss the constraints which amplitude and frequency modulation of the gravitational wave impose on our search algorithm. Early assumptions regarding Gaussianity and stationarity of the noise spectrum are tested. A strain sensitivity is derived, taking these effects into account.

This study examines the effect of American national identity formation on early United States-Mexican relations from the start of Mexico's war for independence through the decade following the establishment of its first sovereign government. During this period, Anglo-American understandings of United States' exceptionalism and of Americanness became intricately connected with larger notions of republicanism and anti-Europeanism. Americans looked to the Spanish American revolutions as auspicious markers of the rising greatness of the New World, and looked upon Mexicans as republican brothers, even willing to explain away their occasional transgressions as the result of their oppressive Spanish colonial heritage. Most significantly, many Americans called on the United States to take the lead in creating a pan-American commercial and political system. The result, they believed, would be a greatly strengthened liberal, republican, and American sphere that could counter the monarchical, statist, Europe of Great Britain and the Holy Alliance. This pan-American System was, in a very real way, the commercial corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In calling for this inter-American system, Anglo-Americans temporarily overlooked the inherent tensions between this new pan-Americanism and traditional United States expansionism. The success of the Mexican revolution seemed to prove the strength of republican ideology, as it demonstrated the ability of American-style republicanism to transcend the perils of historical degeneracy and decay. At the same time, however, the creation of an independent Mexican republic along the southwest border of the United States threatened to close that frontier to future Anglo-American expansion, considered essential for the very survival of the American republic. This tension was resolved, however, when Mexico proved unwilling to play its part in the pan-American System and instead courted British aid and support. It was then that Anglo-Americans began to racialize Mexicans, not as the American brothers they once had been, but as backwards, ignorant people unable to maintain a viable republic. This new construction was reinforced by the internal political turmoil that began to wrack Mexico in the late-1820s. The result was an Anglo-American idea of Mexican racial otherness that paved the way for the aggressive American expansionism of the 1840s and 50s.

This dissertation is a study of two Edo-period narratives that circulated for over 200 years and purport to tell of the arrival and expulsion of the Christian missionaries in Japan. Combining the results of archival research and an ideological analysis of representations of Japan and the Kirishitan as a Western other in the tales, the work employs a cultural studies approach to examine the place in Edo popular culture of Kirishitan monogatari (Tale of the Kirishitan), printed in 1639 and 1665, and Kirishitan shumon raicho jikki (Record of the Arrival of the Kirishitan Sect), which circulated in manuscript from the late seventeenth century until its first printing in 1868. A translation of the latter text is included in the Appendix. The first two chapters detail the startling results of archival research in twenty libraries in Japan, which reveal that over 150 extant copies of Kirishitan shumon raicho jikki exist under at least 65 different titles. They further trace the evolution of the tales from the earlier kanazoshi style to the later jitsuroku style, and show the importance of the latter as a genre in which news of current events and other prohibited information circulated in manuscript form under the bakufu's censorship radar. The analysis reveals that a crucial element in the success of this circulation was the phenomenon of the commercial lending library. The third chapter analyzes the representation of the so-called Kirishitan (Christians) in the tales as a discursive strategy that worked to allay the anxiety brought on by a new, more comprehensive understanding of Japan's place in the world and by the ever growing, unsettling presence of Western ships offshore. In the tales, the threatening Kirishitan demons and would-be conquerors are subjugated not only through their expulsion by Hideyoshi, but also in their representation as an exoticized but thoroughly domesticated other. The fourth chapter examines the imagined geographies of the tales to show how they ignore new information about the world and instead remap Japan at the center of the traditional, sacred three realms cosmology, with the land of the Kirishitan representing the barbaric peoples outside that realm.

This dissertation focuses on the remarkable approaches toward materials in art objects taken by the Japanese modernist art group the Gutai Art Association (Gutai) and its leader Yoshihara Jiro (1905-1972) in the mid-1950s. Responding to the Japanese art community's concerns with representation of human experience and national identity, Yoshihara and the Gutai members placed special emphasis on how the intervention of the artist became inscribed in the materials of the object. Their recognition of the importance of the artist's engagement with materials as an expression of human presence in visual art radically departed from the contemporary Japanese art practice of representation and interpretation of the physical world. By expanding the use of tools and materials beyond oil paint, paintbrush and canvas, Gutai transformed the practice of Japanese modernist art that had evolved in dialogue with Western art since the late 19th century. In the process they grappled with the thorny issue of national identity in cultural production. In response to a general interest in subjectivity and the rejection of conventional systems in early postwar Japan, modernist artists confronted two major issues: how to incorporate human experience into art, and how to challenge the criticism of being derivative of West. Yoshihara Jiro developed a model of materiality and human subjectivity that ingeniously incorporated the human presence into non-figurative art, thereby attempting to overcome the problems of national authenticity in modernist styles. Applying Yoshihara's concept in conjunction with their own theorization of painting practice, Gutai artists, including Shimamoto Shozo, Shiraga Kazuo, and Tanaka Atsuko, developed highly individual works ranging from sculptures and installations to performance. Although Gutai members consciously planned their presentations to generate critical conversations, critics and artists in Japan failed to acknowledge the group's ground-breaking interpretation; this neglect greatly affected Gutai's decision to return to painting. Through careful examination of the wider historical, intellectual, and cultural context, this dissertation demonstrates that Gutai's innovative concept of materiality and human subjectivity was a lone response to the problems shared by Japanese artists in the mid-1950s, while also prefiguring many new developments in modern art of the 1960s and beyond.

This project explores the cultural practice of music through a series of ducal and noble weddings at Stuttgart in the period 1575--1609. The seals of carefully-calculated alliances, these weddings were ostentatious presentations of power and enactments of political and religious ideology through ritual, the arts, and their interaction. By reconstructing the contexts in which music was performed, I explain the complex factors that shaped musical practices. I study the music of these characteristically Renaissance social and political phenomena through the interpretation of three complementary categories of evidence: the repertory of pieces composed for the celebrations; narrative accounts, court records, sermons, and other artistic products created for the weddings; and contemporary discourses about the nature and purpose of music. These sources allow us to locate music in a precise and therefore illustrative social and cultural context. The dissertation is organized into ten chapters, each of which approaches the weddings from a distinct perspective. My analysis of the literary narratives demonstrates how they invested music with fundamental cultural values, and provides a more sophisticated framework for understanding them as music-historical documents. I argue that musical sound structured the wedding rituals as they unfolded in time and space, physically controlling human movement and framing the central ceremonial elements. In the process, it affirmed essential social structures by distinguishing between social ranks and genders. By reconstructing the repertories composed for the weddings, I demonstrate how musicians worked within the system of patronage to produce music for specific occasions, and how social, political, and religious context, contemporary discourses on music and poetry, and the demands of audience and occasion shaped compositional practices at Stuttgart. Musical practice was also directly conditioned by competition with other courts, particularly those of Munich and the Hapsburgs, and visiting nobles used their own musicians to engage in personalized forms of representation. I also demonstrate how musical symbolism and style could be invested with moral and political force to communicate specific political agendas.

In medieval and early modern France, letter writing offered women and men access to a unique type of discursive authority. Through an examination of epistolary form and convention as promoted by the ars dictaminis , I argue that writers actively negotiated letter-writing practices to create subject positions and engage in dynamics unavailable to them outside of letters. These negotiations take varied forms in selected epistolary writings from the eleventh through the sixteenth century. In the verse epistles of Baudri of Bourgueil and Constance of Angers, a stylized genre is employed to stage a contradictory relationship that would be illicit outside the space of letters. This literary staging, undermined by Baudri's insistent defenses of writing as harmless and Constance's contradiction of this harmlessness, demonstrates how troped forms are manipulated to create unexpected authoritative positions. Heloise and Abelard employ letters to contest the terms of their relationship and to enact it, engaging in performances that show how letters act on their readers and writers. In her varied epistolary writings, Christine de Pizan exploits the epistle as a material object, a coded set of behaviors, a platform for social advocacy, and an authorizing genre, demonstrating that women can successfully access authoritative discourse, and that letters are a privileged field in which to make and perform this claim. The correspondence of Marguerite de Navarre and Guillaume Briconnet exploits epistolary dynamics of call and response, supplication and acquiescence or refusal, reinforcing their mutual need and authority in their respective realms. It demonstrates the survival of medieval epistolary practices in early-modern France, and the limits of letters for providing spiritual consolation and effecting spiritual change. Through a close reading of selected letters and the manipulation of formal prescriptions and conventions governing their composition, I recuperate letters as more than rhetorical exercises, and suggest that they are a site of performance---of authority, agency, and gender. By examining letters for what they do as well as what they say, my research suggests that for women in particular, letters offered ways to challenge and reconfigure gender stereotypes that traditionally excluded them from the authority associated with participation in epistolary discourse.

In the United States in 2004 it is estimated that lung cancer will be responsible for more than one quarter of all cancer-associated deaths. With an overall 5-year survival of less than 15%, lung cancer is one of the most rapidly fatal common malignancies diagnosed. Since 1973, prognosis and survival has remained nearly constant. Differences in incidence of lung cancer and survival after diagnosis vary significantly by race. African Americans, particularly men, are at greater risk for development of lung cancer and tend to have poorer survival than their Caucasian counterparts. Cigarette smoking is an established risk factor for lung cancer. However, only 10% to 15% of smokers develop lung cancer, and cases occur among nonsmokers. This suggests that there are individual susceptibilities to environmental carcinogens which may have a genetic basis. Three studies were conducted in young lung cancer cases identified from a population-based cancer registry in metropolitan Detroit. The first study examined aggregation of lung cancer in family members of lung cancer cases compared to families of population-based controls. The second study, a case control study, evaluated lung cancer risk associated with polymorphisms in glutathione S-transferase genes (GSTs). The third study, a case-only study, evaluated lung cancer survival associated with polymorphisms in GSTs. Familial aggregation of lung cancer was demonstrated in families of young cases, with risk of lung cancer higher in African American families than Caucasian families. Overall, individuals who carried combinations of GST polymorphisms that result in low enzyme expression were at increased risk of having lung cancer compared to individuals with fully functional genes. This increase in risk was especially apparent in Caucasian heavy smokers and among all African Americans. Among late stage, non-small cell lung cancer cases who received chemotherapy, decreased survival time was seen in those with combinations of dysfunctional GST genes. Collectively, these results support a genetic component of lung cancer development and survival in young onset cases. Further characterization of high risk individuals is necessary for health practitioners to tailor risk reduction and treatment protocols to the populations they serve.

This dissertation looks at divinely inspired dreams as a literary trope within the genre of early medieval Latin hagiography. In examining a representative sample of saints' vitae composed between 396 and 1006, in England and the area which came to constitute the Carolingian Empire, I have found that the chronological position of a dream within a narrative indicates its literary function within the text. Dreams associated with the birth, life, and death of saints each serve distinct literary purposes. Dreams which accompany a saint's birth are generally prophetic, and as such inaugurate a narrative construction which is centered around the reiterative demonstration of an already established sanctity. In contrast, dreams experienced by a saint during his or her lifetime are virtually always conversion dreams, marking an important turning point in both the plot of the story and the character of the protagonist. As a result, such dreams are constitutive of a developmental narrative structure, in which the text recounts internal growth and change in the character of the protagonist. Dreams surrounding the death of a saint occur in both static and developmental narratives, as death dreams serve the literary purpose of making explicit the theological status of the saint, consistently straddling the earthly and heavenly realms both before and after death. These categories account for over 90% of dreams studied in this dissertation; those texts which do not adhere to these standards can be best understood by looking at the ways in which they adhere to, and depart from, established generic standards for the literary use of dreams. Overall, this examination of dreams as a characteristic trope helps to elucidate the parameters of the hagiographic genre as a whole.

This dissertation explores how the social, cultural and political form of the early Roman principate reflected the voices of the upper classes of Italy and Rome. Sources formerly overlooked in this regard become useful when viewed through the lenses of the key concepts of consensus and concordia, which both predated and informed the transition to empire. The self-justification through consensus constrained the princeps to 'legitimate' and 'traditional' forms of presentation. Yet the concept by itself facilitated this, being concretely operative in the earliest republican historical records, and manifest through acts easily transferred to the justification of imperial authority and regularly reproduced. The nature of tradition and legitimate power, however, became articulated in terms of the problematic turmoil of the late republic. This prompted an inventory of the proper structure and feel of Roman society, observable through the Roman discourse on concordia, and culminating in the works of Sallust, written during the troubles of the second triumvirate. The proscription narratives highlight these themes maintaining Roman norms by depicting their subversion. With other neglected sources, they demonstrate how the triumvirs (and future principes) acquired auctoritas by upholding values autonomously and categorically articulated at the time. Finally, the three representatives of early imperial prose complete the picture. The History of Velleius Paterculus ensconces the viewpoint of tota Italia through a cogent political argument for the principate cast in traditional terms, and plainly contrasting the present otium with the tumultuous republic. The declamations of the Elder Seneca, moreover, illustrate how independent shifts in educational practices provided an interface between culture and politics that allowed for the autonomous expression of values demonstrably officialized in the new system. In addition, declamation helped institutionalize the political transformation by encouraging the inadvertent recasting of republican history in terms of imperial ideology. Lastly, the exempla of Valerius Maximus demonstrate how the historical elements of republican history, the quintessence of consensus , were de-politicized and recycled to clarify and instill the elements of Roman identity, and inform every major aspect of Roman imperial society.

Studies of female adolescence, whether in historical or modern societies, recognize that the relative timing of physical maturation, sexual initiation, and marriage has far-reaching consequences for the individual, the family, and society. Evidence from the early Roman Empire suggests that women of the upper social ranks married in their early to mid teens, several years earlier than the rest of the female population. Scholars have rarely asked why this was so, but a study of the sources addressing elite girls' movement into marriage and childbearing can allow the social pressures pushing down the marriage age to be examined. The dissertation begins by surveying medical treatises on female puberty, showing that some Roman physicians advocated a later marriage age based on the health risks of early pregnancy. Subsequent chapters place the physicians' writings in a larger context, illuminating the familial and social forces that may have prevented their prescriptions from being put into practice. The Roman law of marriage, for example, set a low minimum marriage age, twelve, and only vaguely addressed a girl's consent to the union, conceding to a father's traditional power over his daughter's marriage arrangements and promoting the state's interest in marriage. The law's perception of girls as resources to be deployed by families is further revealed in the protection of unmarried girls' virginity; the desirability of sexual purity may also have pushed down the marriage age. Examination of the dowry builds on this picture, showing that financial pressures encouraged families to place young daughters in marriage. Offering a glimpse into a girl's experience are literary accounts which portray the wedding and the trauma of sexual initiation, suggesting a psychological down side to marriage at a tender age. Finally, several legal cases indicate that some girls under twelve resided with fiances, raising questions about when children were held to adult expectations and rules. The range of viewpoints represented in the sources suggest that the pattern of early marriage was not an inevitability. It was determined by the interplay of factors, including paternal authority in the family, state promotion of marriage, economic pressures, and cultural expectations of femininity.

Having lost the physical link to speakers, written language must compensate for the disembodied nature of its content and make clear its orientation, the voices behind the words. Present-day written English texts create textual coherence through quotation marks, which indicate passages of represented speech. These quotation marks are a recent convention, however, and premodern texts had different methods of marking speech. In late Middle English texts, these methods engaged both the visual organization of the page (e.g. marginalia, ink color) and the words of the text itself. Such strategies were not always precisely or consistently applied, though, and recognizing their functional differences from our present-day conventions helps the modern reader to understand the ordering of early texts and the pragmatics of the medieval manuscript. This work presents the first full study of speech reporting methods in premodern English, employing the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse to search a broad range of texts. It uses the methodology of historical pragmatics to examine the techniques of speech marking, and then to put them in their cultural and interpretational context. Because medieval texts were less precise and exacting in their designation of reported speech than present-day texts, the conception of quotation which governs them does not seem to be as precise or exacting, either. Our readings of late Middle English texts are strengthened by considering these differences, and by recognizing that the modern editorial practice of adding quotation marks also adds an interpretative layer to the original text. Further, editorial punctuation of represented speech has hermeneutic implications for our readings of literary texts. This work shows that poems by Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain-poet exploit the less-determined systems of medieval speech marking for aesthetic and rhetorical purposes. By acknowledging the subtle ways in which medieval writers used their own systems of speech marking, we come to a deeper appreciation of their written and literary legacy.

The ubiquitin/proteasome pathway is highly conserved in evolution and is essential for many diverse cellular functions. Many of the short-lived cell cycle regulatory proteins are targets of this proteasome pathway. Unregulated cell cycle proteins are important contributors to tumorigenesis. Efforts to identify and develop drugs that target the ubiquitin/proteasome pathway to treat malignancies have become an intense area of investigation. However, targeted drug design requires a better understanding of the many genes involved in the ubiquitin/proteasome pathway. The first aim of my thesis was to examine a ubiquitin ligase, CHFR (checkpoint with f&barbelow;orkhead-associated and r&barbelow;ing finger) that also functions as part of the early G2/M checkpoint, in breast cancer. This checkpoint delays chromosome condensation in response to microtubule poisons. We found that half of the 24 breast cancer cell lines studied had low CHFR expression. Following nocodazole treatment, breast cancer cells with low CHFR expression failed to arrest in prophase, whereas cells with higher CHFR expression arrested in prophase as expected. Further analysis revealed that some of the nocodazole treated cells may have progressed through mitosis due to lack of any functional mitotic checkpoints (i.e., early G2/M and spindle checkpoints). The second aim of my thesis was to identify novel oncogene candidates on the long arm of chromosome 17 through analysis of regions of amplifications. We detected two distinct amplicons on 17q23 that harbor putative oncogenes and several uncharacterized ESTs specifically expressed in breast tissue. Ubiquitin specific protease 6 (USP6), a gene that mapped more proximal to the 17q23 amplicons, was also significantly overexpressed in breast cancer cell lines. We demonstrated that overexpression of USP6 in NIH3T3 and 293 cells induced an increased growth rate but such overexpression alone could not induce neoplastic transformation in these cells. Overexpression of USP6 and other candidate oncogenes within identified amplicons may be functioning cooperatively during breast carcinogenesis. Additional studies to reveal the expression and function of genes in the ubiquitin/proteasome pathway will help us elucidate the complex interactions of cell-cycle regulation. A better understanding of how this pathway operates should then lead to the development of efficient therapeutical applications.

Ex vivo gene therapy that combines gene therapy with cell transplantation methods is a new way to achieve localized skeletal regeneration in vivo. Implanted ex vivo BMP-7-transduced human gingival fibroblasts or rat dermal fibroblasts form bone. The newly formed bone was a chimera of both donor and recipient cells, suggesting that BMP-transduced non-osteogenic cells convert to osteoblast-like cells in vivo. However, the underlying mechanisms need to be investigated. An in vitro model in which treatment of C2C12 cells, a mouse myoblast precursor cell line, with BMPs causes a shift in the differentiation pathway from myoblastic to osteoblastic was used. Microarrays were performed and gene expression profile for BMP signal pathway was analyzed. Data suggested a total of 395 BMP-7 responsive genes with minimal 1.8-fold change in expression. Significant decreases in muscle related genes and increases in expression of osteogenic-related genes were observed by 12 h. In addition, BMPs not only stimulate the osteoblastic differentiation but also induce the expression of chondroblast markers. BMP-7 treatment increases the expression of TGF-beta1 and inhibin betaA that could bind their specific receptors and transduce their own signals. Therefore, this project focused on a bone specific transcription factor, core-binding factor alpha1, or Cbfa1. A total of 657 potential Cbfa1 responsive genes were identified by using a model of Cbfa1 -/- mouse calvarial-derived cells infected by AdCMV-Cbfa1 and microarray assay. Furthermore, nine genes were found to be responsive to both BMP-7 treatment in C2C12 cells and Cbfa1 transduction in Cbfa1 -/- mouse calvarial-derived cells. Among them, Tenascin C, an extracellular matrix protein, whose responsiveness to BMP-7 was completely abolished in Cbfa1 -/- mouse calvarial-derived cells, is suggested to be a BMP-7 responsive gene through Cbfa1 activation. Overall, these data could provide new insights into molecular mechanisms of osteoblastic conversion from non-osteogenic cells, particularly, the early responses to osteogenic stimuli.

Osteoporosis is a potentially debilitating, chronic condition, whose sequelae, fractures, are likely to garner increasing medical and public health resources as our population ages. Developing effective prevention strategies may depend on understanding factors associated with the achievement of optimal bone mineralization as well as the determinants of bone loss. Among women, declining ovarian function around the time of menopause, delineates a period of increasing risk for lower bone mineral density (BMD), the precursor to osteoporosis. The menopausal transition offers an important time to evaluate the characteristics that may affect this risk for lower BMD. A longitudinal analysis of six year's of data from the Michigan Bone Health Study, a prospective cohort study of 614 women, aged 24--44 at baseline, provided insight into the natural history of bone loss, risk factors associated with BMD status, and risk factors associated with BMD loss. Rates of BMD change for pre-, peri-, and postmenopausal women were estimated and compared, with up to five BMD measurements at the lumbar spine and the femoral neck. BMD measured at the lumbar spine was curvilinear with respect to time, while BMD measured at the femoral neck was linear and began as early as 24 years of age. Rates of bone loss were not significantly associated with age in this group of pre-and-peri-menopausal women. Important and independent predictors of pre- and perimenopausal BMD status were body weight, family history of osteoporosis, fracture history, past physical activity, and modest alcohol consumption. Reaching postmenopausal status and reporting a history of breast, ovarian or uterine cancer were strongly related to increased rate of BMD loss. Greater body weight was protective for BMD loss. Baseline osteocalcin (OCN), a bone matrix protein found in serum that indicates bone turnover, was not predictive of subsequent BMD after controlling for baseline BMD. Only the repeated annual measures of OCN were independently associated with BMD, with the only sizeable effect among postmenopausal women. Understanding the distinction between factors related to BMD status and those related to BMD loss might help women to adopt healthy personal practices and health planners to develop programs that curtail an increasing trend in osteoporotic fracture.

Existing interpretations of the broader social role of Early Historic Period (c. 300 B.C.--A.D. 300) Buddhist monasteries in South Asia tend to emphasize two possibilities. The first is that Buddhist monasteries were centers for religious isolation. The second claims monasteries were actively engaged in fostering the development of long distance trade networks. This thesis is an argument for a third possibility---ritual engagement with local laity. I argue that these different possibilities are not only a debate between historians---they were tensions that existed within the monastic community at one Early Historic Period Buddhist monastery, Thotlakonda, in north coastal Andhra Pradesh, India. These tensions were manifested in the layout and organization of the monastery and in the larger landscape in which it was located. Between November 2000 and March 2002, I conducted six months of systematic archaeological surface survey in the area immediately surrounding Thotlakonda monastery. In this time I surveyed 7.3 km2 and identified 134 archaeological sites. Archaeological features identified during survey included walls, terraces, reservoirs, one Early Historic Period village, and a stupa (a Buddhist ritual structure). The challenge of my work is the identification of the material consequences of religious practice. My approach links religious and other architectural spaces within a regional landscape of meaning and interaction. I employ architecture to derive the social implications of spaces, and landscape to link them within a larger social context. I conclude that Thotlakonda monastery had multiple, conflicting religious and economic relations with the local communities that supported it. As suggested in numerous early Buddhist religious texts, the monks attempted to isolate themselves from society. However, their isolation was balanced with obligatory ritual functions they performed for the laity. While I found only limited evidence for active monastic involvement in long distance trade, the monastery was heavily enmeshed in local trade networks. Overall, I argue that Buddhist monks attempted to promote themselves as the sole arbitrators of Buddhist ritual, but that the laity resisted the authority of the monks, maintaining their own ritual and social interests.

The purpose of these studies was to evaluate the reliability and validity of reading assessments in the Michigan Literacy Progress Profile (MLPP). The MLPP is a battery of literacy assessments designed to test children's language and literacy skills and beginning reading competence. Chapter Two examined the test-retest reliability and the concurrent validity of the MLPP. The sample included 191 children in kindergarten through third grade in two Michigan schools. Data were collected in the spring of 2001 and in fall 2001 and spring 2002. The results indicated that all components of the MLPP demonstrated reasonable test-retest reliability. The strongest reliability was evident on the most discrete skills assessed by enabling tasks on the MLPP. Concurrent validity was moderate to strong when compared to scores on the Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI) and the Gates MacGinitie Reading Test. Chapter Three explored the predictive validity of the MLPP utilizing three samples. The first sample was the 191 children previously described who assisted in the evaluation of the test-retest reliability. The second sample was a longitudinal sample of students in a different school district who were assessed with various components of the MLPP. Data collection began in the fall of 1998 by testing 230 children and continued for four years. The third sample was collected as part of a summer school evaluation for the Michigan Department of Education using various components of the MLPP. Initial data collection began in the spring of 1999. The results showed that the oral reading component of the MLPP was a significant predictor of later achievement on standardized assessments such as the GMRT and the Michigan Education Assessment Program (MEAP) test. The robust predictive correlations were consistently significant by predicting scores six-months, one-year, two-years, and three-years after initial assessment. The MLPP enabling tasks were significant predictors of GMRT scores six months and one year after initial assessment, but they did not predict GMRT or MEAP scores as well two or three years after initial assessment. The research identified fundamental issues in the evaluation of reliability and validity of early reading assessments such as the influence of skewed data distributions on parametric statistics. The importance of consistent assessment procedures, unidimensional scaling of data, and teacher training on the reliability and validity of reading assessments are also discussed.

Cancer treatment-related fatigue is a distressing effect of cancer therapy. Early efforts in describing the fatigue experience have progressed to the testing of potential interventions. This study built on the fatigue, functional capacity, and exercise activity of previous studies with women with early stage breast cancer. Strength training and the nature of the relationship of physical self-efficacy and performance to functional wellness, contribute new understanding to the area of fatigue and symptom management. The purpose of this thirteen-week study was to test the effectiveness of a structured exercise program in decreasing fatigue, increasing physical performance, increasing perceptions of attention performance and physical self-efficacy, and enhancing perceptions of functional wellness in women undergoing a specific type of adjuvant chemotherapy for early stage breast cancer. The study utilized a randomized, two-group, repeated measures experimental design. The sample consisted of 22 women (36--58 years) randomized to comparison (n = 9) and intervention (n = 13) groups. Both groups were tested at weeks 1 and 13 for physical performance (VO2max and 1-Repetition Maximum) and attention performance (Attention Functional Index). Measurement of fatigue (Revised Piper Fatigue Scale), physical self-efficacy (Physical Self-Efficacy Scales), and functional wellness (MOS SF-36, and Functional Wellness Questionnaire) occurred during weeks l, 7, and 13. Data analysis found significant differences between groups in VO2max from weeks 1 to 13. Significant differences in activity also existed between the two groups. Treatment-related fatigue increased over the study period for both groups, although the intervention group reported lower overall fatigue scores, as compared to the comparison group. Perceptions of physical self-efficacy declined in both groups over the study period with the peak fall at week 7, the midpoint of the study. Preliminary testing of the proposed conceptual model utilizing multiple regression, demonstrated support for relationships between dose, exercise program, performance, physical self-efficacy, functional wellness, and fatigue. Correlation coefficients strongly supported the associations between fatigue and vitality, physical self-efficacy with attention performance, attention performance with vitality, and physical self-efficacy and physical functioning. These findings, provide support to the positive role of exercise during a specific type of adjuvant chemotherapy for early stage breast cancer.

By examining conflicting analytical approaches to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tonal music in terms of their unspoken assumptions and philosophical commitments, I hope to identify some of the criteria by which we might validate or invalidate competing theoretical accounts of the same music. My dissertation develops a meta-theoretical framework for evaluating methodologies, and in doing so, it provides insight into a body of late-tonal music that seems resistant to any single approach. A critical problem confronting people who study tonal music of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century is the lack of consensus concerning an analytical approach. In the work that attempts to engage this music, the Schenkerian, Schoenbergian, and neo-Riemannian analytical methodologies represent the most widely used and criticized approaches. Is there a common denominator among the Schenkerian, Schoenbergian, and neo-Riemannian methodologies that would allow us to critically compare them? How do we resolve the differences that arise between theories that offer conflicting accounts of the same empirical domain? As a possible solution to the questions of theoretical conflict, I suggest we turn to the ideas of historical philosopher Michel Foucault. I propose that a Foucauldian perspective might view the competing Schenkerian, Schoenbergian, and neo-Riemannian methods as participating in a triangle of knowledge defined by hierarchy, context, and symmetry. This triangle, analogous to Foucault's quadrilateral of eighteenth-century general grammar, represents the discursive formation or the space in which the knowledge of the Schenkerian, Schoenbergian, and neo-Riemannian methods is made possible. As I believe, each approach's epistemic commitments are based on its acceptance or rejection of these three philosophical presuppositions, and my dissertation explores how aspects of knowledge in the three theoretical models can be linked to some positive or negative constellation of hierarchy, context, and symmetry. One of the most important consequences of an archaeological evaluation is that it can uncover the deep, underlying structures that order knowledge within these three theoretical models, and show theorists who choose one approach over another how a methodology may, in fact, be connected to a seemingly opposed approach through common philosophical presuppositions.

Research suggests that children need both phonics and whole language experience in learning to read although there is little empirical evidence showing that instruction incorporating both approaches is more effective than either one used alone. This study closes this gap in the existing literature by examining the effect of each approach as well as the interaction between them. Specifically, using data from the base year of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998--99 (ECLS-K), this study investigates the impact of early literacy instruction on kindergarten children's learning defined in terms of both the product and process of learning, as well as the social aspect of children's learning. Three child outcomes at the end of kindergarten are examined in this study: direct cognitive test scores, indirect teacher ratings of children's achievement in language and literacy on the Academic Rating Scale, and indirect teacher ratings of children's approaches to learning according to the Social Rating Scale. Four composite measures of instructional approaches are constructed from teachers' reports of their instructional practices in the teacher survey: phonics, teacher-directed instruction, integrated language arts, and advanced writing. The analytic sample includes a nationally representative sample of 13,609 kindergarten children in 2,690 classrooms and 788 schools. Within a multilevel framework of school effects research, this study employs three-level HLM models (children nested within classrooms within schools), which is most appropriate for the research questions and nested data used in the study. The findings from this study strongly support the notion of comprehensive early literacy instruction. Children learned significantly more at the end of kindergarten in classrooms where teachers reported using both integrated language arts and phonics more often. Children also displayed more optimal approaches to learning in classrooms where more integrated language arts and phonics occurred. This suggests that effective teachers use the combination of integrated language arts and phonics rather than either approach alone. In addition, this study also found that children from low-SES families learned more in classrooms where there were more teacher-directed instruction and fewer behavior problems taking place. Implications of the findings for policy and practice are discussed.

While the number of women and faculty of color in the academy has grown in the last two decades, African American women's presence is dwindling across all disciplines and departments. They are practically invisible in engineering and the hard sciences. Although research has scrutinized more closely the barriers affecting women and minority faculty's professional advancement, inquiries that focus specifically on Black women's careers represents a serious and important gap in academic research. This phenomenological study attempts to fill that gap, by placing Black women at the center of analysis. Through in-depth interviews with 10 scientists and engineers, this study aimed to uncover the complex and hidden nuances of these Black women's early-career faculty experiences. I situated this study in the context of new faculty socialization research. Since Black women are relative newcomers to the professoriate, some insight into their lives might be gained by exploring their early-career faculty socialization. Although some theoretical models of socialization are problematic, scholars tend to agree that organizational socialization involves the communication of values, attitudes, and expectations, etc., among members of an organization. Thus, to understand Black women faculty's socialization, I examined messages they encountered about what an academic scientist or engineer ought to be or what they should do. I analyzed how participants responded to these messages; how they constructed their roles/identities as they negotiated with others through communications; to what extent they changed their environment, if at all; and to what extent they revised their own expectations for their roles, as well as their behavior, when they could not change the environment. I also considered how individual characteristics shaped the way the black women faculty negotiated their environment. Findings show that Black women faculty encountered several kinds of messages, many of which made their tenure-track experience difficult: official and informal feedback, devaluation (of their race and gender), double talk (lack of straight talk), silence (lack of discourse, lack of validation). They did, however, also find authentic discourse in some collegial relationships, and especially in networks of other Black women academics, that acknowledged and affirmed them as African American females and as legitimate academics.