Alex Borsa, Sociomedical Sciences

Alex Borsa’s dissertation addresses the financialization of fertility, in which he examines how private equity (PE) firms have been acquiring and consolidating fertility clinics throughout the US. Borsa is constructing a novel dataset of all PE-owned fertility practices and conducting qualitative interviews with investors, clinicians, patients, and other stakeholders to study how social meanings and understandings are implicated in financial takeovers. Drawing upon sociology, public health, and feminist science studies, his project speaks to emerging scholarship, social policy, and public dialogue on the financialization of sexual and reproductive healthcare. 

Julia Burke, History

Julia’s dissertation on abortion in nineteenth-century Britain has two goals. The first is to explore the effects of industrial capitalism on abortion’s availability, methods, and criminality through a comprehensive review of nineteenth-century abortion trials, whose evolution speaks to the commodification of the practice, the motives behind its criminalization, and the profits made – then and today – in offering women “choice” as consumers, but not as citizens. The second goal is to remedy the omission of individual women from existing historiography: the unsuccessful, and therefore visible, abortion that wound up in the courtroom or hospital is too often conflated with the successful, routine contraceptive practice, undetectable by contemporaries and historians, alike. By contextualizing abortions in the lives in which they occurred, the dissertation attempts a history of abortion as it might be told by the people who actually had them. 

Kathleen Aria Carreras Pereira,
Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology

More than 90% of plants form symbiotic relationships with mycorrhizal fungi providing carbon to the fungi in exchange for nutrients. The most common mycorrhizal types are arbuscular- (AM) and ecto- mycorrhizae (EM), which differ in their nutrient cycling pathways. AM and EM types differ in their ability to access soil nutrients, with consequences for tree community composition, carbon storage, and other ecosystem functioning impacts. Fungal traits associated with nutrient acquisition select for tree traits that drive soil properties which reinforce the advantage of their own mycorrhizal type. My research explores biogeochemical feedbacks within the plant-fungus-soil system as a possible mechanism that could drive mycorrhizal-tree spatial patterns on a local scale at Black Rock Forest (Cornwall, NY).

Shirley Chikukwa, Music

What is, or where is Africa located as an ethnomusicological construct? To define oneself as an Africanist, an Africanist ethnomusicologist, or an African musicologist, is to admit to the existence of the construct of Africa which makes a carved out, disciplinary formation possible. To borrow Stuart Hall’s phrasing, this project explores the question: What/who is this ‘Africa/African’ in Africanist ethnomusicology? This project is a multi-sited study of the sonic constructs of contemporary, African identity. This project can be summed up as an attempt to build a sonic profile of the Western construct of Africa, as refracted through the thoughts, experiences, and voices of those who have been labelled both voluntarily and involuntarily, “African,” in service of the question: what does it mean to be African?

Tomás Esper, Teachers College

Why do some reforms ‘travel’ from one country to another, and, more precisely, what exactly is traveling? Is it the reform idea, its instruments, or its procedures? Tomás Esper’s dissertation addresses these questions by analyzing how and why the reform coined ‘School Autonomy with Accountability’ (SAWA) has been disseminated in Latin America since 1990. In simple terms, SAWA promotes schools operating as managerial units, holding them accountable through standardized testing, school inspections, and other distance-monitoring mechanisms. However, there are significant variations in why and how SAWA was adopted in each country's context. Therefore, the first research strand has a birds-eye looking at disseminating 13 SAWA policies across 33 Latin American countries between 1990 and 2020 to unpack what traveled where and why. The second strand delves deeper into examining how economic, political, and institutional legacies have shaped the different SAWA policies’ trajectories in Argentina and Colombia.

Claudia Grigg Edo, English & Comparative Literature

Claudia Grigg Edo is a PhD student in the English & Comparative Literature department. Her research areas are psychoanalytic theory, theories of gender and sexuality, critical theory, opacity, and traditions of self-writing. Her current project is on 20th-century psychoanalytic literature—theory, case study and patient memoir—and its intersections and divergences with feminist and radical political theories of change.

Marie Robin, History

Marie Robin’s dissertation investigates the gendered, political, racial, and military aspects surrounding the French military’s management and administration of soldiers’ sexuality during France’s wars of Empire in Vietnam (1946-54) and Algeria (1954-62). Using both macro and ground-level perspectives, it centers its analysis on the state-sanctioned transcolonial system of French military prostitution, known as Bordel Militaire de Campagne. Established with the paradoxical aim of "curbing" battlefield rape against local populations, alongside other strategic objectives, the institution depended on the sexual labor, and exploitation of thousands of North African and Asian women and girls. Delving into the intricate dynamics between unregulated and regulated forms of sexual violence amid the political and social power struggle of decolonization, the dissertation illuminates the pivotal role of sexual violence within wartime rhetoric and anti-colonial nationalist discourse.

Renata Ruiz-Figueroa, Latin American and Iberian Cultures

Renata Ruiz-Figueroa’s project explores conflicting views of the Nahua altepetl that have been pivotal in shaping property regimes and ensuing agrarian struggles in modern Mexico. Originating from the metaphorical unit of water and mountain, this term denotes Nahua communities. However, legal and historical interpretations have overlooked this crucial relationship, contributing to the degradation of the water-mountain ecological complex. This investigation aims to historicize this deterioration, as well as the transformations of this communal entity and the movements that have emerged in response in the state of Puebla, all of which have been influenced by European ideas of nature, property, jurisdiction, and agricultural production. By exploring diverse cultural/epistemic frameworks and analyzing the tensions between them, this research examines how different views of the relationship between the human, the natural, and the supernatural shaped the historical trajectory of the altepetl and the Mexican state. Ultimately, it aims to underscore the urgency of recognizing and preserving the ecological integrity of the water-mountain relationship.

Benjamin Silver, Psychology

Who I was 5 years ago is not who I am today. The self-concept, or how we perceive ourselves, can change gradually over time or abruptly in response to significant personal events. In this, Benjamin Silver will investigate whether and how the self-concept changes in response to a societal-level event—in this case, the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Silver also asks if a societal-level event serves as a temporal boundary that makes it more difficult to remember one’s own self-concept from before the event, and what types of memory (i.e., episodic memory vs semantic memory) we rely on to draw conclusions about previous self-concepts. This project builds on my own preliminary work investigating how the 2020 U.S. presidential election impacted the self-concept.

Ava Tomasula y Garcia, Anthropology

Ava’s doctoral project investigates undiagnosed illnesses experienced by individuals living in the Calumet Region of northwest Indiana and northeastern Illinois, a former center for steel production. Today, chronic yet poorly understood health conditions are widely experienced in the Calumet, including complaints of "brain fog," unexplained dizziness, and weakness which folks link to the complex ecological, historical and social landscape of the Region. Such vague health complaints do not fit existing paradigms of medical causation, work-related illness or labor-based sociality, nor does the Calumet's present-day mix of decaying and newly emergent industries fit readymade narratives about post-industrial life. In their search for healing, residents of the Calumet make use of ‘alternative’ medical practices which fall on the outskirts or outside of science-based medicine. These include the use of herbal and homeopathic remedies, chiropractic and naturopathic services, prayer groups, and energy work. This research hypothesizes that the undiagnosed health conditions prevalent in the Calumet Region are occasioning new socialities and epistemologies of illness and cure and that communities' increased reliance on alternative healing modalities is impacting the landscape of medical epistemology in the United States.