In a global asylum system that is increasingly hostile to refugees, queer Middle Eastern refugee narratives undeniably do political work. In this thesis, I examine three overlapping discursive sites—testimony, popular news stories, and memoir—where queer Middle Eastern refugee n…
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Reading poetry in Yiddish, Hebrew and English from across the twentieth century, this dissertation examines how literary lineage is constructed and challenged by Jewish women in Eastern Europe, America and Mandatory Palestine. Between Jewish women's limited access to the past an…
This thesis addresses how leaders find themselves doing something even when they don't know what to do. It is based on my own practice as an experienced team leader and it deals with questions of action, time, identity and leadership. A classic understanding of action usually re…
In this thesis I examine the heavy residue material in four buildings from the Neolithic site Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Heavy residue refers to all those 'material' fragments that sink during the flotation process. The basic principle of flotation is that the sediment is added to wa…
This dissertation proposes an explanation for how Islamic senses of divinity, prophets, and the afterlife influence perceptions of the legitimacy of various political and religious leaders and male heads of families in the rural northern part of the Fouta Djallon region of Guine…
Evidentiality is commonly concerned with two basic notions: evidence type and the speaker's commitment towards the truth of the proposition expressed (Chafe and Nichols 1986). Throughout a detailed study of the morphosyntax and semantics of deverbal agentives (DAs), this dissert…
This dissertation explores the practice and perception of urban form in Urfa—an ethno-linguistically diverse city in southeastern Turkey, where in recent years state development and village-to-urban migration have brought rapid material change. Based on fourteen months of ethnog…
My dissertation, entitled “Prosaic Times: Time as Subject in Wordsworth, Richardson, Flaubert, and Melville,” examines literary works of realism—the artistic claim to represent life as it is—that do not necessarily depend upon the plotline of the story they tell but on the sense…
This paper examines the portrayals of ghosts and narrative disjunction in Henry James’s The Turn of The Screw as examples of non-linear and non-chronological conceptions of time. Through this examination, I utilize theories from Riceour, Derrida, and Barad to argue that James’s …
This thesis proposes an urban intervention to create a new type of public space in the city of Shanghai. It investigates the historical evolution of the public spaces in the city and concludes that a new type of public space without prescribed functions and boundary restrictions…
This dissertation retells a story of the American postwar period as a debate about what it means to be contemporary: a story made legible by tracing out an ongoing confluence of depictions of reading, anachronistic temporalities, and theorizations of race. Specifically, it tells…
This dissertation argues that religious world-making in popular culture can reveal and resist hegemonic times. Taking as my primary case study the United States in the 2010s, particularly the shift from the Obama to the Trump era, I analyze cultural constructions of time—as sacr…
Modern understandings of nostalgia sharply distinguish it from memory and often construe its relationship to the past as reactionary, fanciful, or retrograde. This dissertation reconsiders that valuation by engaging the formative sources that contribute to philosophical understa…
Formal criticism of comics has often focused on the importance of sequence and the filling of gutters with causative logics. Practitioner-theorists like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud have focused on “sequentiality” and “closure” to conceive of how readers connect the disparate p…
This dissertation rethinks the Iraqi revolution of 1958 and the post-World War II era leading up to it through the lens of gender and family reform, in particular by examining the relation between such reforms and various conceptions of temporality, both secular and Islamic. Eng…