Theses and Dissertations

Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer's personal evolution from an elite, reserved, art-collecting wife of an American Gilded Age industrialist to an engaged, unapologetically outspoken activist on behalf of all women's right to vote is emblematic of the myriad ways women moved out into the world from their domestic spheres in the early twentieth century, harnessing the increasing power of collective visual protest as a peaceful, non-violent tactic to demand justice and a voice.Her 1915 suffrage exhibit held at the Knoedler Gallery in New York City may be a modest moment of microhistory in the l

This thesis deconstructs a 21st-century museum photography exhibition of two mid-century pop culture icons, Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley, to foreground the significance of contemporary institutional practices in the deradicalization of socio-historic narratives in the resurrection, propagation and merger of two fundamentally radical post-modern cultural symbols. I historicize each man within his mid-20th century milieu to analyze broader communicative themes within this current exhibition and chart a roadmap of boundary transgression in a complex parallel history.

During the Second World War, the United States government established the Civilian Public Service (CPS), an alternative service program for conscientious objectors on an unprecedented scale. Though it intended to place men in camps where they would perform "work of national importance" in lieu of military service, the CPS often assigned men to make-work projects that proved inadequate to both the government and the conscientious objectors themselves.

The electromagnetic properties of a live biological system are extremely important to many medical applications. While information about electromagnetic properties of tissues are available in the literature, little or no data are available for a single cell or subcellular structures. Microwave biological/cell detection has been demonstrated to be useful and promising in many medical applications due to its internal properties such as non-invasive, fast and label-free.

This thesis explores the use of paratext, or the material surrounding a text, in the rise of video games in American arcades and homes. Paratext bridged the gap between the game and the player, inviting players to play and providing context to a game's content. By translating game rules into context players understood, paratext mirrored American culture and common themes players recognized. While arcades were the originating space for video games, home console games became more prevalent in the late 1970s and eclipsed the arcade as innovative space for video games.

For the first time, the impedance spectrum of live Jurkat T-lymphocytes human cells was characterized in a single sweep spanning six decades of frequency from 9 kHz to 9 GHz. The ultrawide bandwidth bridged the traditional impedance spectroscopy at kilohertz to megahertz frequencies with the recently developed microwave dielectric spectroscopy, which can probe the cell interior without being hindered by the cell membrane.

A closed-loop capacitance sensing and control mix-mode circuit with a dedicated sensor electrode and a proportional-integral controller was designed for MEMS varactors. The control was based on tuning the bias magnitude of the MEMS varactor according to t

For the first time, wafer-scale fabrication of PtSe2 MOSFETs was demonstrated by photolithography. The on PtSe2 is grown by thermally assisted conversion (TAC) of Pt films under Se vapor at 400 °C. Taking advantage of the unique property of PtSe2 to transition from semiconductor to semimetal as its thickness increases beyond a few monolayers, channel recess was adapted for improving gate control while keeping the contact resistance as low as 0.008 Ω∙cm. The wafer-scale fabrication resulted in uniform device characteristics so that average vs. best results were reported, as well as RF vs.