Empowering Popular Fiction: The Ironic Reinterpretation of Confucianism in the Fiction of Kyokutei Bakin

(This dissertation includes previously published material.)In my dissertation, I investigate the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the hierarchical, state-endorsed Confucian ideology imported from imperial China and the iconoclastic, popular literature of Edo Japan. Although the Tokugawa shogunate implemented Confucianism to reinforce social order from above, I argue that Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848), a renowned popular writer whose audience consisted of people from various classes, reinterpreted and appropriated this ideology in his fictional works as a means of critiquing and resisting governmental oppression. Previous scholarship on the literary exchange between Edo Japan and Imperial China has primarily focused on the influence of Chinese vernacular novels in terms of themes, plots, and terminology, while often neglecting the transference and reinterpretation of Chinese philosophical thought. My interdisciplinary research addresses this gap by bridging the fields of literature and philosophy. This transnational and multilingual approach reveals how the seemingly rigid framework of Confucian thought was adapted and transformed into a literary tool for questioning social hierarchies and challenging authority. The core of my research examines how Bakin’s works critique Confucianism by systematically deconstructing its prescribed top-down social order–beginning with the higher-level legitimacy of the ruler, moving to the secondary-level obligation and righteousness of the samurai class, and finally addressing the personal-level filial piety and chastity. Chapter I outlines this overarching structure, while Chapter II analyzes the concept of legitimacy in Kaikan kyōki kyōkakuden (Lives of the gallants: Read them and wonder, 1832-1835). The novel’s multifaceted portrayal of legitimacy through characters from diverse positions challenges and resists a singular, monolithic interpretation of the concept. Chapter III, part of which has been published in Studies in Japanese Literature and Culture, investigates the kyōaku (gallant) archetype, debunking the myth that a righteous person has to devote himself to serve the ruler. The portrayal of virtuous kyōkaku as protectors of the oppressed reflects societal anxiety over disorder and the collective yearning for justice. Chapter IV focuses on the portrayal of a dokufu (“poisonous woman”) character in Shinpen Kinpeibai (New Edition of the Plum in the Golden Vase, 1831-1847), uncovering how filial piety and chastity can function as tools of oppression. Ultimately, I conclude that Bakin’s works amplify the voices of marginalized individuals, emphasizing their agency in reinterpreting state-endorsed ideologies and constructing their own identities

Ensuring the Educational Rights of Multilingual Students: New Policy Perspectives on English Learner Research

English learners (EL) status is a federally-protected student category that ensures equal educational rights for multilingual students in the United States. In this dissertation, I conducted two studies to advance the understanding of how and to what extent current policies and practices uphold the educational rights of students classified as ELs.The first study explored the relationship between EL students and their peers in secondary school academic content courses, an under-studied topic in EL education research. I conducted three sets of analyses with course-taking data in Oregon: describing the average characteristics of EL students’ peers in academic content courses using social network analysis; causally estimating the impact of exiting EL status on peer composition with a regression discontinuity design; and estimating the association between peer composition and EL students’ academic achievement through a linear-in-means model. I found evidence that secondary EL students are often placed in low-level academic content courses with other EL and low-achieving peers. Findings from this study point to the need to reconsider curricular structures, course placement practices, and instructional models altogether to improve the learning experiences of EL students. The second paper examined how long students typically take to exit EL status, or time to EL reclassification—an area where research has been actively conducted but remains un-synthesized. I conducted a meta-analysis with survival analysis and longitudinal studies on time to EL reclassification, using a meta-analytic technique to synthesize individual survival curves into a single summary survival curve. I estimated that the majority of kindergarten-start students likely exit EL status before grade 5. I also found significant variation in time to reclassification by students’ initial English proficiency level, special education status, and socioeconomic status, as well as reclassification policies set at the state and district levels. Importantly, this study provides an empirical benchmark that state departments of education can reference to set English proficiency growth goals as required by the federal education law and to identify ways to improve EL services.2027-10-1

Acute Next-Day Effects of Alcohol Use on Daily Cognitive Functioning Among Young Adults: Protocol for a 21-Day Diary Study

Background: Young adults exhibit the highest rates of binge drinking and heavy alcohol use of any age group. Blackout drinking, or alcohol-induced memory loss, is a negative consequence of heavy drinking and is common among young adults. Alcohol use has been found to affect postintoxication cognitive functioning, especially among those who have experienced blackout drinking. However, there have been a limited number of studies that have assessed alcohol use and cognitive functioning via ecological momentary assessment (EMA). This methodology allows researchers to have a better understanding of the association between alcohol use and next-day cognition as well as blackout drinking and potential moderators between these associations. Objective: The primary objective of the current study is to examine the association between alcohol use and next-day cognitive functioning among young adults. Multiple indices of alcohol use including blackout drinking and cognitive functioning will be examined. Additionally, moderators of these associations (at the day- and person-levels) will be examined. Potential moderators include other substance use, sleep, mood, hangover symptoms, and participant characteristics (eg, baseline alcohol use severity). Methods: Eligible participants had to be aged between 18-25 years, a current university or college student, residing in the Eastern time zone, endorsing heavy episodic drinking at least 2 times in a typical month, and reporting a blackout drinking episode at least once in the previous year. After completing a web-based screening survey, eligible participants were directed to a web-based baseline survey that asked about alcohol use, self-reported cognitive functioning, objective cognitive assessments, and demographic information. Participants were then sent 5 surveys a day for 21 consecutive days, which asked about substance use, sleep, mood, and self-reported and objective cognitive functioning. Multilevel models will be used to examine day-level associations between alcohol use and cognitive functioning. Results: A total of 304 participants were eligible, with 297 participants completing at least 1 EMA survey and cognitive assessment during the 21-day period. Data were collected between November 2023 and May 2024. Conclusions: The primary aim of this study is to examine the association between alcohol use (including blackout drinking) and next-day cognitive functioning, with a secondary objective of identifying potential day- and person-level moderators of these associations. Findings from the study may help inform momentary interventions and identify characteristics of young adults that may put them at higher risk for experiencing negative consequences.This work is supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA; grant R21 AA030590) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA; grant T32 DA017629). The NIAAA and NIDA did not have any role in the study design; collection, analysis, or interpretation of the data; writing the report; or the decision to submit the report for publication

Time-Reversal Based Hybrid Quantum State Transfer and the Interference of Two Interference Effects

Much of quantum science is about developing and employing methods for controlling quantum systems to perform tasks that are either classically hard, interesting (e.g., novel or useful), or ideally both. In this dissertation, we analyze the essential role of controlling the modes photons occupy (e.g., their shape, polarization, and path taken) in performing quantum-information-processing tasks. This dissertation includes two disjoint but complementary research directions. The first and primary direction concerns the deterministic transfer of quantum information or entanglement between heterogeneous quantum systems using itinerant photons. We present a unitary transformation that time reverses, frequency translates, and stretches the photon wave packet emitted by one system to match the spectral properties of the receiving system. We show how the underlying input-output formalism is modified due to such manipulations, leading to a new interpretation, wherein the receiving system is effectively driven by a fictitious version of the emitter that evolves backwards in time at a new decay rate and frequency. The probability of interfacing successfully is determined by the temporal-spectral overlap of the actual photonic wave packet and an ideal shape. This allows us to analytically and numerically analyze how the probability of success is impacted by realistic errors and show the utility of our scheme in consonance with known error correction methods. In the second direction, we analyze a linear-optical setup in which two kinds of standard interference effects---namely, Mach--Zehnder interference and Hong--Ou--Mandel interference---interfere with one another, partially canceling each other out. This new perspective, along with the overall pedagogical exposition of this work, illustrates how quantum effects can combine nontrivially, the importance of photon indistinguishability for interference, and, moreover, that quantum interference happens at measurement. This work can serve as a pedagogical bridge to more advanced quantum mechanical concepts, including photonic quantum computing, complementarity, and tests of quantum mechanics (e.g., Hardy’s Paradox). This dissertation contains previously published as well as unpublished co-authored materials

Meat Matters: Food, Power, and the Racialized Politics of Eating Animals in Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of food in Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) to explore how food discourses and practices shape and reflect processes of coloniality, ethnonationalism, racialization, and everyday resistance. Building on scholarship within critical food studies, coloniality studies, and racialization studies, I ultimately show how hegemonic food discourses and practices—even purportedly progressive and inclusive ones—work to stabilize hierarchies of power to the benefit of white, European eaters and at the expense of Indigenous Inuit, religious minority, and non-white communities in and outside of Europe. These arguments, practices, and related legislative policies are often justified through the language of preserving tradition, protecting animal rights, and promoting environmental sustainability. I draw on qualitative methods—including ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, content and discourse analysis, and fermentation as methodology—to examine three dissimilar yet interrelated case studies that encompass the major competing forces that shape today’s (contested) Danish and Greenlandic Inuit foodscapes. First, I examine the so-called Danish meatball war, analyzing how public debates about pork in school lunches racialize white, Christian Danes in opposition to Muslim and Jewish communities, which in turn shapes the welfare state and asylum system. Second, I analyze Denmark’s 2021 dietary guidelines, corporate plant-based campaigns, and global policy reports to show how recent plant-based approaches perpetuate plantation-style agriculture and extend temperate-normativity, marginalizing Arctic Indigenous and other food cultures. Third, I explore the Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit) practice of fermenting hooded seal blubber (iginneq) within the fermentation revival and New Nordic Kitchen movements, demonstrating the limits of these movements and examining the Kalaallit expression of double consciousness as an everyday theorization of coloniality and Indigenous resistance. By putting these cases in conversation, I examine how anti-sealing efforts and anti-religious slaughter laws operate as a colonial boomerang, where imperial logics developed abroad to manage Indigenous communities are redeployed to manage religious minority populations at home in Europe. These processes, however, remain obscured behind a culture of denial and silence, where colonial legacies and racial hierarchies are denied even as they persist. At the same time, Indigenous, religious minority communities, and others continue to resist these pressures, asserting their rights to culturally relevant foods through everyday practices. Taken together, this project reveals how food operates as a site where power is both reproduced and contested.2027-08-0

“The dangers which plague this country”: Empire and Disaster in the North Pacific, 1700-1995

This dissertation examines how the history of colonialism and empire building interacted with frequent earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in the North Pacific. Through archival sources and new translations of Russian scholarship, it narrates how natural disasters did and did not interact with programs of conquest, colonization, settlement, and urban planning. Through the stories of major natural disasters in Kamchatka, Kodiak, Anchorage, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin, this dissertation proposes that colonial projects in the North Pacific appear to have possessed a resilience to natural disasters based on their roles within the larger colonial and imperial projects of the Russian Empire and its successor states, as well as the United States. Conversely, these same projects appeared to be uniquely vulnerable to other aspects of the North Pacific environment, such as the incompatibility of the climate with export-oriented agriculture. The dissertation concludes with an argument for the importance of the region’s fundamentally colonial history in shaping the contemporary disaster regimes in the North Pacific as well as twentieth century seismology.2027-04-2

The Appeal of the Fascist Leader

How the fascist Leader and fascist propaganda seek to circumvent rationality through psychological manipulation and emotional training to create, cultivate, & maintain a following

Psychological Distance in Maps: A Conceptual Framework for Applying Construal Level Theory in Cartography

The construal level theory of Psychological Distance (CLT) is an emerging psychological theory that could offer a rich framework for understanding communication in maps. According to CLT, as an individual’s psychological distance (the degree to which the topic is removed from an individual's frame of reference) from a topic increases, so too does their construal level (the degree of mental abstraction) of that topic. In cartography, this theory can offer a useful framework for trying to understand how the content of a map can moderate an individual’s reception of the map’s message. This thesis offers a conceptual framework for understanding how psychological distance may be present in maps.2026-08-0

Border Fictions: Nationalism and Decolonial Aesthetics in US-Mexico Migration Literature

Submitted to the Undergraduate Library Research Award scholarship competition: (2025). 35 p.This essay explores the literary representations of national identity, national borders, and transnational Latinx migrants in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) and Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2015). Both novels interrogate the myth of American exceptionalism and the common preconceptions Americans have toward Latinx migrants: Luiselli’s novel portrays a national identity crisis following the narrator’s confrontation with the reality of the ongoing child refugee crisis, while Herrera’s novel assumes the transnational migrant’s perspective to dissect the illogical meanings attributed to the symbols and practices that support American nationalism. This project builds from Glenda R. Carpio’s formulation of “migrant aesthetics” in contemporary migration literature, from which I consider literary features that expose the fragile yet highly consequential assumptions that compose American national identity. Across the various sections of the essay, I argue that migration fiction constructively questions the nationalist ideologies that produce physical and intangible violence against Latinx migrants

ART VS CRAFT: EXPLORING THE CATEGORIES OF “ART” AND “CRAFT” THROUGH QUILTING

22 pagesThis project aims to explore the similarities and differences between the categories of “art” and “craft” in the creative world through research and personal practice. As a multimedia artist, I have found myself fascinated by the noticeable differences in the way my peers, academics, and other professionals in the visual arts space speak about “art” as opposed to “craft.” I have observed that “art” is often preceded by value judgments like “fine” or “high” that essentially position “art” as something esoteric, valuable, and exclusive (Tompkins). “Craft,” on the other hand, seems to be more of a catch-all category for creative works that serve a more practical purpose, require specific skills to produce, and can be re-created by following a set of instructions (Wentworth Galleries). I have noticed that “art” tends to value the process behind creating the piece, emphasizing expression, whereas “craft” seems centered around the final product, emphasizing craftsmanship (Davies). While these two categories seem clearly defined at first glance, I have observed through my own practice how certain creative works transcend or overlap “craft” and “art,” specifically fiber arts– a genre that has historically been left out of professional and academic art spaces due to its associations with femininity, poverty, and utility (Brooklyn Museum). I intend to explore the differences and similarities between these categories by first understanding how academics in the space define “art” and “craft” and examining recent discourse about the subjectivity of these classifications (Markowitz). I will simultaneously research the rich history of quilting in the United States of America over the past two centuries to more thoroughly understand the symbolism and significance of different quilt squares, patterns, and styles. I will then apply my research to create my own quilt while documenting and reflecting on my process to answer the question: Can craft be art?