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This dissertation examines how the Centralverein deutscher Staatsb�rger j�dischen Glaubens and the Volksverein f�r das katholische Deutschland utilized decentralization into the local and regional spheres to participate in German society, shape public and political discourse, and strengthen their respective community’s sense of belonging and identity. Drawing on the Centralverein and Volksverein’s administrative records held in archives in England and Germany, this dissertation assesses how their networks of local and regional branches operated and how power and responsibility shifted between the center and the periphery during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany. In decentering away from their respective central office to focus on the local and regional branches, this dissertation argues that local and regional branches were the main sites in which religious minority groups constructed and reinforced their influence, whether political or social. Whether through providing legal or political defense or holding assemblies and lectures, religious minority associations worked to unite their members and create a unified front for political and social action on their own behalf. In promoting a positive connection to Jewishness while also defending Germanness, the Centralverein’s local and regional branches created tailored spaces in which Centralverein members could develop and affirm a synthesized German-Jewish identity while also asserting their civic belonging in the local, regional, and national spheres. Through both a comparative and integrated institutional history of the Centralverein and Volksverein’s decentralization, this dissertation provides a more detailed understanding of social and political relations between minority and majority communities during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany. A comparative perspective allows for examining how minority religious associations responded and adapted to changes at the state level and navigated shifting means of self-assertion and political expression. In examining how German-Jewish and German-Catholic associations implemented decentralization and accommodated regionalization, this study decenters the examination of belonging, the pluralities of civic, regional, and religious identities and what it meant to represent religious minority interests in the German public sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This doctoral dissertation is a comprehensive study on a novel method based on unitary synaptic weights to construct intrinsically stable neural systems. By eliminating the need to normalize neural activations, unitary neural networks deliver faster inference speeds and smaller model sizes while maintaining competitive accuracies for image recognition. In addition, unitary networks are drastically more robust against adversarial attacks in natural language processing systems because unitary weights are resilient to small input perturbations. The last portion focuses on a small demo that implements unitary neural nets in quantum computing. With the comprehensive performance evaluation in classical machine learning, the rigorous framework in mathematics, and the exploration of quantum computing, this dissertation establishes a solid foundation for unitary neural networks in the future of deep learning.

Although the wars waged by Classic Maya kings were carefully documented in stone by ancient Maya scribes, little is known about the internal battles fought on the political field. Maya inscriptions present the court as a body unified behind its king, however there is reason to believe that courtiers under the king possessed their own aspirations, and competed with one another for power and security. During the Late Classic a flourish of new elite residential construction at royal centers and the appearance of new sub-royal titles on public monuments signaled that a burgeoning noble class gained influence in Maya courts. This second tier of elites existed in an exclusive political system primed for competition over power and resources. Hints in the ancient textual record suggest that factions within Maya courts contended with one another to improve their positions. This dissertation seeks to establish the competition within the aristocracy of a Classic Maya polity, and what methods the secondary elite pursued to jockey for power.Unfortunately, the dearth of non-royal elites in art and texts at most Classic Maya sites poses a methodological challenge: how does one study the internal dynamics of Maya courts without explicit historical references? I hope to address this question by analyzing the Late Classic aristocracy of El Zotz, using archaeological evidence to compare the practices of different lineage groups at the site. I focus on three residential complexes built outside the royal palace of El Zotz during the Late Classic, each with elite characteristics. My research seeks to answer two questions: (1) which of the newly constructed Late Classic residential groups around El Zotz housed non-royal elites? And (2) what strategies did the non-royal elites at El Zotz pursue to gain power within the political system? With these questions I identify the politically influential parties in the court of El Zotz beyond the royal family, and the tactics that they used to compete for dominance inside the government structure at the site.

This paper explores the conceptual framework for the body of work featured in the thesis exhibition, We Got Here Under False Pretenses. It explores how the structures of the neoliberal free market manipulate the superficial construction of value under the constructs of branding and advertising. Framed through an investigation of the history of pattern, the work is situated within the context of capitalist cultural production as a product that is both critical and complicit with the current value structure.

Neural conversational dialogue agents often produce uninteresting, broad responses, such as “Yes” or “I don't know.” While these responses can be appropriate in a variety of contexts, if a model over-produces these typical responses, this leads to a dull conversation. This well-documented phenomenon is known as the diversity problem. This dissertation examines the diversity problem and proposes ways to improve dialogue agents in both the single- and multi-response setting. In the single-response setting, the dialogue model is tasked with generating one utterance to continue a conversation. In this setting, a dialogue model's diversity is measured by its ability to generate diverse responses to different conversations. I propose a data collection procedure aimed at increasing the diversity of a corpus, called Diversity-Informed Data Collection (DIDC). While prior work modifies decoding procedures to increase model diversity, DIDC addresses the diversity problem at the dataset level. DIDC uses dynamically computed corpus-level statistics to determine which conversational participants to collect more data from. DIDC produces significantly more diverse data than baseline data collection methods. Additionally, training dialogue models on a more diverse corpus results in more diverse responses. DIDC is generalizable and can be used with other corpus-level metrics.The next two contributions consider the task of generating multiple responses for a single conversation. Diversity examined in this setting measures a model's ability to generate multiple varied responses for the same input. First, I propose a novel metric which uses Natural Language Inference (NLI) to measure the semantic diversity of a set of model responses for a conversation. I evaluate this metric using an established framework and find strong evidence indicating NLI Diversity is correlated with semantic diversity. I show that the contradiction relation is more useful than the neutral relation for measuring this diversity. I additionally demonstrate how to iteratively improve the semantic diversity of a sampled set of model responses via a new generation procedure called Diversity Threshold Generation, which results in an increase in NLI Diversity compared to standard generation procedures. Finally, I hypothesize that some conversations constrain the type of responses which are appropriate, therefore limiting the diversity one would expect in a set of responses. I explore the relationship between speech acts present in the input conversation and the diversity of a set of output responses. I propose the concept of Pragmatically Appropriate Diversity, the extent to which a conversation creates and constrains the creation of multiple diverse responses. Using a multi-response dataset, I find significant differences among NLI Diversity of responses for different speech act utterances. I use these findings to explore whether expert creative writers can predict the Pragmatically Appropriate Diversity from an input conversation, finding significant differences between the Pragmatically Appropriate Diversity among different speech acts. This contribution provides a framework to incorporate pragmatic conversational information into the evaluation of neural dialogue models.

The nineteenth century brought significant cultural changes for the United States. In addition to changing religious ideals, shifting gender roles, and educational reform, perspectives on disability began to transform. Particularly within Presbyterian circles, Deafness was a target for rehabilitation. The founding of the Connecticut Asylum for the Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons provided a new opportunity for wealthy, white d/Deaf people to learn the then newly created American Sign Language. Some of the first students enrolled included Sophia Fowler and Eliza Boardman, two women who received formal education and fulfilled the roles expected of women during their lifetime by becoming wives and mothers. Previously, disabled women were prevented from doing any of this. This project relies on methodologies associated with biography, critical disability studies, and gender history to use the lived and documented experiences of Fowler and Boardman as case studies for how cultural and social shifts related to disability and gender allowed space for d/Deaf women to challenge gender roles and perspectives on disability in the nineteenth century US.

This MA thesis traces how “ethnic Koreans” in northeastern China (chaoxianzu) reshaped their perception(s) of “ethnicity” over the course of the great political and social upheavals from Manchukuo to the People’s Republic of China. By looking into less-explored memoirs and oral histories, this research is interested in dissecting the interrelations between memory-formation and ethnic imagination. Chapter 1 lays the theoretical groundwork for my memory-centered approach, through which I historicize the ethnic Koreans’ conceptualization(s) of “ethnicity” as a process, rather than a self-evident precondition. Chapter 2 reveals the ethnic Koreans’ ambiguous and fluid sense of ethnicity under Manchukuo’s ideology of minzu xiehe (concordia of ethnos). Chapter 3 examines the cultural construction of “Korean ethnicity” advocated by the Chinese Communist Party during the Chinese civil war. Chapter 4 investigates the contestations between the Party-state’s revolutionary narrative and the bottom-up ethnic discourse in the early socialist era. This thesis argues that memory comes to be a mediator reifying the fluid, contingent, and sometimes-contested process of ethnic imagination in between the boundaries of nation-states.

Transgender individuals worldwide are bound to the necessity of the provider’s letter—a letter from healthcare professional certifying the validity of their identity—for medical care and legal recognition. The use of the provider’s letter continues, despite decades of community pushback, a lack of any evidence of efficacy or positive effect of the requirement, and multiple literatures supporting its unethical and damaging impacts on the trans community. This project uses three approaches, in the form of three separate but thematically connected articles, to understand the letter and its current usage in the trans medical and legal world. The first article defines the providers letter and performs an integrated historical review of the letter and the bodies of literature that have engaged with it; bioethics, critical literatures of medicalization/pathologization, and legal scholarship. This review concludes that the letter, rather than being a supportive or helpful practice, is used to control trans bodies and performances of gendered subjectivity. Further, that the justification of the letter focuses on the specter of regret, which has not been supported by evidence to be a legitimate concern. The second article digs into the history of the letter as an object, revealing its origins as a part of the application for a transvestite certificate in early 20th century Germany. This article focuses on sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld as the creator of the modern understanding of the letter, and its use in the application for the transvestite certificate, a pragmatic solution to the problem of presumed transvestites disturbing the peace. Hirschfeld’s pupil, Dr. Harry Benjamin, brought the letter to the United States and served as the architect for early trans medicine in the mid 20th century, so its Germanic origins are deeply relevant to the modern practice. The final article focuses on an alternative approach to transgender medicine, first laying out the issues with the current medical model, then laying out an alternative model, the gender wellness model. This model rests on the idea that all people have an optimum level of gender wellness, and for some, reaching that optimum level may require intervention. While the letter is a complex object that resists simple categorization, understanding what it was created to do and how it functions practically in the legal and medical realm opens a variety of productive avenues for exploration.

This dissertation traces the development of the early South Korean prison system. It follows changes in prison administration after Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule and subsequent division by the United States and Soviet Union in 1945. It examines the use of prisons before, during, and after the Korean War (1950–3) and ends with the fall of the Syngman Rhee regime in 1960. After the 1948 establishment of the Republic of Korea, penal reformers proclaimed the goal of reforming the prison system under the slogan “democratic punishment” (minju haenghyŏng, 민주행형/民主行刑). Though appearing oxymoronic, reformers wielded the slogan when legitimating real changes in penal administration. This dissertation examines successive benchmarks in early ROK penal reform history to reveal that the “democratization” of penal administration was an earnest project to transform South Korea’s prisons into laboratories, factories, and schools for producing ideal citizens. More broadly beyond the Korean context, Democratizing Punishment traces the changing discourse surrounding criminality and reform in the early ROK to explicate the role of punishing society’s others in reflexively producing national identity, solidifying state power, and building the Cold War’s U.S.-aligned bloc known as the “Free World.” It argues that early South Korean prisons were not exceptional, aberrant, or an inadvertent reversion to colonial practices: they operated as designed to produce the ideal South Korean citizen from the negative example of its abject other—the criminal, the communist, and the social deviant.