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This thesis seeks to discuss the inclusion of space and technology in Aimee Semple McPherson’s illustrated sermons and work. Throughout the 1930s, McPherson was able to blur the lines between religion, science, pop-culture, and performance to create a spectacle for those in attendance at the Angelus Temple in Echo Park. Her theatrical and pop-cultural elements not only gave her preaching more credibility, but also made them more relatable to a wider audience across Los Angeles County, and even the world. After receiving permission to access the Heritage Center Archives, I cross-referenced my research with materials from the Pentecostal Archives. I investigated different newspaper articles to gather more information on both the illustrated sermons and the church’s interest in outer space and the great beyond. I then explored other online records of newspapers from the period to discover the intrigue in space outside of the church. Through my comparison of the articles by McPherson, the Foursquare Crusader, and other California-based publications, I gathered a better picture of technological and astronomical appreciation. Alongside the images from the Heritage Center Archives, I was able to discover where McPherson drew her inspiration from in order to create such entertaining and thought-provoking sermons rooted in science, technology, and religion.

Much of the Christian imagery in colonial Latin America (1492–1824) was crafted by the hands of indigenous artists who used European prints as models for their work. Translated from printed sources to monumental painting, Diego Quispe Tito’s (1611–1681) El juicio final (1675) synthesized the printed works of three different European artists: Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516), Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475–1564), and Philippe Thomassin (1562–1622). Quispe Tito drew inspiration from each print’s iconographic elements, cohesively translating them into his painting. The transition from print to paint allowed for translations of European Christian imagery to colonial indigenous Christianity. Native artists constructed their own visual traditions from prints, which mediated their understanding of Christianity through their own lived experiences and socio-cultural history. Diego Quispe Tito selected motifs from different printed sources which would best suit his audience, while also including subtle references to indigenous concepts which pre-dated Spain’s conquest. Through both visible and invisible pictorial modes, Quispe Tito crafted a unique picture of the Last Judgment imagery which was filtered through the lens of indigenous experience. The Peruvian artist included motifs which drew from European ecclesiastical imagery while also appealing to pre-colonial belief systems that predated Spain’s colonization of Latin America. Quispe Tito situated Christianity within an indigenous intellectual framework, transforming three European prints into a painting which centered the native believer.

"Marriage Laws and Practices in South China, 1930-1980" traces and compares different models of state regulation of marriage via laws and campaigns and people's responses over five decades. It focuses on twentieth-century South China, a time and place in which successive regimes in China and a colonial government in Hong Kong each tried to reform marriage customs, with differences in scopes and methods across the Hong Kong–China border. In China under the Nationalist and collaborationist regimes and under the Communist Party in the People's Republic of China, the national government and its provincial counterpart adopted an active agenda to reform marriage, in contrast to the laid-back approach by the post-war colonial government in Hong Kong. Through analyzing changes in marriage customs in the context of three marriage laws--the Nationalist Civil Code in 1930, the People's Republic of China Marriage Law in 1950, and the Marriage Reform Ordinance in Hong Kong in 1971, this dissertation crosses the chronological divides of the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. It suggests that regime changes or political campaigns had a real but limited effect on changes in habits and customs. Furthermore, the regional specificity of South China and cross-border marriages in China and Hong Kong during the Maoist era made marriage governance more challenging for the state, as the people were less receptive to the state's message of frugal weddings and transaction-free marriage. Gradually the state in China evolved into a regulatory behemoth, and its people's ability to act outside the law gradually diminished as state capabilities to regulate marriage expanded between the 1950s and the 1970s. Nonetheless, urban and rural residents frequently found ways to manipulate politics and policies while interacting with multiple levels of the Chinese state (local, provincial, national) and the colonial state in Hong Kong to retain their marriage practices and customs despite relentless campaigns from the top.

The recent proliferation of machine learning (ML) agents that interact with humans through natural text conversation (e.g. smart phone assistants, chat bots) is predicated on the unprecedented public availability of user-contributed text (e.g. blogs, product reviews) and behavioral traces (e.g. purchases, social media interactions).Current methods for building conversational agents have seen success in highly structured fields like automated help desks and reservation booking. However, it remains challenging to apply these ML systems to help users with daily tasks in more natural and intuitive ways. For example, current recommender systems cannot fluidly engage with users for multiple rounds of conversation.In this dissertation we focus primarily on developing technologies that allow intelligent agents to engage with users in trustworthy, personalized, and interactive ways through the medium of text.Specifically, my work focuses on 1) explainable dialog models to facilitate meaningful interviews; 2) a language modeling framework to infer user preferences from dialog; and 3) a bot-play framework for training explainable and personalized recommender systems to understand and reflect user feedback over multiple turns of conversation. I finally present two case studies on applying the aforementioned technologies to build personalized interactive agents that generate and edit instructional texts (e.g. cooking recipes) to assist users in their daily lives.

The overarching problem that Natural Language Processing (NLP) research tries to solve is linguistic constructs and their meaning. There has been tremendous progress in recent years in contextual text representations, leading to the emergence of self-attention and language models. Language models have pushed the state of the art in question answering, natural language understanding, and a range of other NLP tasks. Whereas language models have revolutionized the way text is represented, they need large amounts of training data, and they may not understand text written in informal, non-mainstream styles. As a result, knowledge-hungry domains such as healthcare or underrepresented users such as older adults have not benefited from this progress.This dissertation introduces methods that aim to enable language models to adapt to domains with user-generated text as input, and that require specialized knowledge, with challenging, noisy or small training datasets. In particular, I develop methods for text understanding and question answering for consumer health applications, or users of medical language technology systems. First, I tackle Answer Sentence Selection through recursive language models. I show that the popular transformer architecture can leverage tree structures in formally written text, yet fail to do so in informal, user-written text. Then, I propose to better understand user-written questions, or Consumer Health Questions: I propose a new parameter-sharing method that jointly trains question summarization and entailment for the medical domain. Afterwards, I bring together answer selection and question understanding to design a system for medical Question Understanding and Answering. The proposed system takes a long, user-written medical question as input, and selects the best answer from a medical knowledge base using self-supervised losses. Finally, I study text understanding through the lens of entity linking for utterances written by users on social media.

The objective of this paper is to illustrate elite women’s political contributions and agency through a case study of Taira Shigeko/Kenshunmon’in. She was the “primary” wife of monarch Go-shirakawa, the mother of monarch Takakura, and a sister-in-law of Taira Kiyomori. Since the Heike regime brought “warriors” to the center of the court for the first time, its military aspect has been emphasized. By examining the sociopolitical structures of the insei period, however, it is apparent that violence alone would have never been enough to both establish and maintain the regime: both civil authority and military power were required. Through a biography of Shigeko, I explore how elite women in this period wielded power through civil authority and conclude that Shigeko was the co-founder of the regime that became a bridge to Japan’s first shogunate. Moreover, by positioning the Heike regime as the Go-shirakawa-Heike medieval ie, I demonstrate the shift of women’s expected role from that of “mother” to “wife.” As co-manager of the ie, medieval women held authority, and with their initiatives and agency, they could also wield tremendous power in the ie.

\begin{abstract}How can we recognize users' cognition and identify behaviors in an online discussion forum? We see that online discussion forums constitute an untapped opportunity for understanding cognitional and behavioral information. Mining this publicly and freely available information can significantly benefit analysts as it helps reveal trends, behavior, and even bad actors. This thesis aims to answer the following problems. First, we identify and characterize thread-centric behaviors where the key novelty lies in an unsupervised model to recognize behaviors without requiring prior forum knowledge. The model reveals some fascinating abusive behaviors appearing in the forum. Second, we develop an aspect-based sentiment analysis model, a powerful state-of-the-art transformer-based model to detect sentiment toward specific aspects in posts. The model also helps quantify the effect of the real-world event on users' sentiment in the online forum. Third, we develop a stance detection model to recognize the user's position toward topics of interest and quantify the correlation of sentiment and stance conditioning to the events. Our finding on the relationship between sentiment and stance redefines how an analyst perceives this cognitional information. The contribution of our work can be summarized in threefold: (a) collect, analyze, and profile thread-based behaviors, (b) detect sentiment toward specific topics in response to real-world events, and (c) infer cognitional information and understand the relationship of sentiment and stance at the events. We see our systematic approaches and tools as a significant step towards cognitional and behavioral understanding in online discussion platforms.

The definition of what constitutes patronage and what makes one a patron, such as the person who funded and commissioned a work, has in recent years broadened to include owners, recipients, and subjects of books, art, architecture, and other objects. With these extended parameters of patronage, my project explores the manuscripts, monuments, and other memorabilia associated with the funerary patronage of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) , her daughters, Marie de Champagne (1145-1198) and Matilda of Saxony (1156-1198), as well as the funereal arts generated by three queens of France, Marie de Brabant (1254-1322), Jeanne d’Évreux (1310-1371), and Blanche de Navarre (1330-1398). In short, the various items associated with the women I explore arguably functioned as mnemonic devices to provide the necessary “backgrounds” to train and strengthen cultural memory, and consequently drew attention to those associated with, and responsible for their continued diffusion.In my dissertation I argue that notwithstanding the uniqueness of each of these women’s cultural contributions, they were not exceptions and a survey of their endeavors over time and throughout diverse regions demonstrates that royal women in the Middle Ages systematically partook in acts of commemorative patronage at precise stages in their lives. Despite the assorted shapes their efforts embodied, ranging from manuscripts to stained glass windows, from funerary plaques, paintings, jewels and linens to monuments, mausoleums and endowments of institutions, including a variety of other forms, these women were notably unified in that their greatest output tellingly occurred during precarious points in their lives that threatened their positions, such as the potential political turmoil associated with the deaths of husbands or children. At these times their participation in acts of patronage solidified their places at court, in society, and within cultural memory while doubling as assertions of their political power and lineage. Further, such acts of patronage that these women practiced throughout their lives also led them to use these same tactics in anticipation of their own deaths. This is evinced through their preoccupation with funerary arts through which they created means for those who would survive them to use their contributions for future ends in these women’s last attempts at remaining timelessly relevant. Thus, testaments, manuscript books, monuments, and memorials were not only a declaration or signs of one’s possessions, but also sites and documents that continued the politicking of the deceased.

Several visitors to the Alta California missions during the early years of the 19th century commented on their colorful interiors and “illuminated walls,” but most of these original wall paintings, produced c. 1810-1825 by Native artisans under the direction of Spanish priests or Mexican-trained artists, were whitewashed in the late 19th century. From 1936-1942, the Federal Art Project’s Index of American Design was involved in the study and restoration of several of these mural programs. Index artists visited the Southern California missions and produced hundreds of photographs, drawings and watercolors of the extant mural programs, as well as of designs they discovered under layers of plaster. In their aim of identifying a “usable past” the Index transformed these mural fragments from regional designs into national motifs. Through case studies of the wall paintings at Southern California missions visited and documented by the Index, I explain how this transformation was attempted through their processes of selection, appropriation, media translation, re-creation, restoration and national promotion. This dissertation, based on research conducted at selected missions, the Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library, the Archives of American Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will answer the question of how the Index-created archive and federally-sponsored documentation and “restorations” have influenced our contemporary understandings of California mission design as well as the art historical and national value of the California missions themselves.

This thesis considers Los Angeles in theory and in history, examining key social institutions like the university and the police for the work of “the prevailing oppression,” what Angela Davis opposed while she was an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969, surveilled, harassed, and fired for her politics. I trace the influence on law and racial order of the under-examined nexus of collaborations and contestations between university students and staff and police in this city. Contradictions cluster here around the ideal and practice of “accountability,” a widely prominent regime of knowledge and power in recent decades, the preconditions and effects of which have often been taken for granted or left ignored. Drawing together insights of abolitionist movements and semiotic anthropology, I demonstrate how prevailing institutions in Los Angeles have resisted and incorporated popular pursuits of “accountability” in equal measure.