�պ���Ʒ

This honors project has been an exploration of my relationship with time and memory. By studying old childhood photos, I translate them onto canvas, focusing on how my perception of specific memories affects my color composition and value structure. I explore the evolution of perspective by understanding how my adult self views these pictures. In turn, this captures time and impermanence. My paintings focus on specific details in the photos, while other sections appear faded. I use an oil glazing technique to represent how some moments are vivid, while others are fogged with emotion. This reflects how memory tends to be hazy, holding both truth and imagination.

Redlining, a discriminatory housing policy from the 1930s, shaped lasting urban inequalities that may extend to environmental conditions. This study examines links between redlining and urban water quality in the Twin Cities using algal communities as indicators. Across 28 water bodies sampled in 2022 and 2024, physical, chemical, and biological metrics were compared by redlining grade. Results show limited relationships between redlining and most variables, with only surface water temperature differing significantly. Nutrients and algal diversity were unrelated to redlining, instead reflecting present-day conditions. These findings suggest contemporary factors play a stronger role than redlining in shaping urban freshwater ecosystems.

Although 100% of Iceland’s electricity comes from renewable energy, it still relies on fossil fuels for transportation and industry. Understanding geographic oil use nuances is critical to achieving Iceland's 2040 carbon neutrality goal. As two thirds of Icelanders reside in one primary urban center, there is lacking information about oil use in non-Capital areas and a gap between state and municipal climate plans. Using newly available data of oil sales at the municipality-level in a Small Area Estimation model, I analyze drivers of oil sales across Icelandic municipalities. Iceland presents global lessons for what happens after a decarbonized electricity grid.

Vaccination rates have declined due to the growing hesitancy by many parents to vaccinate their children, signified by an increasing amount of non-medical exemptions. While there has been previous spatial analysis of exemption patterns as a threat to herd immunity, there has not been much post-COVID. This analysis provides a modern analysis of changing exemption clustering in Minnesota, while also considering the impact of public health being increasingly politicized. We used kindergarten vaccination data for 1475 elementary schools to analyze the evolution of clustering and predictors of NMEs across space and time in Minnesota, from 2014 to 2024.

We better understand the people who came before us through objects, images, and stories. Between Their Hands and Mine is a studio art honors project that connects wheel-thrown ceramics to the stories and experiences of the women in my life, known and unknown. Adorning the home with love and care through objects like cups with butterflies was common in my upbringing. My family’s Norwegian background inspired the florals and stripes that decorate the surface. This series of plates, bowls, mugs, and other dinnerware set amongst a dining room and ancestral objects is reminiscent of the homemaking women in my life.

The Arundel facies sauropod record is fragmentary and taxonomically complex, with the single accepted taxon, Astrodon johnstoni, considered a nomen dubium by some authors. Analysis and description of fourteen teeth, six vertebrae, two metapodials, and two ungual phalanges from the Maryland Dinosaur Park reveal a tooth morphology consistent with that previously described for Astrodon. A previously unobserved procoelous caudal vertebral morphology may indicate unexpected variation in the tail of Astrodon, or may indicate that the Arundel sauropod fauna is more diverse than previously hypothesized.

My Studio Art Honors Project engages the grid as a contradictory format: one that simultaneously represents empirical order (graphs and maps), and a domestic visual language that rejects a single point of view (weaving). Gradual Disordering exists within this tension; referencing cluttered interior space, non-linear organizations, and repetition as world-building. I layer materials–photos, archival images, and journal pages–into multiple woven, painted, and ceramic abstractions. Nest-like objects perch out of reach, viewed from below. Large-scale grids and paper weavings warp in space, looked at and looked past. With additions and deletions in each iteration, the grid continually changes.

One fall morning, Clarice, a woman in her mid-twenties, is getting ready for the day when she finds a black ground beetle crawling along her bedroom wall. The beetle consumes her, and throughout the day, Clarice undergoes a metamorphosis. Rendered in poetry and prose, After the Morning Light explores the cultivation of a self, questions the boundaries between humans and their environment, and portrays the fragile relationship between women and the act of being seen.

Within the context of the “family farm,” a symbol of heteronormative agriculture and traditional American values, this study investigates queer farming in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Archival research and spatial analysis yielded insights into the evolution of the family farm from a national project to a model for agricultural resistance and spatial patterns of queer, alternative, and conventional farming. Then, interviews with LGBTQ+ and family farmers explore queer farmers’ efforts towards more anti-capitalist relationships with land, work, and community; differing values and challenges between queer and generational farmers; and how all small farmers affect change across the agricultural landscape.

The Crimean Tatars exist within a framework of historical and modern Russian settler colonial oppression. By examining their preferred form of identification, this thesis argues that claiming indigeneity holds promise for combating this colonial structure. Further, it identifies the construction of collective memories of the Sürgün (1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars) in virtual museum project Tamirlar’s oral histories as a form of discursive decolonization—the reclamation of cultural, linguistic, and historical representation and primacy on the land. Novel analysis of fifty interviews with Sürgün survivors preserves indigenous Crimean identity and challenges the retrospective settler colonial construction of Crimea as “Russian.”

This case study offers insights into the ability of small-scale gardening to advance community-level food sovereignty by comparing the dietary diversity outcomes, livelihood outcomes and degrees of agency between 33 gardeners and 25 non-gardeners in Genadendal, Western Cape, South Africa. Dietary diversity scores were statistically significantly higher for gardeners compared to non-gardeners. Despite the continued prevalence of large-scale commercial agriculture in Post-Apartheid South Africa both in practice and development discourse, small-scale gardening in Genadendal is associated with better livelihood outcomes and offers an alternative to the dominant agrarian system that has persisted into South Africa’s democratic era.

How do readers learn to engage with novel forms of written language that fall outside of their established linguistic repertoire? And how do texts themselves facilitate this process? This thesis looks for answers to these questions in literary theory, multilingualism studies, applied linguistics, and a diverse corpus of literary works. I propose a comprehensive descriptive vocabulary of novel language use in literature, and then observe how these frameworks work in concert in an exemplary text by analyzing Christine Brooke-Rose’s multilingual novel Between. I conclude by discussing how the “exceptional” cases explored in this thesis can change our understanding of “typical” language use in literature.

Topographic heterogeneity structures Arctic plant communities, impacting broader ecosystem responses to climate change. The role of topography in shaping leaf physiological, nutritional, and structural traits in the Arctic is not well characterized. We examined plant community composition and measured leaf traits in representative species along a heath-slope-valley gradient in Varanger, Norway. We found valleys are more biodiverse, driven by higher numbers of forbs and graminoids, and physiology and leaf traits varied amongst species. This work shows that topography can create oases of biodiversity in the low Arctic, and adds complexity to studying this rapidly changing landscape.

The recent rise of far-right leaders, from Donald Trump challenging democratic institutions in the United States to Viktor Orban's fifteen-year autocratic reign in Hungary, has led me to my main research question: Why are some far-right parties stronger than others? Conducting process tracing analysis of Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, and Czech far-right politics from 2005 to 2025, I argue that far-right parties are stronger when they utilize the surveillance state to limit democratic institutions and actors. My findings clarify how far-right parties use the surveillance state and other tactics to maintain power within their nation.

Emergency department (ED) wait times remain a persistent bottleneck in the United States healthcare system, impacting patient outcomes, hospital efficiency, and equitable access to care. This study analyzes nationally representative data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS), a complex, multi-stage probability sample. Using survey-weighted analyses and predictive modeling, we examine the effects of patient characteristics, triage acuity, and visit timing. Results indicate that operational and system-level factors, including hospital capacity, geographic region, and temporal variation, are among the most influential predictors of ED wait times.

This project explores the relationship between kept objective record and fictionalization through an application of Wolfgang Iser’s Reader Response Theory to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Maggie Lee’s Mommy. I argue that through an analysis of Plath’s novel with her diaries and Lee’s film with my interview with her, we see reader involvement in the text and textual openness to the reader create an active dynamic that is particularly heightened when discussing feminine, diaristic, or otherwise personal stories. I conclude that the gaps in both works reflect a direct relationship between artwork and recipient that powerfully implicates the audience.

This project explores the role of cinema in the establishment and rupture of “Franco-American triangulation” through representations of the United States in French cinema. Through an analysis of films by Jacques Demy and Jean-Luc Godard, I apply theories of the definition of the nation, the image, and the spectacle to analyze the relationship between the French nation and the cinematic image of the United States in the Nouvelle Vague. Ultimately, this paper uses technical and visual analysis to understand the powers and limits of film both to facilitate Franco-American triangulation, and to represent and critique French national ideology.

The synthesis of various novel Pt(II) complexes of the type [(PC)Pt(amine)Me] (PC = benzyldi-tert-butylphosphine; amine = aniline, diethylamine, pyrrolidine) is described. The stability of these complexes is monitored via NMR spectroscopy. While the aniline and diethylamine complexes display limited stability, the pyrrolidine complex is more robust and its reactivity with O2 was explored in coordinating and non-coordinating solvents. Evidence is presented for O2 insertion into the Pt-Me bond and formation of methanol. Lastly, the product of an O2 pressurization reaction in methanol-d4 is characterized via NMR and single crystal XRD as the platinum dimer [(PC)Pt(µ-OCD3)2]2.

The mundane is defined as lacking interest; dull, unimportant. My honors project aims to find the beauty in the mundane moments that linger in the domestic spaces that hold meaning to me. My desire to amplify the figures, spaces, and belongings that formed my childhood home and current apartment inspired me to create numerous highly detailed, overlapping works that act as portals into rooms in these spaces. In Shaving Cream, 2008, my 6-year-old self is shaving my older sister’s legs in the bathtub. In Down in their Nest, posters, trinkets, and stuffed animals act as easter eggs for my childhood.

Martin Tawney’s Guide to the Middle of Nowhere is a portion of a novel that parodies Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film Yojimbo. Yojimbo is a trickster narrative which drew influence from the noir genre and went on to influence other Westerns. This project turns that story into one about a travel writer who visits a town with two feuding hotels. The travel writer escalates the feud to create the story he wants to tell, but he loses control over it. The project explores what a trickster narrative looks like when the trickster cannot maintain their power over the story.

Many understand personal pro-environmental behavior (PEB) to be necessary, yet fewer engage in it, prompting a need to investigate psychological factors responsible. The present research investigates the influence of cognitive dissonance, outcome efficacy, and self-efficacy on PEB. Study 1 investigates the relationship between cognitive dissonance and PEB with outcome efficacy and competence as potential moderators. In Study 2 we further examine competence and outcome efficacy, adding a self-efficacy manipulation dimension. Results indicate strong positive associations between both competence and self-efficacy and PEB, suggesting that feeling capable of behaving sustainably is significantly related to individuals’ intention to do so.

In the United Republic of Tanzania, school farm and garden programs have been promoted to address low student attendance rates and food insecurity. Using the case study of four primary schools near Nyamuswa, Tanzania, I explore how the technological shifts of the New Green Revolution for Africa have impacted students' knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards different methods of agricultural production. I seek to answer the questions: how are primary schools a conduit for the dissemination of agricultural knowledge? In addition, what type of agricultural information is being shared and why?

Absolute pitch (AP), colloquially known as “perfect pitch,” is the ability to identify or recreate any musical note without an external reference tone. While many believe AP is an exceptional, innate musical talent, I argue that AP is a continuous ability influenced by experience. Using a mixed-methods approach that combined behavioral tasks with interviews, I examined AP memory in AP possessors and non-possessors with varying musical backgrounds to understand how experience-based factors, such as language, primary instrument, and the onset and style of musical training, might influence individual performance on established AP measures.

Standard development theory holds that recovery requires institutions first: courts, fiscal systems, the rule of law. Rwanda in 1994 had none—and rebuilt a state. The state must extract to build capacity, deliver to build legitimacy; when both collapse, no entry point remains. Somalia's three-decade failure confirms it. Rwanda broke it—through gacaca, umuganda, imihigo, and ingando—because it possessed enabling conditions Somalia did not. This thesis argues Rwanda is not an exception to the good governance consensus: it is a refutation, introducing convergent impossibility, negotiation-based capacity, and the gray zone framework—where ambiguity is medium, not defect—at a cost this thesis also names.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) begin to produce text on the internet, the same repository from which training data for LLMs are scraped, LLMs will start to train on data they produced. What will happen to future models when LLMs are trained on their own text? Scholars have raised concerns about the possibility that LLMs homogenize language and discourse. These concerns are further exaggerated as LLMs begin to infect their own repositories, marking a turn from human-produced training data sets. In this paper I simulate a recursive training loop by prompting a popular open-source LLM with 1000 prompts and using the output to train the same LLM, creating Model-1. I repeat this process 5 times. I then analyze these outputs through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a methodology which attempts to analyze discourse in terms of genre (social action), discourse (topic representation), and style (authorial identity). I argue that recursive training results in an increase in homogeneity, in which later outputs tend to resemble each other in terms of both vocabulary (measured through Type-Token Ratio and Self-BLEU) and format (later generations unilaterally adopt features like extensive footnotes and institutional affiliation).

This study aims to improve cross-linguistic understanding of the production of contrastive phonation by investigating sources of variation within vocal fold vibration. Individual glottal pulses were selected from electroglottographic recordings of speakers of eight languages across five language families. To determine dominant dimensions of variation, pulses were analyzed using functional principal component analysis. One dimension correlated meaningfully with contact quotient, an electroglottographic measure. Interpretations of the other dimensions were revealed only through statistical analysis. Results were mixed regarding the extent to which information provided by the functional principal components is novel and meaningful in the context of cross-linguistic phonation classification.

In this work, sterically hindered poly(pyrazoyl)borates are shown to adopt an unexpected κ2-N,N coordination mode, yielding three novel 14-electron homoleptic four-coordinate iron complexes of the general formula Fe[RR’Bpz*2]2. Simultaneous functionalization of substituents on the pyrazole rings and non-pyrazole R-groups enforces the high-spin (S=2) state and the rare pseudo-tetrahedral bidentate coordination mode adopted by the supporting ligand structure in the resultant complexes. Investigation of the structural and electronic composition of this new family of iron-based complexes, via paramagnetic 1H NMR spectral analysis and numerical coordination-geometry classification, reveals significant metal-ligand spin interactions and structural characteristics that further define the systems.