“Death, which is the most horrifying of evils, is nothing to us; whenever we, on the one hand, exist, death is not present. On the other hand, whenever death is present, we, then, do not exist” (Ep. Men. 125). According to Epicurus, in section one hundred twenty-five of his “Letter to Menoeceus”, if death is the deprivation of all sense-perception and the annihilation of the subject, it cannot be bad, for there must be an...

This study examines commonalities in English-language texts dealing with queer history before 1969. The goal of this research is to expand the field of queer historiography by understanding what stories and methodologies preceded more modern histories, and especially to understand what existed before the narrative of an upward arc from the flashpoint of the Stonewall Uprisings. Material surveyed includes magazines, poetry, sexology books, novels, diaries, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and academic papers in order to collect...

The U.S. Dollar emerged as the dominant world currency after the end of World War II. Though the global economy has changed drastically since then, the U.S. Dollar is still the leading currency. This thesis provides strategies if China wishes to challenge U.S. Dollar dominance as the internationalization of the Chinese Renminbi continues to expand. First, I will evaluate the history of the U.S. Dollar’s replacement of the British Pound Sterling as the dominant world...

The United States is experiencing an infant and maternal mortality crisis across racial stratifications at more alarming rates than in the antebellum era and Jim Crow. Over the past fifteen years, these disparities have accrued significant media, scholarly, and medical attention. Scientific evidence has proven that racism and the physiological stress it causes are contributing factors to these birth outcome disparities. Even so, there has been a dearth of information on how harmful tropes have...

The increase in genetic testing availability, coupled with the increase in demand for genetic counselors has led some groups to evaluate who is offered genetic testing and genetic counseling, and how those services are provided. Hereditary breast cancer risk assessment is one of the fields currently undergoing re-evaluation of services. In February of 2019, the American Society of Breast Surgeons (ASBrS) released a consensus statement calling for all breast cancer patients to be offered genetic...

Wonderland is a novella in which a recent college graduate ends up working through her self-esteem issues--or, at least, begins the process of working through them--when she enters into a romantic B.D.S.M relationship.

The field of active matter seeks to understand how the collective behavior of many animate constituents leads to large-scale organization and dynamics. In this thesis, I studied an active matter system composed of purified cytoskeletal components to examine the statistical properties of the material dynamics and their microscopic origins.

"Their tongues are ashes when they'd speak to us" David Ferry, Resemblance. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from time to time, especially from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have...

The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year's War, though it isn't usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently published Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap, 2019), centered on a group of enslaved West Africans,...

Iraj Pezeshkzad's My Uncle Napoleon is a slapstick and at times goofy love story, but it is also in the best tradition of sly anti-imperial satire. Scholar Pardis Dabashi came to it late, but she has all the convert's zeal as she links it to a literary tradition that's highly theoretical, but also delightfully far-flung.

Seeta Chaganti, medievalist extraordinaire (Strange Footing and The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary) joins John to discuss-wait for it-data visualization in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, philosopher, visionary and scholar. They go on to discuss past traditions that merge text and image in ways that foreshadow modern visualization practices, and close with beloved books that take readers "back of the tapestry" to reveal what everyday front-of-tapestry life keeps decorously hidden.

What's a picture worth? How about the picture that allows scientists to grasp what's actually going on in a cell-or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence.

We are delighted to begin the Brahmin Left series with Matt Karp, historian at Princeton, author of This Vast Southern Empire and a perennially thought-provoking essayist about the complex 19th and 20th century genealogies of contemporary American politics: "The Politics of a Second Gilded Age" is the essay that links most closely to this conversation.

What's the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? What do a badly characterized, racist novel and an imaginatively metaphoric biology article from the 1970s have to do with that? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth find out all of that and more in this discussion with Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. They first discuss Jean...

Ultradian genes are genes that transcribe with ultradian rhythmicity (more than one cycle in 24 hours), that is speculated to be independent of the Circadian Clock. Their expression can induce cyclic changes such as in behavior, gene expression and metabolism (1). They have no known internal regulators, and the regulation of their expression is not well understood in D. melanogaster. Our Goal is to determine if our candidate Ultradian Genes are indeed cycling with ultradian...

Donald Martino’s Notturno (1973) is both his most well known work and is among his most conceptually impenetrable. The composer’s publicly shared observations reveal little of the work’s deep formal and conceptual procedures by describing the work as being “about the diversity of feeling that I undergo daily when I contemplate my life at that moment before sleep.” Naturally this diversity manifests itself in a myriad of formal and conceptual ways representative of the composer’s...

Today's guest is Princeton's Jan-Werner Müller, (Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought, Constitutional Patriotism) author of What is Populism? (2016) which explores how the identitarian logic of populism can come to lodge within democracies. Is the current success of the antidemocratic Right (in Hungary and Poland-and increasingly elsewhere in Europe as well) the product of "plutocratic populism"? Or is there some other more systemic...

This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan--prolific and prize-winning American novelist--than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread.

For the third installment of Books in Dark Times, inspired by our global moment, Elizabeth and John turned inward. We started with a book that you might not think would be so comforting, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) about the plague in London "during the last Great Visitation in 1665." Probably based on the journals of Defoe's uncle Henry Foe, the Journal comforts Elizabeth in a few ways. First, by its...

Novelist, screenwriter, and HBO showrunner Tom Perrotta joins his old friend Mark Wollaeger (who also happens to be a top scholar of modernism) for a wide-ranging conversation about literature, television, and everything in between. Tom reveals that he has been reading a most peculiar self-help book: Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce. Mark then shares some juicy Joyce anecdotes before getting into the nitty gritty of style and craft. We discuss balancing difficult themes with...

Our two hosts play guest, and dive into the season's high and lowlights, starting with the role humor played on the show. We also talk through the affordances of the "virtual" studio as opposed to the brick and mortar one where John recorded podcasts in "the before time." Literary critics that we are, we can't help but consider the podcast as an audio form that solicits different kinds of listening. Aarthi wonders if it's "close"...

Pamuk plays scholar and novelist both. He reads the cheekily postmodernist final page of his novel Snow, while also talmudically interspersing comments on the text.

Research has shown that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQIA+) healthcare students experience discrimination during admissions and training. While several studies have examined the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities within the genetic counseling field, the admissions experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals has not been explored. Through semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study investigated the experiences of ten LGBTQIA+ genetic counselors and genetic counseling students during graduate school admissions....

Cyclic mono- and di-nucleotides are essential signaling molecules involved in many cellular processes. Cellular levels of cyclic nucleotides are fine-tuned by metal-dependent phosphodiesterases (PDEs), such as the histidine-aspartate (HD)-domain proteins. The large histidine-aspartate (HD)-domain protein superfamily contain metalloproteins that share common structural features but catalyze vastly different reactions. This thesis focuses on the characterization of three HD-domain PDEs: i) the tandem domain HD-[HD-GYP] PDE, VCA0681 (V-cGAP1), ii) the prototypical single domain HD-GYP PDE, VCA0931 (V-cGAP3),...