This dissertation investigates the real-time comprehension and final interpretation of object pronouns in Vietnamese, a language in which reflexive and non-reflexive pronominal forms have overlapping meanings. It addresses the questions of whether and how Principle B is applied as a structural constraint to determine the appropriate antecedent for pronouns in the language. The central argument is that Vietnamese speakers rely on two distinct mechanisms to resolve anaphoric relations: Within a pronoun's local domain, even though...

This repository contains data from sediment cores collected during 2017-2018 from 17 impoundments that are located on tributaries to the tidal portion of the Hudson River as part of a larger NERRs collaborative project entitled Dams and Sediment on the Hudson (DaSH). A companion dataset that contains sediment core data from Hudson tidal marshes is archived at UMass Scholarworks data repository. Sediment cores collected from impoundments behind dams were recovered via piston push coring, which...

This panel explores the heritage of religious sites in rural landscapes and communities of central and eastern Europe, and Morocco. Religious sites and their community networks within the rural landscape are often overlooked as a collective resource. However, they provide overlapping levels of order in the landscape that derive from various social classes and religious traditions. Often these layers of class and spiritual tradition are invisible to those outside of the class/social/cultural group that created...

In this dissertation, I track the political emotions present in Abeng by Jamaican Michelle Cliff and Balún Canán by Mexican Rosario Castellanos in order to identify the personal notions of justice held by each of the protagonists. Their personal definitions of justice are tangible in the protagonists' actions and the narrators' tone and decisions. In this research, I engage in a close reading analysis of the emotional legacies that each girl-protagonists accept or reject from...

One of the challenges in urban development is to promote civic engagement, especially in processes that involve vulnerable lower-income populations. Participation in civic life is often tied to subjective factors such as their experiences within a community; memories and care for place or even situations of trauma such as housing evictions. Thus, this dissertation identifies place-based emotional factors that motivate civic engagement in informal settlements. I observed the process of zoning regulation in the city...

Discoveries at the interface of chemistry, biology, and materials science have emerged as a powerful route to impact life science in this century. My research in the Thayumanavan group is focused on problems at this interface. A common theme of all the six projects is the use of modern synthetic organic chemistry to build interesting, novel macromolecules which are chemically rich, to study the molecular self-assembly behavior in solution and then translate to solve problems...