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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.

This dissertation explores the implications of “dying for the motherland” in late imperial Russia. What did this mean at the turn of the twentieth century, when battlefields were being transformed by new technologies of war, the population was becoming increasingly urban and literate, and in a geopolitical entity that was as much imperial as it was national? While the vast majority of the scholarship on military death has revolved around the idea of the nation, my research on late imperial Russia foregrounds the critical role played by three other thematic factors: technology, modernity, and space. Methodologically, I take the approach that the material remains of the dead soldiers, sailors, and aviators were not distinct from their representations but profoundly symbiotic. These two aspects reflected an intertwining of military and media, battlefield and home front, in ways that were central to the social and cultural history of the era. At this time, new technologies of destruction, new modes of communication, and new ideas about citizenship and personhood were challenging prior conceptions about what dying for Russia should mean. This process was fuelled by the media, which was grappling with the same world of novel ideas but also trying to understand how to market them to a mass audience. I argue that placing military death at the fulcrum of this interchange reveals a dynamic between the military and the media that the tsarist government valiantly tried, but ultimately failed, to control. The military dead were conscripted posthumously to causes beyond the nation. Using archival documents, printed materials, and visual sources, I adopt a spacious definition of military death that includes killing and dying, institutional and personal responses, and representations. The five chapters of my dissertation cover the Russo-Japanese War through the early years of the First World War. My work insists that matters of military death, most intimate and personal, not only map onto the broader ebbs and flows of cultural change and revolutionary ferment but offer some novel and critical insights into those processes.

Actors are often praised and lauded for their ability to seamlessly transform into characters that are very different from themselves. It is why method acting is so appealing to many of us actors and why the Oscar awards are usually given to those who disappear behind their character. But does divulging deeply into a character have psychological effects on actors? If so, what are those effects? In applying to graduate school, I wanted to attend a program that could help me learn a process of transformation and full character embodiment. I was able to fully explore this process in my performance of Fick in Balm in Gilead. In preparation to play a heroine addict, I watched numerous documentaries, explored physical movement transformation through Anterior Head Carriage (a condition where the head is improperly aligned with the neck and shoulders), and I read psychological studies on the thought processes of addicts. By the final performance, I was totally immersed in a character so unlike myself that I began to think, move, and engage with the world around me, as Fick would, outside of performances and rehearsals. I found my confidence deteriorating and it became difficult to sleep and think clearly. A Royal Society Open Science study states that “changes in embodiment can lead to neural changes in networks associated with perspective taking and role change”. Essentially an actor’s brain changes fundamentally with different roles. And with Fick’s negative thought patterns, I began to become depressed. And all of these symptoms I experienced of depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and life stress are indicative of what the Journal of Alzheimers Disease calls RNT. It is habit of negative thinking over a prolonged period of time that can have harmful effects on the brain’s capacity to think, reason, and form memories. I was completely overcome both mentally and physically. What I have found is that, much like the placebo effect, an actor’s imagination of character and embodiment does cause some neurological effects on the actor. It took me a long time to readjust myself and find my center again even months after the performances were over. I believe that is why some actors, i.e. Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman, process this decentering through drug use and oftentimes overdose. What I hope for is a more indepth teaching of closing processes for actors and more therapy integrated into acting curriculums so that the cost of transformation is not one that demands sacrifice of our well-being that affects the performer beyond the performance.

The rise of online platforms for buying and discussing books such as Amazon and Goodreads opens up new possibilities for reception studies in the twenty-first century. These platforms allow readers unprecedented freedom to preview and talk to others about books, but they also exercise unprecedented control over which books readers buy and how readers respond to them. Online reading platforms rely on algorithms with implicit assumptions that at times imitate and at times differ from the conventions of literary scholarship. This dissertation interrogates those algorithms, using computational methods including machine learning and natural language processing to analyze hundreds of thousands of online book reviews in order to find moments when literary and technological perspectives on contemporary reading can inform each other. A focus on the algorithmic logic of bookselling allows this project to critique the ways companies sell and recommend books in the twenty-first century, while also making room for improvements to these algorithms in both accuracy and theoretical sophistication. This dissertation forms the basis of a re-imagining of literary scholarship in the digital age that takes into account the online platforms that mediate so much of our modern literary consumption.

This dissertation explores the ways in which a diverse workforce negotiated differences and formed novel labor communities within the strictures of nineteenth century industrial quicklime production in Santa Cruz County, California. These issues are examined through archaeological and historical research at the Samuel Adams Lime Kiln complex, a small pluralistic company town in operation between 1858 and 1909 in the western foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The history of the Samuel Adams site is one marked by transformations in ownership, management practices, and workforce demography. As such, it was a dynamic landscape where notions of ethnicity, class, gender, and labor were constantly being negotiated and (re)defined.The archaeological findings of this work indicate that the particularities of early industrial work-life in the American Far West facilitated intimate and sustained encounters between diverse groups of laborers. These pluralistic encounters necessitated negotiations and collaborations across differences, which resulted in the emergence of new ways of doing and being. Rather than seeing social groups as fixed and pre-defined, I explore the ways in which novel labor communities were co-constituted and emergent through intra-action. I argue that it was in the processes of negotiating alterity and the resulting co-creation of new social-material practices that novel connections were created between workers and community boundaries were reconfigured and reimagined. Instead of being impeded by pluralism, I contend that cultural diversity actively promoted the construction of novel labor communities at early industrial sites. Moreover, these emergent relations and nascent communities of practice forged the necessary connections for later union formation and collective action in the Santa Cruz lime industry.To explore these ideas, I engage with new materialist theories that position materials as vibrant and agentive in the constitution of the social-material world. As such, archaeological materials are examined not as static reflections or products of culture change, but as active participants in the dynamic processes of social entanglement that worked to reshape social practices, relations, connections, and meanings at the Samuel Adams site. This work illustrates that industrial sites, which have long been recognized as places of control and exploitation, were also important pluralistic spaces of social-material encounter, negotiation, entanglement, and emergence. These sites, therefore, were spaces of creativity, collaboration, and community-making.

Before the Spanish-led defeat of the Aztecs in 1521, manuscripts were ubiquitous in Mesoamerica. Regrettably very few survive. One of them is the Aztec (Eastern Nahua) Codex Borgia painted in the Late Postclassic period (ca. 1250–1521 CE). Many of its 76 pages include maize imagery in polychrome. The plant appears amid gods of fertility hovering above naked females; associated with Quetzalcoatl, the god of wind; and rendered to look strikingly similar to grass. The questions I address in this dissertation relate to the significance of maize, Quetzalcoatl, and grass depictions. What does maize imagery convey? Why did the Nahua venerate a god of wind? How is maize related both wind and grass?Until now, scholars of the Codex Borgia have generally assumed that it records information used in divination, astronomy, and farming. What has not been considered is the possibility that it reflects scientific information about plants. I contend that maize imagery studied against the scientific record on plant domestication indicates that it does. Scientists have demonstrated that Central Mexicans were brilliant at manipulating plants, and had by approximately 6,000 BCE, through genetic selection, transformed a common grass into the maize plant. The result was a symbiotic relationship between maize and humans. Amerindians cared for the plant, continuing to manipulate it to become the modern crop, ultimately spread throughout the world, completely dependent on humans for reproduction.Scholars have lamented that indigenous people failed to make a record of their scientific achievements. I argue that maize and related images in their extant artifacts reflect those accomplishments. My research strives to shed light on the Codex Borgia, its imagery, and the ways in which indigenous people of Mesoamerica recorded scientific information. Specifically, my dissertation shows with substantial scientific, ethnohistoric, and iconographic evidence that the Nahua understood plant sexuality, that wind was the primary means of plant reproduction, and that the common grass they held in great esteem was the progenitor of maize. My dissertation seeks to establish that the Codex Borgia’s imagery shows the cultural importance of maize to the Nahua and that it was rooted in scientific understanding.

A growing body of data suggests that the Western Stemmed Tradition and Island Paleocoastal Tradition likely originated from a Pacific Coastal migration from northeast Asia in the late Pleistocene. These two traditions are often considered as linked due to overlaps in crescent and stemmed point typology. While interior groups of the Western Stemmed Tradition did take large terrestrial game including artiodactyls, their subsistence pattern largely mirrors the broad spectrum aquatic diet of the Island Paleocoastal Tradition. Increasing evidence shows that both Island Paleocoastal Tradition peoples and interior Western Stemmed Tradition peoples made use of upland environments and resources, however their dominant settlement pattern was oriented near large bodies of water: the sea and inland pluvial lakes. Due attention has been given to technological systems associated with lithic reduction of the Western Stemmed Tradition in the Intermountain West, yet little technological analysis has been conducted on the California Channel Islands (largely due to the fact that late Pleistocene and early Holocene occupations were only relatively recently discovered). This dissertation focuses on a detailed technological analysis surrounding the organization of production of flaked stone tools across three of the best preserved sites associated with the Island Paleocoastal Tradition on California’s Channel Islands. Details of this technological system are then compared more broadly with mainland Western Stemmed Tradition finds. Additionally, as watercraft clearly played a significant role in the colonization and subsistence system of the earliest known islanders, replicative studies are used to evaluate the production dynamics associated with simple boating technology (the tule balsa) to address when and why people invest in boating. This study shows that even the simplest boats represent significant startup costs and therefore specific circumstances are needed to justify their manufacture and use. Additionally, parallels in the chaine operatoire/reduction sequence behind flaked stone tool production on the California Channel Islands and mainland Intermountain West suggest that the Island Paleocoastal Tradition should be considered a coastal variant of the broader Western Stemmed Tradition.

This dissertation is an examination of the passage of the Nevada Water Law of 1913 in the light of the conflict between populism and progressivism, the tragedy of the commons, and boosterism. It demonstrates that aridity was not the overriding factor in the development of the Western United States, especially Nevada. Rather, aridity was merely a technical problem to be solved by technical experts such as lawyers and engineers.

Utilizing skeletal remains from an urban, colonial hospital in Central Mexico, this dissertation strives to illustrate how an examination of the bodies from archaeological contexts can shed light on the activities of everyday life in the past. While other archaeological material can tell us about the tools used to perform activities, we do not always have accurate information about who was doing what, when, and for how long. If not careful, scholars can fall into the trap of preconceived notions of a gendered division of labor that may or may not accurately portray how daily life activities were organized in other times and spaces. This issue is complicated by historical documents from the Spanish Colonial Period in the Americas, which were often written by European men and with specific administrative agendas. Similarly, the examination of gendered objects within archaeological explorations of Colonial Mexico are fraught with cyclical reasoning that stem from methodological issues within the subfield of bioarchaeology. Skeletal remains provide an exceptional opportunity to examine the actual bodies of individuals that accomplished day-to-day tasks. Yet, rather than simply relying on binary sex categories derived from skeletal features to discern gendered patterns of labor, I instead examine groupings of individuals that are derived from similar kinds of biomechanical stress. Combining the social theories of embodiment and materiality with biological understandings of bone remodeling and biomechanics, the bioarchaeological analyses used in this research illustrate how the social and biological interact to create unique individual bodies that literally become chronicles of the amount and kind of activities performed during life. These changes better illustrate the organization of labor that actually occurred rather than arbitrarily creating groups of individuals based on modern conceptions of sex/gender that cannot always be ascertained from the skeleton and may not have even existed in societies in the past. The specific historical focus of my research is on the urban colonial experience in Central Mexico. The skeletal collection utilized in this study was recovered from the remains of the Hospital Real San José de los Naturales (HSJN), established in 1553 as the first royally sponsored hospital to care for the indigenous population in the Spanish colonies. Three non-invasive bioarchaeological analyses are used to discern subtle material changes to the bone tissue. Macroscopic analysis of entheseal changes interprets the areas of insertion for muscles on long bones that change with biomechanical stress from repetitive movements commonly used in everyday life. Next, metacarpal radiogrammetry examines the amount of cortical bone of the second metacarpal bone of the hand and provides a rough estimation of the amount of bone remodeling that occurred throughout adulthood for each individual as well as the trends in the population as a whole. Finally, cross-sectional geometry utilizes computed tomography images of the transverse plane of long bones (humerus and femur) to analyze the amount of cortical bone as well as its distribution around the central axis of the long bone. This geometric analysis provides not only an understanding of the amount of bone, but its overall strength and rigidity in response to biomechanical stress. The combination of various bioarchaeological analyses provides a richer understanding of the numerous ways in which the stress of daily activity becomes literally incorporated into bone. Furthermore, none of these methodologies are intrinsically tied to the traditional methodology of sexing skeletons and therefore is free from many of the interpretive issues that result from simplistic categorizations of individuals. Most bioarchaeological data analyzes these data separated according to age or sex groups, but this practice is based on the assumption that a difference should be present between these variable. In this study, differences in the amount of muscle usage is found when following this method of preliminary division by age and sex, but differences in the kind of muscle usage is less clear. This could be the result of a significant overlap in the kinds of biomechanical stress received over the life course and between males and females. Instead, I used an exploratory data analysis software program and statistical cluster analysis, to identify groups of individuals with similar kinds of bony changes. None of these cluster groups consisted of solely males or solely females, supporting the notion that a preliminary division may obscure other patterns of biomechanical stress. The cluster analyses help to do two things overall - isolate small groups of individuals on the extremes with a lot of bone growth or very little bone growth so that other averages are not skewed; and isolate groups of individuals who experienced unique kinds of movement. Additionally, these analyses are able to isolate variation that exists in terms of movement within age or sex groups. Sharing a sex/gender identity does not automatically mean that you will have the same opportunities available to you. This is an especially important factor to remember for this skeletal population, since other identities such as geographical origin or migration status created drastic differences in activity.For the lower limb, the ability to isolate unique kinds of movement proved to be the most useful aspect of this different interpretive approach. When examining the data by age or sex groups, all individuals showed signs of walking on two feet (leg extension, lower leg flexion and extension, and plantar flexion) with only slight differences in the amount of stress. One of the groups derived from the cluster analysis, however, indicated that in addition to the movements associated with walking they also had a higher amount of stress from leg adduction (moving the leg toward the midline of the body). During this time period, the Spanish introduced new techniques for creating pottery using a potter's wheel with a lower kick wheel to create momentum. It is possible that this isolated group of individuals may have experienced this unique kind of biomechanical stress as a result of such a unique labor opportunity. For the upper limb, the cluster analysis was useful for isolating groups of individuals with different kinds of movement, but also for showing variation in the amount of stress within sex groups. The data, when preliminarily divided according to age and sex, showed slight increases in the amount of stress across the life course and high average scores for males than females; however, differences in kind of biomechanical stress was less clear. The groups derived from cluster analysis for entheseal changes helped to separate groups of individuals with more whole arm movements (arm extension, shoulder rotation, and arm abduction) and a group of individuals with more precise forearm movements (forearm supination, forearm flexion, and hand/wrist control). The individuals in this last group are both males and females, which is why it may have been difficult to discern this difference with the data preliminarily divided. Another important distinction found was different levels of activity among individuals that performed these whole arm movements and that also caused an increase in the amount and distribution of the cortical bone among the males in the population. Only indigenous males were obligated to participate in the different tribute labor systems during this colonial time and it is possible that the cluster groups help to isolate this subset of the male population that performed more strenuous manual labor. Interpretation from a perspective of embodied subjectivities acknowledges that many different aspects of identities controlled the kinds of labor opportunities available to individuals in urban New Spain. Individuals who performed similar kinds of work on a day-to-day basis will have similar kinds of responses to these biomechanical stresses and cluster analysis illustrates actual distinctions in the way individuals were using their bodies that then became incorporated into the skeleton. If the data are divided from the beginning of analysis then our interpretations are inventing differences that may or not actually exist. Rather, biological data related to categorical aspects of identity should be added into interpretations only after groups of individuals with similar kinds of bone changes have been identified, in order to avoid assumptions about labor organization based on modern conceptions, historical written documents, or other archaeological data. The complex intersection of gender, geographical origin, age, and migration status during the colonial period likely influenced the creation of these variable groups of individuals with unique biomechanical stress.Despite the unique historical moment that brings these varied populations together, bioarchaeological analyses of other times and places should also attempt to analyze the data from a perspective of embodied subjects. This means that patterns of organization should be discerned from the bone functional adaptation data first. The groups of individuals identified will then represent people who experienced similar kinds of biomechanical stress that later became materially incorporated into their bodies. Interpretation of these patterns should include other biological variables, like age and sex, but only after divisions by biomechanical stress. Preliminary divisions only test if our assumptions about how labor should be organized actually exist, rather then help to interpret actual patterns of difference.

In the 9th century CE, a vast polity centered on the region of Angkor was taking shape in what is today Cambodia and Northeast Thailand. At this time the polity's inhabitants, the Khmers, began to see themselves as members of a community of territorial integrity and shared ethnic identity. This sense of belonging, enshrined in the polity's name, Kambujadesa (i.e., Cambodia) or "the land of the descendants of Kambu," represents one of the most remarkable local cultural innovations in Southeast Asian history. However, the history and implications of early Cambodian identity have thus far been largely overlooked. In this study I use the evidence from the Old Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions to argue that Angkorian Cambodia (9th-15th centuries CE) was at its conceptual core an ethnic polity or a "nation"--an analytic category signifying, in Steven Grosby's words, an extensive "territorial community of nativity." The inscriptions of Cambodia's provincial elite suggest that the polity's autonomy and its people's common descent were widely disseminated ideals, celebrated in polity-wide myths and perpetuated in representations of the polity's foreign antagonists. I contend that this culture of territorial nativity contradicts the prevailing cosmological model of pre-modern politics in Southeast Asian studies, which assumes that polities before the 19th century were characterized by exaggerated royal claims to universal power and the absence of felt communities beyond extended family and religion. At the same time I seek to problematize standard historical accounts of the nation which fail to observe the affinity between territoriality and fictive kinship in select political cultures before the era of ideological nationalism.