DCE Theses and Dissertations

Answering the Call is a collection of seven short stories set in the 2020s that explores the central theme of being seen. The pieces look at what people try to hide of themselves, be it a secret wish, an emotion, love, power, authenticity, or desire in order to maintain the status quo or because of their own limiting beliefs. In each story these characters are (consciously or not) on a quest for authenticity and healing transformation. These transformations bring in elements of the unseen, invisible, or spiritual worlds that exist alongside the physical one. While most of these stories take place in modern day reality, they each have a fairy tale quality, and the collection ends with a tale about how an entire city reacts when the citizens want to see something that remains a mystery to them. Does being seen/unseen protect, harm, or both? That is one of the many questions hidden within this collection—what other questions might you see? What answers will you find?

There are few concepts in international relations that are of more consequence, and yet more amorphous, than power. In the struggle for mastery among the great powers – on and off the battlefield – this study seeks to shed new light on the measurement, nature, and exercise of power since the introduction of the modern state system four centuries ago. The contributions and findings can be distilled as follows.

In utilizing recently developed data sets and new proxies for state power over a longer period than comparable studies, I put different measures of power to the test and find striking differences in their ability to predict war and dispute outcomes. Of particular significance, many of the representations of raw or gross might that are intuitively appealing and ubiquitous in international relations scholarship – like gross domestic product, the composite indicator of national material capability, military spending, and the size of the armed forces – are shown to perform no better than a coin toss in predicting the outcomes of great power conflicts. These results pose a challenge to the large body of analysis that emphasizes measures of raw might as rough but reliable guides to power and influence in the international arena. By contrast, measures of latent capability I refer to as ‘dual use power’ (spanning technology, trade, and finance) have accurately foreshadowed the outcome of around 80 per cent of great power conflicts.

In a case study of cycles and transitions in hegemonic power based on a novel systematic dating exercise, I also identify several stylized facts when breaking national capability down into its key elements. First, while dominant states have often enjoyed lengthy leadership cycles in individual sources of power lasting well over a century, periods of simultaneous leadership in these dimensions of power have been much shorter at around seven decades. Second, power transitions are best conceptualized as multi-stage phenomena rather than a singular cross-over event. Third, a peak in relative power rarely portends an imminent power transition. Fourth, global leadership in sea power is an early-cycle marker of hegemonic ascendency. And fifth, global leadership in finance and technology is typically more enduring than for trade, which could partly reflect stronger network effects in the former.

In concluding with a review of the limits of material power and predatory coercion, I argue that while the ability and willingness of the pre-eminent state to shape the international system differed across three hegemonic eras – Dutch, British, and American – each sought to make key tenants of the international order tolerable or attractive to a sufficiently large cohort of states that it boosted their influence beyond that possible by their material resource advantage alone.

As a new era of great power contestation dawns where competition is intensifying across a range of domains, the results in this study should be of more than historical interest. I conclude with several implications pertaining to the dynamics of power transitions, the integration of different elements of national power, and the conduct of modern economic statecraft incorporating dual use power.

Building on literature that suggests that there are both benefits (e.g., increased empathy and social cognition) and risks (e.g., psychological discomfort during or after emotionally intense practices) related to the practice of acting, this study addresses a gap in psychology research by investigating cognitive control and emotion regulation processes that could be involved in creating emotional states in acting. Using a mixed-methods design, this project aims to examine whether “inside-out” acting training is associated with interoceptive awareness, emotion regulation, and theory of mind, as well as with any potential short- and long-term unwanted psychological discomfort felt by actors. The study is divided into quantitative and qualitative parts. In the quantitative phase, participants completed the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), and a modified version of the ERQ. As the original ERQ tests for the ability to down-regulate emotions, and I hypothesized that up-regulation would be used in acting, the modified ERQ contained questions that were inverted to inquire about up-regulation in acting contexts. Analyses examined associations between acting experience (class level and years of study) and these measures. The primary finding was that the MAIA total score increased significantly with both class level (F(2, 65) = 49.03, p .001) and years of study (F(4, 63) = 46.26, p .001), after Bonferroni, whereas the RMET and ERQ measures did not show significant associations. These results suggest that interoceptive awareness may increase with acting training, while other measured scales either may not be sensitive to acting training or may not be the appropriate measures, due to limitations such as the ceiling effect. In the qualitative phase, phenomenological interviews were conducted to help understand the findings of the quantitative phase. The participants were ten professional actors (ages 27–81) with training in inside-out techniques, all of whom had more than ten years of experience, representing multiple approaches (such as Method Acting, Meisner, Stella Adler, Uta Hagen, and mixed methods). Actors described multiple pathways to triggering emotional states (such as autobiographical memory, imagined future outcomes for the self, and imagined memories/futures for the character), and reported somatic sensations as markers of emotional arousal. They also reported that emotions could arise when they focused on the character's responses to circumstances, objectives, relationships, and environment, but less so when they consciously strived for a specific emotional state, suggesting that a loosening of top-down control may facilitate emotional experience during acting. Together, the mixed-method findings suggest that acting may cultivate interoceptive awareness and that actors rely on a number of personally tailored strategies to alter their emotional states, which could be better understood through future research controlling for specific acting techniques and situational contexts.

Melville and Mannerism argues that the deformation of inherited form in Moby- Dick is organized by a Mannerist problematic in which measure, matter, and telos pass through a literary order of disproportion, tension, incompletion, and re-formation. The thesis—beginning with the European art made available to Melville and the text’s own sustained attention to painting, sculpture, and architecture—reads Mannerism less as a period in art history and more as a recurrent working method in which a preconceived order endures through stretch, strain, distortion, and unfinishedness. Critics have long recognized Melville’s art-historical engagements; what has yet to be developed is the Mannerist mode by which these concerns gather around deformation. The thesis follows the logic through three primary modes—i.e., disproportion, tension, and incompletion. It is in Chapter II where I argue that disproportion emerges when the whale strains past every available measure, converting scale, ekphrasis, and perception into signs of representational failure. From measure, I then turn to matter in Chapter III, to demonstrate how Ahab’s bronze-cast body—through Cellini, the figura serpentinata, enargeia, and metamorphosis—turns mutilation into Mannerist tension. Chapter IV then takes incompletion—through roughness, indistinctness, and lack of finish—as Melville’s deformation of telos, arguing that he transforms the absence of completion into a positive Mannerist mode. I then conclude the study by arguing that Mannerism names the formal logic through which Moby-Dick deforms scale, matter, telos, relation, and belief in order to make re-formation possible.

My Father’s Daughter follows Laura, a young woman who flees a patriarchal village where storytelling is punished as sin, to a city where she intends to write a novel that will prove her stories are true. The world she enters operates on dream-logic: mermaids, crows, and boarding houses where oblivion is served teacups and publishing contracts are linked to the Devil’s Grandmother. The obstacles she encounters are simultaneously external and psychological—the city, a projection of the self that was shaped by suppression. At its center, the novel is a study in creative paralysis. Laura carries everything like a live thing in a drawer in her chest. What she’s learning to do is act. My Father’s Daughter traces the unbridgeable distance between the hunger for recognition and the terror of the blank page. Drawing on the tradition of feminist surrealism and the fairy tale rewritten from within, the novel asks whether a woman can stop living inside the stories for which she was punished for believing long enough to write her own.

This study investigated whether a brief mindset-reframing intervention could influence perceived energy and state focus. Drawing upon previous mindset-placebo research, the study tested if reframing the perception of daily work tasks would produce immediate shifts in self-reported energy and focus. An online experiment was conducted with 41 adults who worked in customer service roles that are in-person with face-to-face customer/client interactions. Participants were randomly assigned to either an intervention or control condition. In the intervention condition, customer service work tasks were framed as energizing and focus-enhancing, while the control condition presented neutral, customer service information. Pre- and post-intervention measures of subjective energy and state focus were completed by all participants. Results indicated a significant Time x Condition interaction for both outcomes. Participants in the intervention group reported immediate increases in perceived energy and focus. Participants in the control group did not report comparable increases. These findings contribute preliminary evidence that the way a task is framed and subsequently perceived may shape felt experience, even when the task itself remains unchanged.

Time is a crucial factor in making an appropriate diagnosis when a patient is seriously ill with a bacterial infection, especially with the looming threat of Antimicrobial Resistance. Traditional culture-based methods can take several days to even weeks to come back to the clinical team, with the patient usually treated with a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics for a bacterial infection in the meantime. Faster next-gen short-read sequencing platforms offer a rapid turnaround time providing bacterial species identification, but are unable to reliably sequence plasmids which can offer valuable information of what virulence factors or antimicrobial resistance genes might be present. Use of long-read sequencing platforms from Oxford Nanopore Technology and Pacific Biosystems are on the rise due to their ease of use, fast turnaround times, and cheap cost—but are almost always used in combination with short-read Illumina sequencing as a gold-standard to fill in the gaps where long-read sequencing falls short. Here, we examine Oxford Nanopore Technology’s MinION nanopore sequencing platform and its reliability to be used as a standalone method. For context, our work will be completed within the Brigham & Women’s Clinical Microbiology laboratory. Our main research question involves whether Oxford Nanopore Technology’s assays are reliable enough to be used for complete bacterial genome and extrachromosomal plasmid sequencing as a standalone method without the need for concurrent hybrid assembly. If a nanopore sequencing diagnostic assay is deemed reliable to be used as a standalone method, then it has further applications in a clinical setting for whole-genome as well as plasmid sequencing of bacterial pathogens—providing tailored genomic information in real time, allowing for better patient outcome. We plan on testing our hypothesis through use of Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT)’s MinION nanopore sequencing technology and a hybrid assembly using both Illumina and Nanopore sequences with a bioinformatic pipeline developed in-house. Bacterial isolates obtained from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood cultures are the initial specimen source for this assay. Although there were variations observed from nanopore-only compared to hybrid sequencing, we concluded that Nanopore sequencing is reliable enough to be used on its own for species identification, but not for plasmid identification. This novel research is important as there have been no similar comparison studies to date. With an increased trust of Nanopore sequencing solo-use, providers will be armed with valuable genomic information to treat their patient in real time. This will greatly lessen the patient’s time on broad spectrum antibiotics, greatly improving antimicrobial stewardship.

This thesis compares two major non-interventionist groups and examines how they used religion to shape the debate over the US entry into World War II. The two groups represented two different wings of the non-interventionist movement. The debate, which occurred primarily from 1939 to 1941, was led on the non-interventionist side by the (relatively) conservative American First Committee, and the more progressive Keep America Out of War Committee. Using archival material from the Hoover Institution and the Swarthmore Peace Collection, along with other predominantly secondary sources, the thesis traces how the two organizations attempted to mobilize the major American religious blocs of the period to support their cause. The analysis shows that the AFC treated religion as a resource, as it did in other parts of civil society. The AFC integrated general Protestant culture in their organization, while specifically targeting Catholics for outreach, while struggling but not ignoring the Jewish community. The KAOWC drew on progressive Protestant and Jewish networks from before the period to attempt an interfaith coalition, while struggling to reach out to Catholic and Black Protestant churches. The thesis argues that differences in organizational structures, constituencies, and cultural orientation produced distinct religious strategies. Methodologically, the project uses comparative analysis and archival case studies to connect religious strategies to political campaigns.

More than 300 years ago, colonial New England experienced a surge of witchcraft accusations. For centuries, countless historians have examined these outbreaks and posited why they happened. However, in contrast, this thesis is concerned with how the witchcraft trials ended. On several occasions over a few short decades, communities in New England were upended by accusations, trials and in some cases, executions. And then…they weren’t. Why is that? What changed? Hundreds of men, women and children were accused of witchcraft in seventeenth century New England. A few dozen people were executed. Many believed that ridding the colonies of witches was vital to protecting God’s kingdom on earth. But a few individuals in positions of power, as well as other ordinary residents, recognized that innocent people were being unjustly condemned, and took actions to make it stop. Studies exist that touch on the various incidents of resistance, but none examine the opposition collectively. None scrutinizes the reasons why and how the trials ended, and specifically, how the endings differed from each other. By examining this deficit further, this thesis evaluates the prevailing characterization of moral courage at the time of the trials, situated within the conventional Puritan landscape. By exploring who was willing to stand up to established beliefs to ensure that the trials and executions ended, I in turn am able to ascertain the various characteristics those individuals possessed and exhibited that others did not. Through a careful examination of contemporary documents, we begin to see an evolution of the thinking surrounding calling for an end to the trials and the stark differences between the endings in Salem, and those elsewhere in New England. In many cases we read, in their own words, the growing arguments against the injustices. We can see the slow trickle with which they began, and the more resounding crescendo as public opinion began to change. Collectively these documents allow us to piece together a more comprehensive and cohesive understanding of those courageous enough, and in some cases empowered enough, to help bring about an end to one of our nation’s most infamous atrocities.

This thesis examines how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape conflict, and information ecosystems in Africa, with a particular focus on Mozambique. While much of the global literature on AI and security is centered on highly digitized environments, this study argues that AI can also affect low-connectivity conflict zones through uneven, and indirect forms of adoption. Using the conflict of Ahlu Sunnah wa Jama’a in Mozambique’s northern state, Cabo Delgado, as a case study, this thesis explores how insurgent groups and state institutions interact within an asymmetrical technological environment that arises from weak governance, limited intelligence sharing, political tension and overall digital abstinence. Focus is given to propaganda from generative AI, algorithmic amplification for controversial media, the role of WhatsApp vs traditional social media apps in Africa, and the current limitations of data and research in Mozambique. The findings suggest that AI in African conflict does not depend on widespread access to advanced tool, but rather how technologies intersect with fragile state control and uneven cooperation in the region. It concludes that AI is likely to deepen existing asymmetries in conflict environments where corruptive governments struggle to respond as quickly as insurgent movements and actors can adapt