Short Story Sequence
Genre of community;
Together, alone

Jeff Birkenstein

University of Kentucky, 2003

By jettisoning and adapting traditional narrative strategies—such as plot or temporal continuity—that tend to maintain their integrity only within the confines of a single story, James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson (and many authors since) use the genre of the short story sequence to present community in ways different from either the novel or the short story. Whether or not the characters in the stories understand these connections, they are connected through community even as they often remain isolated and alone.

Greenhouse gases rise
Stable boundary layer
“Whole farm” emissions

Laura A. Wittebol

McGill University

Fluxes of the greenhouse gases CO2, N2O, and methane at two eastern Canadian agricultural farms were measured using the nocturnal boundary layer budget method, which gave nighttime “whole farm” estimates. Results from this method were compared with other micrometeorological methods and a flux aggregation method.

Appendix, molars
Vestigial limbs be gone!
Vital? I think not.

Meghan

This has nothing to do with my dissertation. It is instead an homage dedicated to my former supervisor, with whom I recently parted ways. It was not amicable.

Romance, between words,
Has e’er dazed souls – brains – bodies.
You, reader, aren’t safe.

Hannah K. H. Kirby

University of Oxford

I’m researching the physical, gendered effects of romantic desire in characters and readers of prose fiction throughout time, drawing on the neurobiologial consistencies of the love concept. I address histories of authorship and readership, and find that authors tend both to favour ambiguities and to locate the power of their work in the fissures surrounding language and its participants – meaning that much of the interpretive onus (as well as its effects) remains with the reader.

they select babies
like shoes, desire blinding
from birth parent pain

Lisa Marie Rollins

University of California, Berkeley

My work focuses on the phenomenon of adoption of black and African children by white parents by examining the insertion of transracial adoption into African Diasporic history as a place for identification for displaced black bodies, and the construction of black women’s bodies during slavery as having an impact on adoption discourse ideas of motherhood and parenting in the United States.

Welcome, winds of change!
Oppressors can’t pay the cost,
Your perfect storm strikes!

Katrina Nowak Dusek

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

My thesis investigates patterns of pre-transition opposition-regime interaction that affect post-transition democratic trajectory in East Central Europe. Specifically, I develop a model for pre-transition interaction, a “mobilization-liberalization cycle”, which is driven by the cost to a regime to repress an opposition. Five case studies demonstrate that in countries with comparatively mild regime atmospheres, patterns of interaction resulted in mature oppositions and therefore more favorable democratic trajectories. Conversely, in countries with severe regime atmospheres, such patterns did not develop and no mature opposition was formed. In these cases, regimes were able to dictate the terms of transition, and the path to democratic consolidation was compromised.

With fire, woodland thrives.
With water, rainforest spreads.
Two systems, or one?

Laura Warman

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Rainforest and fire-prone (pyrophytic) vegetation in the Wet Tropics of Far North Queensland are usually approached as two independent biological systems that happen to occur close together. My project examines whether they can be considered alternative stable states within single large complex system.

Chiral Induction
strokes my mind with Organic
(chemist) Seduction

השראה כיראלית
מלטפת ברוך את
תת ההכרה

Anat Milo

Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

My research is focused on developing solid-state organic-inorganic hybrid materials for the induction of chirality upon various organic transformations.

Medieval cities –
Not as dirty as we think.
Muck and filth cleaned up.

Dolly Jørgensen

University of Virginia

In my PhD dissertation, I examined sanitation practices in English and Scandinavian urban areas from 1350 to 1600. Using both written and archeological evidence, I defined the roles of city corporations and individuals in street maintenance, waste management, and river cleansing, and found working social and technological systems that kept the urban space relatively free from waste.

reveal the tacit
logic of your strategy
to make it better

Roberto Perez-Franco

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I am developing a methodology to help practitioners improve the supply chain strategy of their firms. The methodology calls for making explicit the tacit logic of their functional strategies, as a prerequisite for evaluating and improving them.

Silent falling snow.
A snowflake melts in my hand.
No more frozen tears.

John T. Bridge

My dissertation examines the relationship between the physical act of crying and the cathartic release of emotional trauma in the therapeutic setting. This reveals in more detail the intimate relationship between the mind and the body.

Planning is crucial
we can’t predict the future
embrace the unknown

Yishai Boasson

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Thesis title: “An Evaluation of Scenario Planning for Supply Chain Design”

נקודות קטנות
הן זוהרות רק עד גבול
תופסות חיידקים

little little spots
seen only to a limit
catch bacterium

Inbal Tsarfati

Ben Gurion University of the Negev

I work in the filed of microarray miniaturization. A microarray is a device composed of selective bio-molecules (like antibodies) spots. When something binds to this molecule an optical signal appears.

I once was a girl
said the gentleman sadly
but now no longer

Catherine Robson

University of California, Davis

My dissertation (1995) considered middle-class male fantasies of original femininity in the cultural productions of Victorian Britain.

Assault: a minor crime?
Yes. Our “right to violence.”
Impunity reigns.

Joshua Stein

University of California, Los Angeles

Dissertation Title: “The Right to Violence: Assault Prosecution in New York, 1760-1840″ (2009).
My dissertation traces a fundamental transformation in the criminal prosecution of assault and battery. Instead of punishing assault as a bothersome breach of public peace, authorities began to prosecute it as a crime in its own right. As criminal sentences grew more severe (and their enforcement costlier), prosecution became much more selective. Convictions relative to the population plummeted, leaving most perpetrators of violence unpunished. Choosing which cases merited prosecution, the state followed attitudes on privacy and authority, consolidating a zone of allowable aggression I call “the right to violence.”

Bad people
should not be given armies
for they are bad

Eliav Lieblich

Columbia University Law School

My JSD dissertation involves analyzing the capacity of parties to an internal armed conflict to invite external intervention. My claim is that international law provides us tools to substantively distinguish between different parties according to their human rights records and other characteristics.

New product design
is not managed efficiently
use a DSM-based plan

Arie Karniel

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Title: “Managing the Dynamics of Product Development Process for New Product development”
My PhD dissertation “Managing DPDP for NPD” focuses on developing a framework for the management of NPD processes (iterative processes with process schemes that changes according to the evolving product knowledge). The framework incorporates the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) method and Petri nets. The DSM method was used for modeling the product knowledge, and then using reordering algorithms for planning the design processes. Petri nets formalization concepts were used for formally proving process structure properties that result from DSM-based plans, and allow implementation of the on-going process changes during the design process at run-time.

There is online law.
Where does it come from you ask?
Legal consciousness!

Ayelet Oz

Harvard Law School

My SJD research is focused on the way abstract understandings of legal concepts by laymen influence the creation of legal orders within online communities.

Trees misplaced,
Far goes the seed,
how high the wind?

Paul Caplat

University of Queensland, Australia

I study the importance of long distance seed dispersal in the spread of invasive conifers.

Electricity
Nature creates it cleanly
From light and proteins

Benjamin Chu

University of California, Los Angeles

Dissertation Title: “Bio-solar energy generation and harvesting from biomolcule/copolymer hybrid systems”
My dissertation work demonstrated light-induced current generation in a solution of nano-scale block-copolymer vesicles by reconstituting two energy-transducing proteins, bacteriorhodopsin and cytochrome C oxidase, into a biomimetic copolymer and coupling their functionality to produce a biological-based photovoltaic system (a bio-solar cell, if you will).