Roma monument
new Holocaust memories,
path to inclusion?

Nadine Blumer

University of Toronto

I am writing about Holocaust memory politics of the Sinti and Roma population in Germany. My focus is on the contested development of the Berlin Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime (opening in Spring 2010).

Who ate the methane?
and who is eating the oil?
deep into the mud…

Beth Orcutt

University of Georgia

I studied the fascinating microbes living in marine sediments that metabolize methane and other hydrocarbons.

It should be here but…
Unpredictable bastard
When thou art too large

Gil Ariel

New York University

Title: “Effective stochastic dynamics in deterministic systems” (2006).
My thesis concerns a few examples of deterministic systems that seem random when they are large enough. This is related to the “paradox” that even though the underling dynamics of a system my be deterministic (e.g., described by Newton’s laws), large ensembles can be treated in a probabilistic way using the tools of statistical physics.

No horizon, lots
of dreams, how they fill the gap?
Yes we can! they write.

Adva Selzer

Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Dissertation Title: “‘Freedom still my soul demands’ – Growing up in a Jewish Family in Inter-War Poland”
In my dissertation I’m trying to understand the experience of growing up as a Jew in Poland between the wars. Focusing on the inner life, dreams and hopes of youth and the “alternative realities” they created to bridge the gap between aspirations and daily life.

Calling people names
Denies individual choice
Of identity

Nick Appleby

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

I research the construction/denial of identity through political discourse on violence.

Schedules are messy,
but schedulers are not dumb.
So, how do they work?

Yishai Boasson

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Master’s Thesis Title: “The cognitive aspects of scheduling”

 

Market was state-planned,
So was World War II.
Coincidence? Nope.

Daniel Rosenberg

University of Haifa, Israel.

My MA thesis deals with the relation between the rise of market economy in the early 19th century and its relation with modern totalitarianism, as reflected in the writings of selected postwar thinkers.

Minor channel gene…
Its new role now discovered:
Building the synapse!

Peri Kurshan

Harvard University

Peri submitted one of the first dissertation haiku.  She is now finishing her Ph.D., and has figured out why the gene she’s studying causes the malfunctions that are observed when it is knocked out in fruit flies.  –the editor

Either in Rum, or
perhaps in Sham, thought to be
one but in fact more

Guy Burak

New York University

I am studying Ottoman history. My dissertation is about the multiplicity within the Hanafi legal school (one of the four legal schools in Sunni Islam) in the Ottoman domains. My main focus is on this history of the school in Anatolia (AKA Rum) and Syria (AKA in Turkish and Arabic as Sham).

Shabtai wrote on Tel
Aviv & realized that
Cities means a lot

Dror Burstein

Tel Aviv University

My dissertation is a reading in Jacob Shabtai, a prominent Israeli novelist, focusing on spatial aspects of his prose.

Soldiers’ tales for sale,
summoned from oblivion,
to build nation’s self.

Uri Rosenheck

Emory University

My dissertation: “Fighting for Home Abroad: Remembrance and Oblivion of WWII in Brazil” is about the collective memory of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force that fought in Italy alongside the Allies in WWII and its uses by different groups to construct and contest national, and other, identities in Brazil.

Level by level
Evolution will suffice
A mind will emerge

Liza Nadal

My dissertation is about emergent processes and the formation of complex patterns from simple founding principles such as displayed in Conway’s game of life.

the genome is packed.
histone marks and dynamics
control expression.

Tommy Kaplan

The Hebrew University

Dissertation title: “From DNA Sequence to Chromatin Dynamics: Computational Analysis of Transcriptional Regulation” (2008).
During my PhD I developed and implemented computational algorithms to understand the basic principles of transcriptional regulation. How the DNA sequence and its cellular packaging control the expression of genes.

Pieces from above
Assembled by strength to be as one
Lightening the big dark

Dori Reichmann

Weizmann Institute of Science

My dissertation is about the microscopical physics of black holes. As part of a greater effort to use String theory methods to give a first principle derivation for thermodynamical behavior of black holes. The first part focuses on a phase transition in a class of black holes known as BTZ. The second part focuses on the emergence of entropy at zero temperature for a class of black hole know as SUSY-ADS5.

Night, shelter here, mate
Or flower has no offspring, yet
By morning – heat’n go

Yuval Sapir

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Dissertation title: Pollination ecology of Oncocyclus irises (2004)
The work showed that night-sheltering male bees are the pollinators of the dark-colored irises in the middle-east, and that their reward is not food (such as nectar), but heat absorbed by the dark flowers at sunrise. The heated flowers warm the male bees, and they fly to their day-time business.

Cities and suburbs,
Borders, they mark the line
between “us” and “them”.

Nethanel Reicher

Erasmus University, The Netherlands

My master thesis dealt with the regional & local implementation of national housing policy in the Netherlands in the 1990’s. I found out that though national policies aimed at strengthening the socio-economic situation of big cities by developing new residential areas in the whole metropolitan area, what really mattered was the municipal belonging of those new areas.

The feminine mark -
A cover story hidden
under common text

Nitza Karen

Bae-Ilan University, Isreal

Dissertation title: “The Feminine Mark: Feminine Poetics – Its Characteristics and Its Embodiments in Contemporary Israeli Women’s Writing” (2005)

My dissertation is about to be published as a book titled: Like a Sheet in the Hand of the Embroideress – Women’s Writing and the Hegemonic Text, in the series “Interpetaion and Culture”, by Bar-Ilan University Press (more information here).

Lying, is it wrong?
When identities performed
are disrupted: free.

Cynthia Foo

University of Rochester

My dissertation looks at the performance of lying as a way to disrupt assumptions of race, gender and class. In so doing, I argue that a space of free expression can emerge.

seven years later
academic gladiator
call me doctor lee

Sarah C. Lee

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

manic death spiral
produces my dissertation
I hope I don’t fail

Sarah C. Lee

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill