This dissertation concentrates on the history of frontiers, borderlands, and empires in Eastern and Central Europe in the eighteenth century. While the existing literature examines mainly ideological and political competitions among the empires for land, resources, and the stateless population; I explore more physical and material spheres of rivalry such as border security, economy and public health. This dissertation explores the politics of the Russian Empire in these spheres in the eighteenth century. It argues that the policies of improvement in migration control, border infrastructure, and health care promoted by the government of Catherine II allowed the empire to incorporate its borderland with Poland-Lithuania and attract the local population more swiftly and effectively than did political repressions, ideological propaganda, or forced cultural assimilation. / History

<p> This qualitative multi-site case study, situated in the context of Ukraine's post-Soviet political economy, examined how orphanage educators' expectations and beliefs about orphans' academic abilities and potential, curriculum, peer relationships, and education policy shaped orphans' post-secondary education decisions and trajectories. Examination of the educational experiences of orphans and children deprived of parental care shed light on socio-economic inequalities confronting these marginalized youth in and beyond state care. This dissertation is informed by critical theories of social and cultural reproduction that examine the relationship between schooling and socio-economic inequalities. I draw mainly on the concepts of the hidden curriculum and forms of capital (cultural, social, and economic). </p><p> Research conducted in Ukraine, primarily through quantitative surveys, tends to pathologize orphans and neglects to investigate how their secondary education experiences impact their trajectories post-institutionalization. This study, framed in qualitative methodology, was informed by observations of daily in- and out-of-classroom activities in two orphanages; in-depth, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with Grade 10 and 11 orphanage students, orphanage educators and administrators, and orphanage alumni; and document analysis. I focused on 81 orphanage youth and 41 educators as key participants embedded in the orphanage system. </p><p> My findings demonstrated that, despite some institutional changes, the ideologies, regimes, and cultures of Ukrainian orphanages still reflect the Soviet legacy of sequestered institutions providing substandard quality education. My examination of orphanage education revealed that many teachers, informed by genetic deficit ideology, communicated low expectations for student success and implemented an unchallenging curriculum characterized by watered-down teaching and learning materials, oversimplified assignments, canceled classes, and inflated grades. This study uncovered nuanced use of a hidden curriculum that ensured social reproduction and what I term a "transformative hidden curriculum" that fostered student success through art therapy, soft pedagogy, and hard caring. </p><p> Furthermore, this study shed light on factors that influenced orphans' complex post-secondary education decision-making processes, including peer pressure to attend vocational school; teacher-directed versus teacher-encouraged decisions; and informed, independent decisions largely thwarted by structural constraints. Lack of cultural and social capital significantly limited orphans' options and disenfranchised them in the labor market, thus perpetuating social reproduction in Ukrainian society.</p>

<p> Can individual differences moderate the deleterious effects of nationalistic attitudes on post-conflict peacemaking? In this work we investigate the relationship between national identification and attitudes toward reconciliation as moderated by dispositional and situational empathy. We hypothesize that the relationship between the socio-ideological concept of national identity and conciliatory attitudes is moderated by an individual difference variable unrelated to group processes, dispositional empathy, as well as by state-induced empathy. We tested this hypothesis in the Balkans, which have been the theatre of two wars in the 1990s, using samples of the Serbian population, and in the U.S., which has engaged in a drone war victimizing the Pakistani people. Study 1 results demonstrate the negative impact of national identification on attitudes toward reconciliation and reveal a moderating role of trait-level perspective-taking (a key aspect of empathy) in the relationship between national identification and conciliatory attitudes. Study 2 results confirm the effects of dispositional empathy and national identification on attitudes facilitating reconciliation. However, moderating effects of trait-empathy are absent and the state-empathy induction yields results that are inconsistent with those dispositional empathy effects found in Study 1.</p>

abstract: This paper contains an examination of the impact of the Vampire Hysteria in Europe during the 1700&rsquo;s on Lord Byron's &ldquo;The Giaour.&rdquo; Byron traveled to the continent in 1809 and wrote the poems that came to be known as his Oriental Romances after overhearing what would become &ldquo;The Giaour &rdquo; in &ldquo; one of the many coffee-houses that abound in the Levant.&rdquo; The main character, the Giaour, has characteristics typical of the Greek vampire, called vrykolakas. The vamping of characters, the cyclic imagery, and the juxtaposition of life and death as it is expressed within the poem are analyzed in comparison to vampiric folklore, especially that of Greece. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2010

ix, 53 p. : ill. / Russian men are over two and a half times more likely to die before 60 than are Russian women. Aggregate national indicators of state policy, health care and individual behavior are examined in a time-series analysis of male and female mortality rates from 1990 to 2008. Data come from the Russian State Statistical Office (Goskomstat) and the World Bank. There is a debate in both demographic literature and that on post-Soviet transition about changes in mortality in post-socialist society. Hypotheses about the relative impact of individual behavior such as alcohol consumption, the effect of changes to the healthcare system and economic stability are studied. A goal of this study is to understand the relative contribution of each factor to gender-based inequality in mortality rates. The findings show that the different types of variables - health care, the economy and human behavior - vary in their level of significance and in effect. / Committee in charge: Caleb Southworth, Chairperson; Julie Hessler, Member

abstract: Political and economic competition, so goes the broad argument, reduce corruption because competition increases the cost of actors to engage in corrupt practices. It increases the risk of exposure, provides non-corrupt alternatives for consumers, and introduces non-corrupt practices into the political and economic domains. Why then, has corruption persisted in the Central Eastern European countries decades after the introduction of political and economic competition in the early 1990s? This dissertation asks how and why the emergence of competition in the political and economic domains leads to a transformation of the patterns of corruption. I define corruption as an act involving a public official who violates the norms or regulations of their office, receives some compensation in return, and thus harms the public interest. I argue that under conditions of a communist past and high levels of uncertainty, the simultaneous emergence of political and economic competition transforms the opportunity structures of actors to engage in corruption. The resulting constellation of powerful incentives for and weak constraints against corruption encourages political and economic actors to enter into corrupt state-business relationships. Finally, the resource distribution between the actors in the corrupt state-business relationship determines the type of corruption that emerges—legal corruption, local capture, or covert political financing. To test the causal mechanism, I employ intensive process-tracing of the micro-causal mechanisms of eleven corruption cases in Poland and Hungary. Using paired comparisons of cases from the same business sector but at different points in time, the dissertation examines how corruption patterns transformed over time in Poland and Hungary. The dissertation shows that the emergence of political and economic competition changes the opportunity structures of actors in favor of corruption. Moreover, the new constellation of incentives and constraints encourages political and economic actors to establish corrupt state-business relationships. Crucially, I find that the resource distribution within these corrupt relationships determines the type of corruption emerges—local capture where both sides have concentrated resources that balance each other out, legal corruption when a strong economic actor confronts a fragmented political actor, and covert political financing when a weak economic actor faces a strong political actor. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Political Science 2018

abstract: Ethno-nationalist politicians and criminals in Mostar espoused a discourse of ethno-exclusionist sociocultural relations as a superstructure for the public in order to establish ethnocratic kleptocracies where they concealed their criminal colonization of residential and commercial property through manipulating the pre-Bosnian War discourse on property relations. This is not to argue that some or most of these politicians and criminals did not believe in their virulent nationalist rhetoric, but instead that the effects of the discourse created well-used pathways to personal, not community, wealth. Elites used the Yugoslav economic crisis and perceived past grievance to enflame growing tensions between ethnicities and social classes. I use Mostar as an object of analysis to examine the creation of Bosnian Croat and Bosniak ethnocratic regimes in this divided city. However, I focus more on the Bosnian Croat regime in the city because it envisioned Mostar as its capital, making the city the site of its political competition among factions. Even though ethno-nationalist politicians and criminals still hold a level of power in Mostar, the IC did succeed in instituting a high level of property restitution, which does not necessarily imply return, because the IC was able to impose rule of law when it acted in an organized manner. Also, the ethnocratic regimes were weakened due to regional economic and political factors that undercut the regimes' hold over the population. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2013

abstract: Naming and naming practices take place at various sites associated with international politics. These sites include border crossings, migrations, diasporas, town halls, and offices of political parties representing minorities. This project is an investigation of these and other sites. It takes seriously questions of names and naming practices and particularly asks how people participate in these practices, often doing so with states and state authorities. It not only looks at and discusses how people proceed in these practices but also assesses the implications for people regarding how and when they can be at home as well as how and where they can move. Through an ethnography of Aegean Macedonians involving interviews, participant observation, and archival research, I find that naming practices occur well beyond the sites where they are expected. Names themselves are the result of negotiation and are controlled neither by their bearers nor those who would name. Similarity of demonyms with toponyms, do not ensure that bearers of such demonyms will be at home in the place that shares there name. Changes in names significance of names occur rapidly and these names turn home into abroad and hosts into guests. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Political Science 2014

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