Vassar Scholarship

In what ways are monstrosity, the abject, and queerness connected? What are the mechanisms by which we as a culture twist perceptions of difference into denouncements of monstrous otherness? How can we use creation as a tool for healing? How...

This paper investigates the determinants of child marriage using a new data set from rural India. Specifically, we focus on an extreme form of child marriage--that is, the marriage of girls under the age of ten. No other study to...

This paper proposes a new instrument for institutional quality—the salary of colonial governors—to investigate whether variations in the quality of British colonial rule continue to have an impact on the economic performance of former colonies. Governors' salaries provide a good...

The diminishing of temporal and spatial boundaries in the contemporary age of connectivity has fully realized Beck, Giddens and Nash's "reflexive" modernity. This reflexive modernity refers to the diminishing control of traditional institutions on individual lives. In the shift towards...

Oystering along Long Island has a long and complex history. For thousands of years, oyster beds grew in abundance in the bays and estuaries of the East End, but with European colonization came unsustainable harvesting practices that led to complete...