Vassar Scholarship

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...

This project provides an oppositional reading of ABC's popular <em>Bachelor </em>franchise, arguing that these reality dating programs present viewers with specific narratives of gender, sexuality, class, and race that contribute to greater hegemonic discourse that reifies heterosexual marriage. Through a...

This thesis investigates why music streaming services are so popular, beyond their affordability, and the ways in which streaming is shifting music culture. Certain aspects of listening culture which we tend to understand as originating from streaming services, specifically the...

This thesis interrogates the social function of small-town theater in the United States. Through a series of interviews with theater artists working at regional and local theaters in the northeast United States, I demonstrate theater's capacity to both reproduce and...