I perform a comparative reading of <em>Iphigeneia Among the Taurians</em> by Euripides (around 414 BCE) and the adaptation <em>Iphigénie en Tauride</em> by Claude Guimond de La Touche (1757 CE). I aim to read the development of the secular with regards to state and religion as it became articulated in the Athens of Euripides and later adapted on the French stage during the Enlightenment. I briefly include some observations on contemporary claims about the separation of church and state in the United States to deepen my comparative reading about the development of the secular as I define it in this thesis.

A visual exploration of Vassar's palimpsestic landscape history, focusing on the evolution of Noyes Circle, the Class Tree Ceremony, and circulation around Main Building.

Finding ways to increase the effectiveness of early childhood education has been a big concern for many educators and policymakers. In an attempt to solve this problem, they are faced with a dilemma of whether to concentrate on parent or teacher inputs. Previous research has studied the impact of either teacher or parent factors on students' academic performance. However, not many papers narrow their focus to the outcomes from early childhood programs. Using the National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL) Multistate Study of Pre-Kindergarten (2001-2003) data, the paper aims to fill in this gap in the literature. Multiple linear regressions are used to weight the relative importance of teacher- and parent-related inputs on children's academic gains. It is found that, while teacher's education is positively correlated with better outcomes, parent inputs, especially parental involvement, are bigger determinants of children's academic outcomes and behaviors. These findings suggest which factors policymakers, with limited resources, should focus more on during education reform.

Currently there is a deficit in economics literature on the labor market outcomes of sexual minorities. Previous studies have provided evidence that homosexual and bisexual individuals endure worse mental and physical health, and lesbian women excluded, face wage penalties associated with their identity. There are numerous studies on the association between social capital and quality of health, as well as showing correlation between health and economic status. This thesis attempts to build evidence of a linkage between the social capital, health, and labor market outcomes of sexual minorities. The results of this paper imply that excluding social capital measures from a model will lead to overestimates on the economic effects of identifying as a sexual minority.

The influx of migrants into modern day Italy created a new literary genre, stories of migration and acculturation. Women migrants are excluded on two levels from the canon, being women and being migrants. This series of translations uses a sexual difference and intersectional feminist frameworks to help amplify the otherized voices of female migrants or second-generation writers with political undercurrents.

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 (Hitchcock et al., 2012b) is a published record of criminal proceedings at London's central criminal court. The Proceedings primarily depict the lives of the "non-elite" population of London. This project explores these proceedings to study this specific population over the approximately 250-year time period of the publication. Because the corpus spans a significant period of history, it can be examined to identify evolving patterns related to different social groups represented in the text. This project aims to identify which computational methods can reveal interesting sociolinguistic information about this corpus. More specifically, this paper will explore unsupervised techniques like latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003), Word2Vec (Mikolov et al., 2013), and Embedded Topic Modeling (ETM) (Dieng et al., 2019b) when applied to the Proceedings of Old Bailey. Additionally, temporal variants of these methods, such as Dynamic Topic Modeling (DTM) (Blei and Lafferty, 2006), Dynamic Embedded Topic Modeling (DETM) (Dieng et al., 2019a), and LDA and Word2Vec manually run across different time slices, are applied to analyze the corpus over time.