Years of research culminate in doctoral theses

The depth and breadth of graduate student scholarship is reflected in the listing of doctoral theses published each year in the Commencement program. Here is a look at some of them.

• Danielle T. Abramson: An Alternative Treatment for Type I Diabetes Based on an Oral Drug Delivery System
  
• Andrew Gentes: Roads to Oblivion: Siberian Exile and the Struggle Between State and Society in Russia, 1593-1917
  
• David Hamlin: Work at Play: Toys and the Toy Industry in Germany, 1880-1914
  
• Jessica Shubow: A Political History of the Normal Body in the United States from the Progressive Era to the Cold War
  
• Joshua Michael Zeitz: White Ethnic New York: Jews and Catholics in Post-War Gotham, 1945-1970
  

Student: Danielle T. Abramson
Adviser: Edith Mathiowitz
Thesis: “An Alternative Treatment for Type I Diabetes Based on an Oral Drug Delivery System”

Every year more than 15,000 young Americans sit down with an endocrinologist and learn how to manage their newly diagnosed Type I diabetes.

The outline is pretty much the same for everyone: a) their bodies cannot fuel their cells unless insulin is present; b) their pancreases will never produce insulin again; so c) they must provide the insulin themselves. Usually that means several injections and finger-stick blood tests every day for the rest of their lives.

But isn’t there a pill? Endocrinologists get that question a lot. No, there is no pill. Insulin is a hormone; it’s made of protein. The stomach would rip it to shreds before the body had a chance to absorb it.

Only … what would happen if the insulin could ride through the stomach in an acid-proof vehicle that would deliver it safe and sound to the small intestine, where it could enter the bloodstream? That’s the possibility that drew Danielle Abramson to graduate studies at Brown. She had majored in mechanical engineering at SUNY-Binghamton and wanted to continue studies in bioengineering – something new, she said, something helpful, something personally meaningful.

She had started grad school elsewhere before she heard about work being done at Brown by Edith Mathiowitz. Mathiowitz’s lab was trying to use microscopic spheres of biodegradable polymer as drug delivery vehicles. It might be possible, Abramson thought, to load insulin into those spheres. If the biodegradation of the spheres could be timed correctly, they might be able to transport insulin safely past the ravages of stomach acid.

She came to Brown and spent three and a half years in Mathiowitz’s lab. Using a special strain of laboratory rat which spontaneously develops Type I diabetes, she studied the rate of decay for the polymer spheres, learned how to calculate dosage, and demonstrated that, at least in the rat model, the biodegradable polymer microspheres could achieve 25 percent bioavailability of oral insulin, an amount far more impressive than had been thought.

That work and other studies continue in Mathiowitz’s lab, but Abramson has moved on. In April, she began working as a technology specialist in the intellectual property department of a Boston law firm, applying her engineering and research expertise to preparing patent applications. “I love learning and I like learning about a lot of different things,” she says. “Understanding so many new projects and helping people secure patents on them is the kind of work I love to do.” – Mark Nickel

Student: Andrew Gentes
Adviser: Abbott Gleason
Thesis: “Roads to Oblivion: Siberian Exile and the Struggle Between State and Society in Russia, 1593-1917”

Typing notes from government documents into a laptop computer in a library in Siberia required the warmth afforded by a pair of gloves with the fingers cut off.

It was one of the accommodations Andrew Gentes made in researching his dissertation, “Roads to Oblivion: Siberian Exile and the Struggle Between State and Society in Russia, 1593-1917.”

Very little had been written in English on the region of Russia that historically served as a dumping ground for the country’s mentally ill, elderly, cripples and criminals, and which has become a metaphor for society’s outcast, according to Gentes.

Most exiles were illiterate, which posed the challenge for Gentes to tell their story without being able to read any of their own stories in their own words. He sifted through historical records during his seven-month stay in Siberia to piece together the tale of the exiled.

About half of the nearly one million people sent to Siberia during the 19^th century were exiled by their village communes through an administrative procedure that required no criminal conviction, Gentes said.

Throughout centuries under tsarist administrations, Russia was predominately rural and most people were peasants. The government allowed village communes to police themselves, and neighbors often abused the power.

“Siberia was not just a giant open-air prison, it also became an insanity ward,” he said. “One of the misconceptions about Siberia is that exiles were all political dissidents. Villages essentially got rid of people they didn’t want to take care of.”

The allure of fur supplies brought Russians into the region in the 16^th century, and later the extraction of gold, silver and lead captured their interest. One of the first ways Russia used the exiles was to extort sable fur from the native population, said Gentes.

Gentes visited Siberia during the coldest months, October through April, when the temperature dipped to 30 below zero and a person walking outside could feel liquid on the eyelids begin to freeze. He conducted research even when the heat in the library was turned off because of a dispute over electricity.

“The relationship between Russia and Siberia even today is always a mother country and its colony,” said Gentes.

One of the cities in Siberia, Vladivostok, is a hilly seaport that is the home of the Russian Pacific Fleet. But any comparison to America’s hilly seaport city of San Francisco stops there, Gentes said.

Vladivostok is plagued by a great amount of poverty; buildings are crumbling and a desire to leave abounds among the Russian college students with whom Gentes lived.

“It was mind-blowing,” said Gentes, who enrolled in the graduate program at Brown in 1994. “I’d been under the illusion before going that Russia was rebounding. What I saw really challenged my view.”

However, Gentes added, the residents were generally friendly. “They bristle at the notion they are all descended from convicts.” – Kristen Cole

Student: David Hamlin
Adviser: Volker Berghahn (now at Columbia University)
Thesis: “Work at Play: Toys and the Toy Industry in Germany, 1880-1914”

The German toy industry has held Ph.D. student David Hamlin captive for a number of years while he researched and wrote his thesis, “Work at Play: Toys and the Toy Industry in Germany, 1880-1914.”

Hamlin examined the metal toy makers in Nuremberg, the doll makers in Sonneberg and the wooden toy makers in Erzgebirge.

He explored how the market and the actual toys that appeared on the market were molded by consumer desires as well as economics. German society and family values affected the toy industry. But so, too, did the desires of consumers and the business decisions of suppliers in Germany’s two largest markets – the United States and Great Britain.

One impact the toy industry had was on middle-class domesticity, with a movement that began around 1905 to create mother-child bonds between girls and their dolls. Around the same time, toy reformers began to make more emotionally empathetic toys “to prevent children from becoming blasé and amoral,” Hamlin said.

In examining developments in the machine industry that dramatically increased the production of metal toys, Hamlin also studied the cultural reasons that more elaborate toys became popular.

At a time when parents wanted their children to enjoy their toys on Christmas Day, metal toys with moving parts brought immediate satisfaction.

“The moving things are so much neater,” Hamlin explained. “They get an immediate response. Everyone wants [their children] to enjoy it Christmas Day.”

Hamlin, who hopes to turn his 352-page project into a book someday, wants to become a university history professor. Toward that end, he will begin after graduation as a visiting assistant professor of history at Brown.

He’ll lecture next year on “Twentieth Century Germany” and “The Rise and Fall of the European Nation-States, 1848-1948.” – Kate Bramson

Student: Jessica Shubow
Adviser: Mari Jo Buhle
Thesis: “A Political History of the Normal Body in the United States from the Progressive Era to the Cold War”

When Jessica Shubow chose her dissertation topic as she pursued her doctoral degree in American civilization, she combined a longstanding interest in the history of women and political movements with her fascination over women’s preoccupation with their bodies.

“No matter how many strides women have made in other areas, this is still a powerful problem,” she said. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combined the history of culture and science, Shubow tackled “the story of how scientists in the United States who were concerned with biology helped to change the social and political significance of race, sexuality, and gender difference” during the first half of the 20^th century.

“As millions of people migrated across national borders and regions during this time, they created new political, sexual and class cultures that made 19^th-century notions of fixed racial, national, or gender types appear too static to account for the dynamic transformations under way,” she explained. In the hands of scientists, however, the use of statistics became a powerful tool for measuring the individual against the masses. “They created a new gauge of value and social legitimacy: ‘normality.’”

The ideal of normal for women– that is, what it meant to be healthy, beautiful and good – was largely defined by private companies and was tied to political struggles in labor, women’s and race issues, according to Shubow. Women, immigrants and minorities could not remain marginalized, but had to become part of the labor market – to “buy in and maintain some stability.”

That buy-in fed a fantasy that “posited a normal person as protagonist, one that – while not being a rigidly drawn type – was nonetheless strictly gender-differentiated and heterosexual and unambiguously on both counts,” Shubow found. “By mid-century, intolerance of life choices that confounded white middle-class ideals and persisting racial and gender inequality were often masked by the promise that anyone who was ‘normal’ could achieve the American Dream…

“The ‘normal person’ consciously produced by insurance companies, biologists, social scientists and other contributors to public discourse was a cosmopolitan figure that proved to be a powerful means of modeling the fantasy of the American century, which sold U.S.-style individualism, markets and culture to the world.”

Shubow has already incorporated her research and theories into her teaching, first at Wesleyan and now at Harvard, where she was appointed last year as a lecturer in history and literature, women’s studies and social studies. – Mary Jo Curtis

Student: Joshua Michael Zeitz
Adviser: James Patterson
Thesis: “White Ethnic New York: Jews and Catholics in Post-War Gotham, 1945-1970”

Race relations may have defined politics in much of the nation after World War II, but it never led to a common political or social outlook for New York City’s two major “White ethnics” – Jews and Catholics.

This finding is at the heart of a dissertation by historian and visiting assistant professor Joshua Michael Zeitz. Many historians suggest that Gotham’s Jews and Catholics melded into a local version of “white America,” particularly under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition of blacks, Jews and Catholics.

However, the two groups were sharply divided in their worldviews before the war, and those fault lines widened in the decades that followed, said Zeitz. He describes how Jews and Catholics lived side by side within enormous subcultures that operated on value systems based on differences in religion and ethnicity.

Often liberal in thinking, most New York Catholics were conservative in their actions. They tended to follow the Church, “internalizing an overriding respect for civil and religious authority,” wrote Zeitz. This pattern changed markedly after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which encouraged parishioners to actively participate in their religious services as well as their communities.

Meanwhile, “New York’s Jewish subculture defined dissent and liberalism as linchpins of Jewish civilization,” said Zeitz. Influenced by earlier events and experiences in the Soviet Union and Europe, many New York Jews saw the world as consisting of either progressives or fascists.

In 1949, a brutal and dramatic confrontation exposed these divisions. Up to 20,000 primarily left-wing Jews traveled upstate to Peekskill for a benefit concert on behalf of the America Communist Party. Local Catholics ambushed the concertgoers. Months later, Jewish publications still called the rioters fascists and anti-Semites. Although concert attendees were more apt to consider themselves progressives and the event a legal way of showing dissent, members of the Catholic community maintained that the Jews were Communists whose participation was unpatriotic, even unlawful.

The bottom line: Both groups saw the incident through their own filters, in black and white.

This summer Zeitz plans to refashion his dissertation into a book.

Among his research methods were interviews with a spectrum of New Yorkers, analysis of other studies, and combing through an abundance of documents housed in the Big Apple and elsewhere (such as the speeches of Reform rabbis archived at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati).

Zeitz said he couldn’t have done the work without the support of the history department. He called dissertation director James T. Patterson, who will retire this year as Ford Foundation Professor of History, “a leading post-World War II scholar, extraordinary advisor and great friend.” During the next academic year, Zeitz will continue serving as visiting assistant professor of history at Brown, teaching about immigration and ethnicity. – Scott J. Turner