Sleep and arousal are among the major mysteries remaining in biology. Animals are rendered defenseless, unable to forage for food, and immobile during sleep and yet sleep is necessary since complete deprivation results in significant health deficits and eventually death. In humans, artificial lighting and societal pressures have reduced the total amount of time spent sleeping over the last century. Chapter 1 of this thesis provides background information on our current understandings of sleep, the role of sleep in disease and Drosophila as a model organism for the study of sleep. Chapter 2 describes the RNA editing enzyme, ADAR, as a novel regulator of sleep and glutamatergic plasticity in Drosophila whereby ADAR acts to restrict the size of the synaptic vesicle reserve pool in glutamatergic sleep-promoting neurons. Chapter 3 details a novel arousal threshold measuring apparatus that expands our ability to measure and understand sleep and arousal in Drosophila. Chapter 4 presents a study in which we show multiple neurotransmitter systems promoting arousal yet differentially promote sleep homeostasis and the cognitive consequences of homeostatic recovery sleep. Chapter 5 describes work probing the role of the gene Nf1 as a sleep-promoting factor and its localization. Finally, Chapter 6 presents an extension of studies performed on the previously described sleep-promoting gene sss and its bifunctional role in regulating neuronal excitability and cholinergic synaptic transmission.

The modernist novel displays a recurrent interest in the limits of perceptual and cognitive faculties. Exploring this "cognitive thread" I reconsider terms for understanding literary modernism (difficulty, "unknowing," inwardness, stream of consciousness) as well as terms fundamental to narratology (frame, character, focalization, discourse). Chapter One addresses the difficulty of tracking the thoughts of a large number of characters. This challenge is also at work in narratology's communicative frame. Modernist narratives and the narratological frame for understanding them approach cognitive limitations in tracking multiple consciousnesses, resulting in a pragmatic "functionalizing"--a readerly practice of reducing characters and agents from sources of consciousness to discrete functions. Chapter Two addresses the functionalizing tendency of modernist experimentation in the single character. I reinterpret E.M. Forster's distinction between "flat" and "round" characters as the basis of a computationalist theory of character rather than a mimetic theory. I show how this conception of character is at work in A Passage to India. By foregrounding artifice rather than mimesis, Forster gives a new dimension to modernist "unknowing," the tendency for modernist narratives to dismantle the Bildungsroman structure of a subject coming to know itself. Chapter Three addresses the critical debate between "inwardness" and the external world in the works of Virginia Woolf. I argue that in Woolf's essays and fiction, forms of misperception are an index of her understanding of the inherent connection between the inner life and the outer world by a fallible human body. The limits of the sensory apparatuses run parallel to the limits of what can be conveyed in narrative. Perceptual limitations form the basis of Woolf's experimentation with focalization--the narratological term for the vantage from which a narrative is told. Chapter Four focuses on the minimum threshold of consciousness itself--moments of not thinking at all--in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes. The novel uses familiar stylistic strategies such as free indirect discourse but not in the service of the "inner voice" or the "stream of consciousness." Instead, the novel focuses on the "core" element of consciousness--what Antonio Damasio explains as "a sense of self about one moment--now--and about one place." Despite the focus on core consciousness, Lolly Willowes is nonetheless a novel of self-discovery in which Laura comes to understand herself to be a witch. In Warner's version of epiphany, I show how insight comes not from a process of reasoning but from core consciousness--an emanation from the lowest limit of the mind.

In 1931 Spain and Catalonia made strides towards democracy as a republic was declared. Throughout the republican period, Catalan governance remained in the hands of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC). This party aimed to fuse Catalan national identity, which had previously been an elite construct, with left republican democratic policies. In an attempt to create a national identity which was both cross class and democratic, the ERC turned to methods outside of the traditions of Spanish politics up to that point. This Dissertation will argue that sport and physical culture were an important tool in the ERC’s attempts to create a cross class national identity and that they allowed people of various classes to perform and negotiate that identity. The sport in question focused on incorporating as much of the population as possible and was about participation, not excellence. This cross class, mass pariticpation sporting movement became known as the popular sports movement and it would go on to serve as part of the ERC’s foreign policy as it reached its peak in the 1936 Popular Olympics. Before this both elite and popular sports had played a role in the ERC’s domestic policy as well as in the nationalization efforts of Catalan civil society. The popular sport movement made use of the infrastructure for sport which had been built before the Republic but fused this with a new, cross class, discourse of national identity. Youth groups and sports clubs served as schools of democracy and sites for performing and negotiating Catalan national identity. It shall be argued that popular sport bought together groups who had previously been ignored by, and ignored, Catalan politics politics and national identity up. This dissertation argues that, through participating in popular sport and physical culture, more people came to see themselves as Catalan and felt stronger ties to the nation.

While reading a series interviews with Michel Foucault conducted between 1982 and 1984, several statements in the text provoked questions that would become the basis of this dissertation. His objective is to move homosexuality away from questions of identity and desire and toward an ethic of pleasure. In the process, he affirms the transformative potential of pleasure. In this work, I analyze how various gay Latin American authors utilize this aspect of pleasure to critique and undermine the heteronormative cultures in which they live as well as offer the vision of a more inclusive society. I found in Pájaros de la playa (1993) by Severo Sarduy and Salón de belleza (1999) by Mario Bellatin, that the authors denounce their respective country’s responses to the AIDS crisis by creating textual spaces in which the reader as well as the fictional literary characters find pleasure. Reinaldo Arenas in Antes que anochezca (1992) and Boris Izaguirre in Azul petróleo (1998) rely on graphic portrayals of non-normative sex to expose governmental hypocrisy. Finally, in Sangre como la mía (2006) by Jorge Marchant Lazcano and Mundo cruel (2010) by Luis Negrón the authors demonstrate the capability of gay relationships based on pleasure, rather than identity, to effect change and create a more equitable and inclusive society.

In this dissertation, I investigate the determinants of regional production choices,primarily focusing on agricultural commodities, and the aggregate consequences of those decisions. The dissertation is guided by the connecting theme of understanding why regions choose to produce specific commodities and the implications of these choices on international trade and development. The study comprises three interconnected chapters, each addressing a different aspect of agricultural and resource economics and international trade. The first chapter examines the clustering of agricultural production in Mexico and demonstrates that agricultural value chains (AVCs) explain these spatial patterns more closely than land suitability alone. The chapter highlights the presence of economies of scale in AVCs that act as barriers to entry and contribute to the clustering of agricultural production. I use Mexico as a setting, where highly productive, export-oriented agriculture coexists with subsistence agriculture. The paper develops a general equilibrium model incorporating intermediaries with market power and large fixed costs of entry. This model allows me to explore several counterfactuals, such as the impact of climate change on agricultural production and the role of fixed costs in generating patterns of clustering. The second chapter, jointly authored with Thibault Fally, investigates the role of primary commodities in international trade, highlighting the potential understatement of aggregate gains from trade when key features of commodities are ignored. By developing a general-equilibrium model that accounts for these features, including low responsiveness of both demand and supply to changes in price, reliance on natural resources, and a high concentration of these natural resources among only a few countries, this chapter offers a more comprehensive understanding of the economic gains from trade. The model and data are used to simulate a number of counterfactuals which confirm that ignoring the specific features of commodities leads to a wide understatement of the gains from trade. The third chapter, jointly authored with Joel Ferguson and Kangogo Sogomo, presents a computationally feasible approach to remote sensing outcomes at large scale. We develop a novel dimensionality reduction technique to predict agricultural outcomes using only widely available, aggregated training data. This methodology is adaptable to various problems, including classification of crop types, measurement of forest loss, or urban growth, and offers a practical toolkit for researchers and policymakers who require timely and cost-effective data for decision-making purposes without the need for additional sources of information. We focus on measuring crop yields, particularly maize yields in Mexico, which is important for ensuring food security and informing policies such as food aid and transfer programs to assist smallholders affected by climatic shocks or better target responses to natural disasters in rural areas. Taken together, these chapters provide insights into the determinants of regional production choices, the development of innovative techniques for crop yield estimation through remote sensing, and the importance of primary commodities in international trade. By exploring the forces shaping regional agricultural and resource production and the distribution of scarce natural resources, this dissertation contributes to a more integrated understanding of how trade and agricultural and resource sector and play a role in shaping regional economic outcomes. The findings have implications for agricultural policy, international trade, and for regional development.

Monoamine neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin, modulate fast synaptic transmission in circuits that mediate many complex behaviors including aggression, sleep, attention, and mood. In psychiatry, many therapeutics target monoamine systems at either the receptors or transporters that mediate and regulate monoamine neurotransmission. The vesicular monoamine transporter (VMAT) is responsible for loading all monoamine neurotransmitters into both synaptic vesicles (SVs) and large dense-core vesicles (LDCVs), which mediate synaptic and extrasynaptic release, respectively. However, the functional contribution of each type of vesicular release to circuit function and behavior is unknown. Previous studies in Drosophila have demonstrated that the amount and site of amine release can be altered by mutations in the C-terminal trafficking domain of Drosophila VMAT (DVMAT). In a DVMAT- null genetic background, the function of several circuits and behaviors are perturbed, but are rescued by transgenic expression of wild-type and trafficking mutant alleles. Some behaviors are not rescued by trafficking mutants. Mutations that cause DVMAT to preferentially traffic to LDCVs do not rescue fertility and egg-laying deficits. This suggests that the oviposition circuit is highly sensitive to the delicate balance between synaptic and extrasynaptic release of the neurotransmitter octopamine. I hypothesized that trafficking mutations in the endogenous DVMAT gene locus confer circuit dysfunction, resembling genetic rescue experiments. To further test this idea, I created a new genetic model of DVMAT trafficking using CRISPR/Cas9 to alter trafficking signals in the endogenous gene. This novel genetic model will be useful to study the effects of mutants at endogenous expression levels, facilitates combinations with genetic and molecular tools for circuit analysis, and represents a new platform for genetic screens to find novel regulators of DVMAT function. The work presented here investigated the contributions of the different modes of monoamine release and the neuroanatomy of the model circuit. I found that mutations in VMAT trafficking caused a decrease in response from the post-synaptic target organ. These and further studies elucidate novel mechanisms of aminergic signaling and new avenues for the research and development of new therapeutics for psychiatric disorders.