Egyptian tower houses are a type of dwelling developed in the Third Intermediate Period in Egypt. They were extensively used in the time from the Late Period (26^th Dynasty) until Roman times and were still in use through Late Antiquity, Medieval times until modern times. Many of these houses used the so called casemate foundations, a foundation type that was also used for other types of buildings. This article discusses typical elements, functions and chronological development of casemate structures and tower houses as well as known sources and possible reasons for their development.

This dissertation traces the idea of the home and family (oikos) through several speeches from the corpus of the Attic orators. Many of the speeches are concerned with family matters, from issues of inheritance or guardianship to adultery and murder. Scholars studying the ancient Greek family often use these speeches as evidence for social practices; my dissertation differs from these approaches in that it centers around the evidence not for real life but for the ideologies that shaped the habits and opinions of the ancient Athenians. I demonstrate that the orators drew on the ideology of the oikos, a set of social expectations that the house should be well-organized and family members perfectly loyal and affectionate to one another, in order to persuade the jury to vote in their favor.

The oikos was a particularly powerful symbol in the Athenian imaginary: every member of the jury and Assembly, before whom the speeches I focus on were delivered, belonged to an oikos. The orators used references to the house and family as a way of appealing to the shared experience of belonging to an oikos. In this way, they evoked what I call the home feeling, a communal, family feeling which could be used to persuade, to characterize, or to provide evidence. My first three chapters deal with forensic rhetoric, showing how speeches by Antiphon, Isocrates, Lysias, Isaeus, and Demosthenes engage with social expectations about behavior between family members and anxieties about dangers both inside and outside the house. In my fourth chapter, I argue that Demosthenes’ political speeches invoke the home feeling at the level of the polis in order to persuade the people of Athens to join together against dangers at home—laziness and complacency among the citizenry—and the increasing threat of Philip of Macedon. By focusing on the home feeling and the prevalence of the rhetoric of the oikos in the Attic orators, my dissertation casts new light on the importance of the house and household in Athenian public discourse.

The unknown nature of dark matter already represents one of the greatest gaps in our understanding of the universe. But the study of dark matter is now encountering a crisis: collider searches and direct detection experiments are quickly ruling out the strongly-motivated WIMP models that have guided theoretical progress for decades. Departing from the WIMP paradigm opens vast regions of parameter space across the scales, from ultralight bosons to objects at the Planck scale and beyond, and effectively probing this space of possibilities calls for new tools. Fortuitously, several such tools are available to us in the form of new quantum sensors, new astrophysical observables, and the new science of gravitational wave astronomy. In this thesis, I show how these methods can be combined to probe well-motivated dark matter candidates across an enormous range of masses.

Remediating and redeveloping polluted, industrialized land has emerged as a significant urban growth strategy in U.S. cities since the 1990s. In the same historical moment, the U.S. military has sought to close and transfer hundreds of military bases to cities - part of a process of "shutting down the Cold War". In California, many of these urban military bases were once destinations for African Americans leaving the Jim Crow south during World War II. In the postwar decades, many of the neighborhoods surrounding these military bases have struggled with multiple forms of racism and urban neglect, including health inequalities from toxic urban environments. This study examines the articulation of waste, race, and space in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of southeast San Francisco, which surrounds the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Once a space of hope and opportunity for black migrants from the south, the shipyard today is understood as an unhealthy, threatening, and sometimes violent site for many long-time Bayview-Hunters Point residents. At the same time, since the 1990s, the shipyard has emerged as a profitable landscape for developers, banks, environmental engineering firms, and a terrain on which social groups in San Francisco imagine and struggle over the future of the city. Through five empirical chapters, I examine the cultural politics of polluted urban land in Bayview-Hunters Point today, focusing on the Hunters Point Shipyard and its neighboring industrial waterfront. At the analytical level, I argue that focusing on the materialities and social relations of waste offers a critical lens onto the urban process.