This paper explores gender relations in the Japanese Peruvian community during its first 45 years of existence, with attention to gendered state policies in both Japan and Peru that affected the Nikkei community in Peru. Relying primarily on oral interviews, it follows Nikkei men and women's own descriptions of their lives. Japanese cultural norms shaped patterns of migration, labor and family for emigrants to Peru, though late-Meiji ideology about women's role found relatively less echo than older rural patterns. As Japanese immigrants' labor patterns shifted, women found new roles, such as in store management, though they remained nearly exclusively responsible for child care and the reproduction of families. The relative scarcity of Japanese women in Peru had some effect on marriage and remarriage patterns, but ethnic associations and public sociability remained primarily male spheres in Peru.

As supporting youths’ mental health increasingly becomes a priority for school-based professionals, methods for identifying youth who may benefit from additional mental health supports are needed. Mental health has traditionally been defined from a deficit-based perspective, wherein mental health was assumed if youth were not experiencing psychopathology. Contemporary scholarship, however, increasingly asserts that the absence of mental illness is insufficient for mental health. Dual-factor models describe mental health as consisting of two separate yet interrelated constructs of well-being and psychopathology. Research using a dual-factor approach to examine youths’ mental health has most often used rationally determined cut points to define mental health groups differing along each of the well-being and psychopathology dimensions. In two studies, a dual-factor approach to mental health in adolescents was investigated. In Study 1, an alternate approach to classification, latent profile analysis (LPA), was used to empirically identify mental health subtypes of high school students as well as to examine the relation of mental health profiles identified in Grades 9 through 11 with Grade 12 indicators of academic and social-emotional well-being. Results yielded four mental health subtypes: complete mental health, moderately mentally healthy, symptomatic but content, and troubled. Students with profiles characteristic of higher levels of well-being and lower levels of distress reported higher grades, prosocial contribution to community, and life satisfaction, and less frequent symptoms of anxiety and depression, illustrating the validity of the LPA approach. In Study 2, the longitudinal stability of empirically-identified dual-factor mental health profiles was examined across Grades 9 to 12 using two cohorts of students. Similar to Study 1, LPA was used to empirically identify mental health profiles. Latent transition analysis (LTA) was then used to examine the stability of emerging profiles over the four academic years. An LTA model assuming full measurement invariance, non-stationary transitions, and controlling for cohort indicated that the complete mental health profile exhibited the greatest average stability followed by moderately mentally healthy and symptomatic but content profiles. The troubled profile exhibited the least stability. Taken together, the findings from both studies support further investigation of methods used to classify students mental health in school settings as well as regular monitoring of students’ dual-factor mental health (e.g., through universal screening) so as to accurately inform mental health promotion, prevention, and intervention efforts.

Scholars of early modern literature often consider allegory inherently idealist, particularly in its exploitation of visual description, which, they argue, produces a spurious vividness that tries to pass off the schematic and the ideal as natural. Critics who subscribe to this view often celebrate Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590/96) as both a pinnacle of the genre and a skeptical anatomy of it—a great allegory that is great because it exposes allegory's illusions. As the argument goes, Spenser reveals the false visuality at the heart of allegory by complicating his imagery with naturalistic description. By turning allegorical images against themselves, the poem prevents allegory from subordinating the world of matter and appearances to a timeless conceptual order.

This dissertation, Allegory and the Art of Memory, offers an alternative framework for understanding allegory's visuality and Spenser's use of it: the mental visualization techniques of the classical and medieval memory arts. Because these mnemonic methods draw mental imagery into the service of memorizing words and ideas, they too have been accused of visual bad faith, but recent scholarship has excavated the practical and philosophical contexts in which these methods were used, and this visual regime gives us a new way to think about allegorical imagery as well. I argue that in adapting the memory arts to narrative poetry, medieval allegorists did not aspire to impress an idealist image of cosmic harmony upon the empirical world but to lead readers through a voluntary and collaborative process of composing meditative imagery.

In the following pages, I analyze three pre-Spenserian allegorical poems particularly engaged with the theory and practice of memory: Guillaume de Deguileville's Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine (1330-32), Olivier de la Marche's Le Chevalier Délibéré (1483), and Stephan Batman's loose adaptation of Le Chevalier Délibéré into The Trauayled Pylgrime (1569). I use these analyses to illuminate crucial episodes of The Faerie Queene to show that, rather than revealing the fissures in the earlier poems' methods, The Faerie Queene continues their project by adapting allegory to the transformed media environment of sixteenth-century England, where the visual mnemonics of the memory arts had mostly been discarded. The pre-Spenserian poems I analyze borrow formal elements from mnemonic techniques while critically evaluating the practices and the role of memory in human life. The Faerie Queene, I argue, follows their trajectory into the age of print. Whereas the older poems treat their imagery as a script for composing mental images, Spenser uses the formal tropes of the memory arts—image (imago), place (locus), and order (ordo)—to represent memory-processes, not just of the individual but of an entire culture, a collective record that is both analogous to memory and radically unaccommodating to the human mind.

The development of social and emotional skills is crucial to students’ academic and life success and can be fostered through the use of social and emotional learning (SEL) programming (Durlak et al., 2011). When implemented universally, SEL can serve as a preventative public health approach to improve social, emotional, and academic outcomes within school settings (Durlak et al., 2011; Greenberg et al., 2017). A current challenge to the effectiveness of SEL is the limited availability of culturally adapted curricula for racially and ethnically minoritized (REM) youth (Castro-Olivo, 2014; Jagers et al., 2019). As part of a culturally responsive approach to SEL, modifications can be made to standard SEL programming to increase its cultural relevance for REM youth and promote educational equity (Castro-Olivo, 2014; Jagers et al., 2019). Yet, little is known about how educators are making SEL more culturally relevant (Li et al., 2023; Meland & Brion-Meisels, 2024). This study employs an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research (MMR) design to (1) investigate current SEL implementation practices in elementary schools, (2) identify the nature and goals of modifications made when implementing SEL, and (3) assess the relationship between educators’ multicultural attitudes and modification. Findings from this research can be used to assess whether culturally responsive SEL practices are being enacted across school settings and may provide insight into the types of modifications being made to better support REM students’ social and emotional development.

Self-regulation is a multidimensional set of skills critical for providing students the foundation for goal-based, self-controlled behavior. These skills are a predictor of students’ academic success and behavioral, social, and emotional well-being. A wealth of research has been dedicated to implementation of evidence-based interventions targeting students’ self-regulation, particularly for students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) whom teachers often report are more stressful to teach. Lack of knowledge about ADHD, low self-efficacy in supporting students with ADHD, and negative student-teacher relationships have been found to contribute to teacher stress. However, there remains a need to address whether teacher factors (e.g., knowledge about ADHD, experience working with students with ADHD) influence the effectiveness of interventions targeting ADHD symptoms. This dissertation is composed of two studies that aimed to examine the teacher-level factors salient for improving school-based interventions designed for students with ADHD. The first study used a small scale, in-depth systematic literature review to investigate intervention studies that concurrently measured student outcomes and teacher-level factors to elucidate teacher-level barriers and facilitators of each of the interventions. The second study evaluated the effectiveness of a teacher training designed to improve pre-service teacher knowledge about ADHD and self-efficacy in their ability to support students with ADHD. Recommendations are made for future directions in school-based ADHD intervention research and implications are discussed for educators and school psychological practice.