Abramovich, Corti and Vistoli have studied modular compactifications of stacks of curves equipped with abelian level structures arising as substacks of the stack of twisted stable maps into the classifying stack of a finite group, provided the order of the group is invertible on the base scheme. Recently Abramovich, Olsson and Vistoli extended the notion of twisted stable maps to allow arbitrary base schemes, where the target is a tame stack, not necessarily Deligne-Mumford.

In this dissertation, we use this extended notion of twisted stable maps to extend the results of Abramovich, Corti and Vistoli to the case of elliptic curves with level structures over arbitrary base schemes. We prove that we recover the compactified Katz-Mazur regular models, with a natural moduli interpretation in terms of level structures on Picard schemes of twisted curves. Additionally, we study the interactions of the different such moduli stacks contained in a stack of twisted stable maps in characteristics dividing the level.

In extended readings of Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, and Ted Hughes, Lyric Spaces troubles the formal resemblance between the lyric ‘I’ and the autobiographical ‘I’ in autobiographical poetry written after the Second World War. I argue that while a work like Robert Lowell’s Life Studies announces itself as being drawn from the poet’s own life, the poems themselves frequently critique and ironize that connection. My project’s first goal is to conceptualize these critiques and ironies as what I call self-forgetful autobiography—a reticent, distanced mode of writing a self that is as attentive to writing’s limitations as it is to its possibilities. For Lowell, this mode is visible in his simultaneous, yet divergent, concern for poetic authenticity and factual accuracy in Life Studies; for Heaney, it appears as the desire in Death of a Naturalist to be both autobiographical and anonymous; for Bishop, it emerges through efforts of recollection that critique the very possibility of writing about memory; for Hughes, it is legible in Moortown Diary in the struggle to assert poetry’s personal, mnemonic valences over its more impersonal, aesthetic qualities. For all of these poets, resisting the direct equation of speaker and poet turns on the multiple spaces of poetic experience that stems from the use of a subgenre whose use they have in common: the past tense lyric.

Indeed, my project’s second goal is to theorize this little-discussed past tense, first person lyric in an attempt to overturn critical assumptions about lyric as a fundamentally present tense genre. To be sure, the vast majority of lyric poems are anchored in the present, but if twenty-five percent of the poems in Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist are wholly in the past tense, that emphasis on the present needs to be refocused to note the poems’ emphasis on the events they present rather than their relevance to the speaker’s present. These past tense poems carve out separate spaces of experience by dividing the figure of the speaker into two positions: one who participates in the events that the poem describes, and another who readers might infer is responsible for generating the poem’s language. By separating these two figures, Heaney and these other poets reshape what seem to be poems of personal experience into recitations of events that are unconnected to the life of either the narrating speaker or the poet. My treatment of this separation as a rhetorical choice rather than a mere happenstance of storytelling reveals a deliberate distancing between these two figures, reigniting the longstanding debate about whether a lyric ‘I’ is also an autobiographical ‘I.’ In light of these formal interventions, poetic autobiography becomes a poetics of caveats and loopholes, of both greater intimacy and greater irony than it initially seems. A recognition of this sophisticated dialectic of self-exposure and self-concealment reformulates this poetry’s naïve retention of Romantic subjecthood as, instead, a form of postmodern play with subjectivity of the type that comes to define the work of Ashbery, Muldoon, and others in this period. By illustrating the ways in which these poets push the boundaries of genre to their breaking point, my formalist approach to these highly canonical works offers another way to take up New Lyric Studies’ historicist challenge to redefine our notions of the lyric genre.

Agriculture is the largest human use of water in California, which gives farmers a critical role in managing water to meet the goals of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). To explore farmers' perspectives on SGMA, we held focus groups with 20 farmers in Yolo County, where the groundwater basin has been given a high/medium priority under SGMA. The farmers had varying perspectives about the factors that led to SGMA and varying responses to the regulation. They suggested that drought, competing agricultural and urban uses, and an increase in perennial crops were factors in recent water use, resulting in changes to water quality and quantity. Impacts of those changes included variable well levels, increased infrastructure costs, and ecosystem impacts, which farmers had responded to by implementing multiple management strategies. Additional research in other regions is imperative to provide farmers' viewpoints and strategies to policymakers, irrigation districts, farmer cooperatives, and the agricultural industry and give farmers a voice at the table.

This dissertation focuses on Jeanne Wier and the years she was active in shaping the Nevada Historical Society (NHS), 1904-1950. It is the story of the institution as it unfolded over four decades, but more broadly, it considers how Wier shaped what Amanda Laugesen has framed as the idea of "public historical culture" in the state of Nevada. This culture not only included the collection of documents and books to provide a basis for research, but also the collection of relics for a museum that sought to be a showplace of Nevada's history for her citizens. It includes the means by which the NHS performed outreach to make Nevada's history a viable part of the community through anniversaries and celebrations and its efforts at preserving historic sites. The study considers the tension that arose in Wier's attempts to have the NHS fulfill these different roles and the challenges that she faced in obtaining financial, governmental and community support for the institution. An important consideration of the dissertation is its evaluation of how successful Wier was in achieving the goals of the NHS regarding its mission of developing a historical consciousness within the state and its citizenry. In defining success, the study considers the general volume and frequency of collection donations to the Society as well as the research it supported and the historical papers it published. When possible, the study considers quantitative data such the number of patrons that visited the Society, the number of people attending events and lectures, and the amount of financial support obtained from the legislature and via private funding. Moving beyond numbers, an assessment of her legacy at the NHS must also consider the collections she gathered over the years. Questions of collecting focus and in particular, an exploration of whose history was collected also form part of the study.

This thesis is a look at the life and career of Miriam Matthews. In 1927, Miriam Matthews became the first credentialed African American librarian in California, and the first to be hired by the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL). After realizing how few resources LAPL held on black history, she began collecting books, clippings, and other materials on the subject. Later, Matthews was also active within the California Library Association (CLA) and American Library Association (ALA). She served as both a member and the chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committees within CLA, helping to organize CLA's fight against censorship in California. From 1949 until her retirement in 1960, Matthews acted as regional librarian for LAPL, supervising twelve branch libraries in LAPL's South Central region. After her retirement, she led efforts to document the black experience in the West. Matthews was an important trailblazer for black librarians in California, and an effective advocate for all users of public libraries in the state and nationally.

Fear of public speaking is common and can cause significant impairment in work and educational functioning. Exposure is an effective treatment for public speaking anxiety but approximately half of participants fail to respond fully and are in need of additional strategies. Functional neuroimaging, psychophysiology, and behavioral data provide evidence that affect labeling (labeling one’s emotional experience) is a promising approach for enhancing emotion regulation, and evidence from spider fearful subjects suggests that combining exposure with affect labeling may enhance long-term fear reduction. The aim of the current project was to build on existing research by examining whether affect labeling enhances the efficacy of exposure in participants with public speaking anxiety. Participants were randomly assigned to exposure with or without affect labeling. Physiological arousal, self-reported fear, and avoidance behavior were assessed before and after exposure and were compared between the two groups. Consistent with hypotheses, participants assigned to the affect labeling group showed greater reduction in physiological activation following exposure than did participants in the Control group. Participants who used more labels during exposure showed greater reductions on physiological measures. Hypotheses were not supported for self-report measures on which participants in the affect labeling group showed less benefit than did participants in the control group. Greater incidental emotion regulation deficits at baseline predicted more benefit from exposure combined with affect labeling than from exposure alone. The current research supports the theory that affect labeling can enhance exposure effectiveness for physiological measures of anxiety. These findings provide further evidence that targeting prefrontal-amygdala circuitry in anxiety patients using tasks that activate key regions involved in emotion regulation can improve treatment effectiveness, and that such interventions will be particularly effective for patients who show the greatest incidental emotion regulation deficits.