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Item Embargo Characterization and cooperative dynamics of kinesin motor proteins in intracellular transport(Temple University. Libraries, 2026-05)Intracellular transport is typically carried out by teams of motor proteins rather than by isolated molecules, yet the rules governing multi-motor coordination remain poorly understood because motor number, spacing, and composition are difficult to control experimentally. In this dissertation, I developed both the molecular engineering and nanostructural framework needed to address this problem. I designed a modular plasmid toolkit for controlled kinesin expression and purification, and I created a novel DNA origami scaffold that allows motors to be positioned with defined stoichiometry and geometry on a rigid cargo-like platform. Together, these advances provided a programmable experimental system for dissecting how kinesin-1 ensembles and mixed kinesin-1/kinesin-14 assemblies behave under well-defined structural conditions.Using this platform, I found that motor valency strongly enhances attachment persistence and transport robustness, but that the magnitude and interpretation of this effect depend on nucleotide state and ensemble architecture. In weak-binding ADP conditions, increasing kinesin-1 copy number strongly stabilized microtubule association, revealing that additional motors provide a disproportionate rescue benefit in vulnerable binding regimes. In ATP, processivity increased with motor number while velocity changed comparatively little, but the motor-number dependence was more geometry- and preprocessing-sensitive, motivating statistical and modeling analysis. Direct mean-field modeling captured the ADP results reasonably well but proved fragile for ATP, whereas a microstate continuous-time Markov chain model with a global attachment scale regularized this instability and supported an ensemble-rescue interpretation. Finally, introducing antagonistic kinesin-14 reduced kinesin-1-driven transport and produced tunable mixed-motor behavior, showing that this engineered platform can reveal how motor copy number, geometry, and opposition collectively regulate cargo transport. These findings have broader significance for understanding transport defects in neurodegenerative and other trafficking-related diseases, where failures in motor coordination and cargo delivery can have major cellular consequences. More broadly, the ability to engineer and quantitatively tune multi-motor assemblies may inform future bioengineering efforts in nanoscale transport design, including programmable cargo handling and motor-based drug delivery systems.Item Open Access Erick Hawkins and the development of a dance avant-garde in the United States(Temple University. Libraries, 2026-05)This dissertation presents historical research on the prominent American dancer and choreographer, Erick Hawkins (1909-1994), who was overshadowed by some of the great figures he worked with, notably George Balanchine and Martha Graham. My research is based on new archival documents that were recently made available at the Library of Congress. In 2018, The Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski Collection housed at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., received a donation of newly discovered boxes containing historical records, personal papers and other significant artifacts of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. As one of the first scholars to have thoroughly researched these new papers, as well as Hawkins’s personal diaries and choreographic notebooks, compiled critical reviews, studied the video recordings, and analyzed photographic artifacts, while also incorporating contemporaneous critical theory, I argue his significance in the history of American dance in general and American modernism more particularly. Each chapter examines a major turning point in Hawkins’s career from his academic studies at Harvard where he joined an emerging generation of American modernists such as Lincoln Kirstein, Alfred Barr, and others, to his career as a classical ballet dancer under George Balanchine, his friendship with Lincoln Kirstein, and his personal and professional partnership with Martha Graham whom he married. Hawkins contributed to the shaping of Popular Front ballet through experimentation, trial, and error. While working as a neophyte choreographer in the 1930s, he experimented with ballet theater and vaudeville, melding together the classical and the popular, as he carved out a place for dance within the cultural front. I follow his development as a ballet choreographer through the works Kirstein commissioned for Ballet Caravan, namely Show Piece (1937). In the field of modern dance, he produced an abolitionist choreographic work titled John Brown. Hawkins’s John Brown (1945) is one of the most politically complex yet misunderstood works of modern dance. For Hawkins, “the Black freedom struggle” became the focus of his work, and the danced role of John Brown was his response to the persistent racial hate and discrimination found in the United States. Finally, in his independent work of the 1950s, I show how Hawkins worked in and through a classic ideal of what beauty meant to him as he progressed into the avant-garde exploring concepts such as sensation, stillness and the vibratory towards the development of new choreographic ideas and a dance training system grounded in a study of anatomy, kinesiology, and philosophy. I link his concept of violent clarity, a philosophical ideal of being and becoming that resonates with today’s somatic dance education field, to Henri Bergson’s notion of élan vital, which Hawkins encountered by way of Alfred North Whitehead and Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrop at Harvard. My primary source research and personal training in the Hawkins technique inform this dissertation as the first thorough, scholarly study of his “Normative Dance Theory.” I reveal how Hawkins’s deeply philosophical dance theory remains rooted in somatic subjective experience in ways that continue to influence dance education and training in the United States.Item Embargo Beyond resistance: aesthetics and politics of Chinese independent choreography(Temple University. Libraries, 2026-05)Beyond Resistance: Aesthetics and Politics of Chinese Independent Choreography reconceptualizes independent choreography within China’s postsocialist political and cultural context. Challenging the dominant trope that tethers artistic independence with political resistance to the state, this dissertation argues that such a framework, shaped by liberalist assumptions, obscures the complex institutional, economic, and affective conditions under which contemporary Chinese dance is produced. Instead of treating independence as a fixed oppositional stance, this study approaches it as a contingent relational and processual practice that unfolds through ongoing negotiation across institutional and extra-institutional spaces.Drawing on historical analysis, infrastructural analysis, close choreographic readings, and ethnographic fieldwork, the dissertation examines how aesthetic conventions, funding mechanisms, labor structures, and social relations shape independent choreographic practice. Chapter One destabilizes prevailing assumptions about Chinese concert dance by demonstrating that realism, often read as a monolithic vehicle of state ideology, has been plural, adaptive, and historically contingent. Chapter Two analyzes the political economy of independent choreography through major national funding platforms, showing how state-supported infrastructures simultaneously cultivate aesthetic norms and intensify precarity, producing what I term a “celebrated precariat.” The final two chapters turn to choreographers’ situated practices, examining how artists navigate institutional ambiguity, relational labor, and postsocialist contradictions. Through case studies of Lv Zimin, Gu Jiani, and Yang Zhen, the dissertation theorizes social relational practices of “guarded improvisation” and aesthetic strategies that mobilize and reconfigure ambiguity, affect, and artistic and social capital to render precarity sensorially legible without resolving it into overt opposition. By foregrounding labor, affect, and institutional negotiation as integral to choreography, this dissertation expands choreographic analysis beyond performance and contributes to Chinese dance studies by offering a more nuanced account of independence as simultaneously choreographed and contingent, agentive while constrained. In doing so, it reframes the politics of contemporary Chinese choreography beyond the binary of resistance and compliance, revealing independence as a dynamic practice shaped by the very conditions of postsocialist cultural life.Item Open Access A grounded theory of secondary school music teacher resilience(Temple University. Libraries, 2026-05)Teacher attrition, the phenomenon of teachers leaving the classroom, has been an ongoing challenge for schools and districts since the 1980s (Hanushek, 2007; Ingersoll, 2002; Sutcher et al., 2016). One reason why teachers leave the classroom is the experience of burnout (e.g., Bernhard, 2016; Gardner, 2010). Secondary school music teachers may be at a particular risk for burnout due to additional extracurricular expectations and pressure to maintain high performance levels (e.g., Robinson, 2010; Shaw, 2014). Developing resilience may help music teachers to persist amid challenges, reduce the risk of burnout, and support teachers’ continued engagement in the music education profession (e.g., Beltman et al., 2011; Mansfield et al., 2016). The purpose of this grounded theory was to describe the process of developing career resilience for secondary school music educators in the Mid-Atlantic United States. The research questions guiding this study were: (a) what significant experiences and relationships do participants cite that have contributed to continuing their secondary school music teaching position? (b) what activities and interactions do participants consider to be supportive of their career resilience? (c) what personal traits and contextual (teaching environment) factors support the career resilience of secondary music teachers? and (d) what benefits and challenges do participants cite related to their continued engagement as educators? Following Charmaz’ (2025) constructivist grounded theory approach, primary data sources were initial and follow-up interviews with long-time music teachers identified by reputation and snowball sampling. Concurrent with data gathering, I analyzed the interview data in an emergent, ongoing process. I used idea-by-idea open coding to identify key processes from the data. I proceeded with focused coding, arranging data into categories. In follow-up interviews, I engaged the participants in co-construction of the emerging theory, inviting them to add nuance and suggestions about what may have been missing among the emerging categories (Gibson & Hartman, 2014). The resulting theory represented the development process of secondary school music teacher resilience. Implications from this study include the importance of music teachers finding a good fit in a position that aligns with their pedagogical values, prioritizing vibrant personal lives, attending professional conferences and seeking to develop a humanizing perspective. School administrators and districts can support music teacher resilience by encouraging and funding conference attendance and establishing school cultures that support work-life boundaries and robust personal lives of teachers. Supporting music teacher resilience can make secondary school music teaching a more sustainable career and reduce the prevalence of teacher attrition.Item Embargo She ain't no mammy: African American midwives' utilization of Ma'at in the preservation and continuation of African epistemology(Temple University. Libraries, 2026-05)This dissertation takes a historiographical-Afronographic approach, examining the African American midwife from her forced placement on Southern plantations in the United States to the present day. These midwives were gatekeepers of a rich cultural tradition grounded in an African matriarchal episteme. There is a long history of debasement of the African women’s body built on a false racial hierarchy where Black women were at the bottom, the lowest tier of society. She has had to endure unimaginable horrors within the confines of a racist, patriarchal society that was antithetical to the preservation of African spirit and culture. Black midwives were able to tap into a deep ancestral epistemological collective, granting access to birthing knowledge that had been maintained and preserved for thousands of years. The survival of this knowledge depended on the midwife’s adaptability to a foreign environment that did not share African cultural values of respect for women and mothering. Many have written on the medicalization of childbirth in the United States and the disappearance of Grand Black midwives. This work aims to show that the legacy of the Grand Black midwives lives on in contemporary Black midwives and in their continuity of African cultural birthing traditions, despite attacks to destroy their reputability as healers.