Cary Wolfe says, “It is crucial to pay critical attention to the discourse of animality quite irrespective of the issue of how nonhuman animals are treated… because the discourse of animality has historically served as a crucial strategy in the oppression of humans by other humans—a strategy whose legitimacy and force depend, however, on the prior taking for granted of the traditional ontological distinction, and consequent ethical divide, between human and nonhuman animals. … Even though the discourse of animality and species difference may theoretically be applied to an other of whatever type, the consequences of that discourse, in institutional terms, fall overwhelmingly on nonhuman animals” (Zoontologies, 2003: xx).

The Central Himalayas are among the most ecologically abundant and historicallyvenerated landscapes of South Asia. This dissertation studies the cultural politics of place-making in the Central Himalayan regions of Kumaun and Garhwal from the late eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. After the region was annexed by the East India Company in 1815, the mountain landscape was recursively mapped, surveilled, demarcated, and appropriated for colonial revenue and resource extraction. Unequal relations between the mountains and the subcontinental plains intensified as a consequence, at the expense of historic trade relations across the Central and trans-Himalayas. From the nineteenth century onwards, an ever-widening number of travelers, officials, timber merchants, sportsmen, pilgrims, Ayurvedic medical practitioners, and settlers from both the colony and the metropole were also drawn to the Central Himalayas. I examine the complementary and conflicting ways in which mountain landscapes were framed, refashioned, represented, and brought into cultural circulation by English travelers and officials, as well as by Indian elites who attempted to subvert colonial hegemony.

Drawing upon Sanskrit, Hindi, and English sources from archives in Delhi, Uttarakhand,and London, I chart the ways in which the Himalayas loomed over the geographical imagination of India under colonial rule. I argue that modern imaginaries of the Central Himalayas as an ideal site for improvement, pilgrimage, and healing reinforced ‘upper’ caste hegemony, racial regimes of property, and the bureaucratic elision of caste and gender specific labor from the mountain ‘commons.’ In the nineteenth century, just as racial logics of the sublime legitimated colonial authority over the people and places of the Himalayas, secular conceptions of agency as the absence of pain undergirded infrastructural ‘improvements’ that routinized class and caste-based hierarchies in Himalayan pilgrimages. While the Central Himalayan landscape had been shaped by agrarian slavery and unequal access to land prior to colonial rule, the late colonial enclosure of the mountain commons exacerbated systems of social exclusion. I follow the unexpected trajectories of colonial spatial enclosures as they were reworked by anti-caste activists and actively adopted by Indian elites who commodified associations between the Himalayas and healing in the early twentieth century.

This dissertation probes three issues of current interest in environmental and agricultural economics. The first paper provides an in-depth analysis of sedimentation management issue in large reservoirs. The paper provides a new model of sedimentation management and conditional on assumed primitives of the model, analyses different scenarios under which sedimentation removal may increase or decrease. The paper also provides insights on how temperature fluctuation, increased sedimentation arrival in the reservoir and change in the perception of large reservoirs among the public may affect the sustainability and management of the large reservoir. The second paper looks at the data from the Latin American countries to search for the presence of Environmental Kuznets Curve(EKC) in Latin America. The paper is also one of the earliest papers to use forestry data and semiparametric approach in finding EKC. The paper finds no evidence of EKC in Latin America as a whole, and in general finds that EKC is sensitive to the region of choice. The third paper carries out an an empirical investigation to test for the convergence of total factor productivity(TFP) of agricultural sector in the United States. The investigation does not find any evidence of convergence while looking at the U.S. state-level agricultural TFP at the aggregate level. However, it finds support for convergence within some of the clusters or within some of the regions. The paper takes a new approach in grouping states, which makes it different from other papers where ad hoc grouping of states was done. In this paper, such approach is abandoned in favor of a cluster analysis approach that relies on data to form "clusters". Cluster analysis approach finds that convergence in the regional level (cluster) does not improve significantly compared to the findings by a wellknown previously published study which didn't use cluster analysis approach .

The semiconductor industry is fast approaching the fundamental scaling limit of conventional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices. This has spurred numerous exploratory researches in the last decade, on technologies that can sustain Moore's law and eventually replace CMOS based devices. One such magnonics based, beyond CMOS device is called the spin wave device. A spin wave device is a low power magnetic logic device that uses a propagating wave of precessional spins, called a spin wave, to perform computations. Traditionally, spin waves have been generated using energetically inefficient, inductively coupled antennas. In order to attain atto-joule energy per operation, which is substantially lower than that of the current generation of CMOS devices, we propose and demonstrate a novel method of spin wave generation using the strain mediated magneto electric effect. We have conducted extensive experimental and numerical studies to design, engineer and fabricate such nano scale spin wave devices. These devices could in effect outperform and eventually replace the CMOS based logic devices.

Traditional plasma systems typically operate at low pressures and centimeter scale reactors. However, during the last decade or so, there is an active interest in the downscaling of devices and plasmas are no exception. Because of the popular pd (pressure times gap size) scaling, such plasmas have to operate at or near atmospheric pressure and are referred to as microplasmas or microdischarges. While downscaling the plasma device, field emission of electrons and their interaction with micro discharge due to high electric fields has shown to affect both pre-and post-breakdown operation of these discharge. In this context, we present computational data for the ionization coefficient (α) at high electric fields. A zero-dimensional Monte Carlo code is used to determine the variation of α as a function of electric field for various gases to use in device-level models. Results are also presented for the dependence of alpha (α) in a spatially varying electric field. While alpha (α) represents the volume process in a discharge, the most important surface process in microdischarge is field emission which is characterized by the field enhancement factor (β). Comparison of experimental data with theoretical data for argon, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and dry air are presented to predict an inverse dependence of βeff on electric field.

Finally, device-level models are also formulated for the post-breakdown operation of field emission assisted microdischarges as motivated by novel cathodes with excellent field emission properties. In this context we present a non-linear sheath model for direct current field emitted assisted microdischarges. The main focus of this work is to develop a self-consistent sheath model that includes the effects of field induced electron emission without assuming a linear electric field. The results obtained from the non-linear sheath model for various parameters including current-voltage characteristics, and current density profiles of ion/electro are validated with PIC/MCC simulation of an argon microdicharge.