Publications & Presentations

Property Laws, White Settler Power and the Kingdom of Hawai`i (2022, SUHJ)

Published paper in the Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal, Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2022). This paper analyzes Hawai’ian property laws in the 19th century and how they ultimately contributed to European planter power and the eventual annexation of the islands. This work examines how these laws led to environmental degradation and Western monopoly of land rights and subsequent Native Hawai’ian impoverishment, a growing settler influence on the government and the eventual overthrow of the Native-led government.

Is the SEC Effective at Preventing Illegal Behavior? (2022, Tri-Co Law Review)

Published paper in the Tri-Co Law Review, Volume 1, Issue 1 (Winter 2021). This paper uses the framework of Criminal Deterrence Theory to argue that the Securities & Exchange Commission is not entirely effective at preventing illegal and anti-competitive behavior in debt, equity and derivative markets due to the high legal costs of prosecution and internal pressure to focus on easily winnable cases, leading to increased focus on penalizing unsophisticated fraudsters.

Syntax & Semantics of Valency-Changing Operations in Wamesa

Senior year thesis for the Swarthmore College Department of Linguistics under the supervision of Ted Fernald. This thesis focuses on unusual word order alternations in Wamesa, an Austronesian language spoken in West Papua, and how these alternations may be due to a complex series of interactions between semantic properties of valency-changing applications in the language and topic-first word order. 

Kyrgyz Encodes Non-Confirmativity in its Past-Tense Paradigm (2021 poster presentation & associated text with Jonathan Washington and Tolgonay Kubatova)

This is a poster presentation and associated text for the 20th International Conference on the Turkish Language and the Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on the Turkish Language. This paper and presentation argues that in Kyrgyz, a Turkic language spoken in Central Asia, the various past finite tenses of a verb can be semantically distinguished not on the basis of strict evidentiality, but rather on temporal distance and non-confirmativity, a related category. In this paper, a survey of Kyrgyz literature was conducted to determine how different verb forms were used and the impact these had on the semantic and pragmatic interpretations of the language. For more information, please contact me at martinrakow@gmail.com.

Elegy for Thermodynamics (2019, e-book)

This self-published work is a science-fiction space opera on the inevitability of entropic decay and also the absurdism of the arrow of time. For more information, please contact me at martinrakow@gmail.com.