Studies in Gravity and Supergravity.

The canonical treatment for theories with local gauge invariances is reviewed and we find an algorithm for the construction of all the gauge generators. This algorithm is then applied to Yang-Mills theories and to (metric) gravity. We conclude the first part of this work with a complete treatment of hamiltonian first order tetrad gravity. In the second part we concentrate on the geometrical aspects of (super)gravity theories. After an interlude with path integrals in curved space (we show equivalence with canonical quantization), we study N = 2 supergravity in superspace, and conformal supergravity in the group manifold scenario. A progress report is added, regarding a study on higher divergences in quantum field theory.