VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Visible Histories: Print Culture and the Reproducible Past in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Keywords: print culture
reading
spectatorship
the novel
the past
visual culture

Ghosts, resemblances, ruins, paintings, and other visual phenomena in nineteenth-century British novels often illustrate the otherwise invisible past. As new media technologies expanded the mass production of images during the nineteenth century, representing earlier time as visible helped novelists to affirm its reality, power, and difference from the present. Distinguishing between the past (prior time) and history (the representation of the past), this project relates historical apparitions in novels by Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde to contemporaneous print media, including illustration, print series, and photography. Against the backdrop of modernizing shifts in popular visual culture, these novelists depict the past as a realm of precarious reality that fiction can uphold, query, or verify by portraying it as a visible reproduction. Their novels disclose bygone events by making them available to sight in images, appearances, and serial variations between bodies that often combine biological and mechanical reproduction, thereby enlarging print-culture notions of reproducibility. These texts make readers, usually already viewers of printed pages, into spectators of fictional worlds by obliging them to agree that narrated histories can be seen. Moments when prior epochs appear before the eyes of fictional characters offer insight into values placed on memory, visual representation, and reproduction. Intimations of former eras in these novels frequently transpire as sights of landscape and so position anterior time as another distant territory that nineteenth-century British expansionism yearned to access. The mnemonic displays in these novels inherit traditions of supernatural fiction and often stand in for fictional ghosts, even as they link print media to spectrality. The physical book itself manifests the haunting presence of earlier worlds and so represents an important symbol of visible history throughout this study. Chapters of the dissertation explore how fictional sights of reproduced time illuminate notions of illustration, Darwin's evolutionary theory, British interests in Palestine, and concepts of mimesis in graphic representation. This interdisciplinary work of literary criticism thus situates the nineteenth-century novel in modern visual culture by examining fictional spectacles in relation to historical spectatorships, tourism, the prehistory of cinema, and the displays of print culture.
Fully Integrated Wireless Power Transfer System For Biomedical Applications
Keywords: energy harvesting
Inductive coupling
integrated CMOS coil
near-field
Regulator
Wireless power transfer

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is commonly realized by means of near-field inductive coupling and is critical to many applications. It is highly desirable to fully integrate the receiver coil (Rx) and power shaping circuits on a single chip in a standard CMOS process with no additional post-processing steps or external components. This thesis investigates the feasibility of a fully integrated WPT system that is capable of wirelessly providing milliwatts of power at centimeter distances. We present a closed form analytical solution for the optimum load that achieves the maximum possible power efficiency under arbitrary input impedance conditions based on the general two-port parameters of the network. Our results generalize several well-known special cases. The formulation allows the design of an optimized WPT link through biological media using readily available electromagnetic (EM) simulation software and effectively decouples the design of the inductive coupling two-port from the problem of loading and power amplifier design. As a proof of concept, we present a 2x2.18mm2 on-chip coil with proper power shaping blocks such as a rectifier, and a regulator in addition to an adaptive matching network, which are co-integrated on a single die in a 0.13um CMOS process. The receiver is separated from the transmitter (Tx) by 10mm of biological media. The on-chip coil demonstrates a peak WPT efficiency of 1.42% in air, 0.97% efficiency while receiving power through a combined 7mm of 0.2 molar NaCl (with similar conductivity and permittivity as blood) and 3mm of air, and 0.8% of efficiency through a combined 7.5mm of bovine muscle and 2.5mm of air. Fully integrating the receiver coil introduces new challenges and opportunities that led to new circuit innovations in each power shaping block. The adaptation block employs a synchronous sampling scheme and provides the optimum susceptance on the basis of the mathematical derivations for the optimum load. The rectifier demonstrates an efficiency of 80% and uses a positive feedback structure to avoid plasma-induced gate-oxide damage caused by the on-chip coil. Finally the integrated regulator employs an auxiliary rectifier to provide better than 24dB of power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) over all frequencies with a low quiescent current of 6uA and no off-chip components.
Imagining Bombay: the Literary Representations of a Postcolonial City
Keywords: Bombay
India
Postcolonial
Rohinton Mistry
Salman Rushdie
Vikram Chandra

This dissertation analyses Bombay novels written in English that construct the city through the narrative manipulation of time, space, and memory. I argue that these imaginative (re)constructions of the city emphasize the limitations of narrative agency as well as the multiplicity and competition between narratives that comprise Bombay's identity. In the first chapter, I contend that the hegemonic narratives of postcolonial nationalism, British colonialism, and Hindu fundamentalism are reductive rhetorical strategies that limit interpretations of Bombay novels to singular conceptions of the city. I argue that the novels by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, and Vikram Chandra reveal characters who actively struggle in different ways with the multiple and coexisting identity-narratives of Bombay that they encounter in their everyday lives. In Chapter Two, I argue that in Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet first-person narrators manipulate time, space, and memory from protected, private spaces in order to reclaim the endangered Bombay that is central to their individual identities. Chapter Three examines Mistry's Parsi characters in Such a Long Journey and Family Matters, who have almost no power to exercise narrative agency and, consequently, must negotiate by other means the overwhelming crush of identity narratives that impinge upon their private spaces. They attempt to change these narratives through ordinary actions in their everyday lives. In Chapter Four, I argue that Chandra's Sacred Games reveals how typically elided characters reinscribe themselves into Bombay's spaces. The novel uses the threat of nuclear holocaust and the intricate political and economic relationships between mob bosses and police to sensationalize, and so represent very explicitly, characters' engagements with hegemonic narratives. The versions of Bombay these novelists produce are at once nostalgic, utopian, and pessimistic, and my analysis provides a model for reading this city and these narratives in which characters struggle to make their voices heard amidst both the city's dense population and its crowd of stories.
Against Ulro: On the Creation of Poetic Space in the Work of Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik and Marosa di Giorgio
Keywords: Latin America
Literature
Poetry
Resistance
Southern Cone
Women Writers

Poetry is the language of subversion. It is a linguistic mode where rules are broken and foundations are shaken, where reality twists and changes its shape, where metaphors startle and confound us. Looking at the work of Southern Cone writers Delmira Agustini (1886-1914), Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) and Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004), this dissertation explores the ways in which poetry becomes a discourse of resistance. I argue that these writers, though traditionally considered apolitical, have created a discourse that is actually politically charged. Drawing extensively on literary theorist Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature, I argue that all three poets seek contact with a "space of knowledge" of an ultimate reality, refusing to abandon their quest even as it proves unrealizable. Through this search, all three poets subsequently create a "space of resistance" that subverts the epistemic structures of their social context. Whether or not these authors intended for their work to make a political statement lies beyond the scope of this investigation and, in my view, has little bearing on the outcome. Because the social structures in which they lived - technocracy and rational utilitarianism during Agustini's era and dictatorship in Pizarnik's and di Giorgio's - are inherently oppressive, the three poets' determination to go beyond them is indeed a political act.
Evaluating the Clinical and Immunological Correlates of Semen HIV-1 RNA Shedding
Keywords: antiretroviral
HIV
HIV RNA
human immunodeficiency virus
semen
semen shedding

Globally it is estimated that 35 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2012. Unprotected sexual transmission of HIV accounts for the majority of all new infections, with semen acting as a vector. HIV levels in blood of an HIV-infected individual is the best-defined predictor of transmission risk, however, as blood is not often a factor during sex, this association likely reflects the level of HIV RNA in semen. It has been shown that while blood viral load reaches a set point during chronic untreated infection, semen can remain highly variable. Factors responsible for this heterogeneity have not fully well characterized. Furthermore, while highly active antiretroviral therapy has been associated with suppression of blood and genital viral loads, some men continue to shed HIV in their semen, despite undetectable viremia, a phenomenon called isolated semen HIV RNA shedding (IHS). In my doctoral thesis I evaluated the impact of semen collection method on viral load measurements, correlations between antiretroviral therapy intensification and its effect on immune activation, viral load and IHS as well as factors contributing to semen viral load variability in drug naive men. Overall, I found that semen collected directly into transport medium had a large impact on the measurement of viral load, evidencing a 0.42log10 increase in viral load over neat collection. Initiation of intensified antiretroviral therapy was shown to decrease viral load in blood and semen faster than a standard regimen. Intensification, however, did not resolve the occurrence of ISH, nor did it reduce systemic immune activation faster then a conventional therapy. It was observed that men on longer durations of ART had no evidence of IHS, suggesting the phenomenon is transient and may resolve with longer duration of therapy. Finally I explored factors that may be linked to the variability seen in semen viral load in drug naive men. Of all parameters examined, the macrophage-associated cytokine IL-8 was the only factor independently predictive of semen viral load (aside from blood viral load) in longitudinal studies. This suggests IL-8 as a common pathway linking clinical causes of high semen HIV levels in therapy-naive men.
Covert Reminders: The Use of Distraction to Enhance Memory in Older Adults
Keywords: aging
attention
distraction
forgetting
memory

Aging is associated with difficulty down-regulating attention to distraction and increased forgetting in explicit memory tests. This thesis explored whether older adults' distractibility can counterintuitively boost memory when presentations of distraction provide an opportunity for memory-strengthening rehearsal between learning and a delayed memory test. Four studies used the same general procedure: Younger and older participants studied and recalled a list of words on an initial test and again on a surprise test following a 15-min delay. During the delay, participants completed a 1-back task in which half of the studied words appeared as distractors. The first two studies examined whether repeating studied words as distraction midway through (Study 1a) or at the end of a delay interval (Study 2) would reduce forgetting for older, but not younger adults, who previous research has shown can effectively ignore distraction. Studies 3a and 3b explored whether younger and older adults can retroactively take advantage of rehearsal opportunities presented as distraction when directly instructed about their relevance at retrieval. Finally, Study 4 explored whether positive and neutral moods, which are known to affect attentional control abilities, influence the costs and benefits of distraction as a rehearsal device in younger adults. Results indicated that repeating to-be-remembered words as distraction minimized (Study 1a) or eliminated (Studies 2, 3b) older adults' forgetting, consistently resulting in final recall that was equivalent to younger adults' recall. Repeating words as distraction did modulate younger adults' recall by increasing forgetting of unrepeated words when they were directly cued about the repetitions (Study 3a), and by increasing forgetting of repeated words under induced neutral moods (Study 4). Nonetheless, younger adults showed clear forgetting of repeated words across all experiments. These results demonstrate that distraction can serve as covert reminders for older adults, a finding with implications for the reduction of prevalent age differences in explicit memory performance.
Sex Under Intimate Siege: Transgender Lives, Law and State Violence in Contemporary Turkey
Keywords: Intimacy
Medicine and Law
Sexuality
State Violence
Transgender
Turkey

My doctoral research is about the production of marginalized sexualities through both the exercise of power and resistance to it. Focusing on legal codes and regulations surrounding sex reassignment surgeries (SRSs), sex work, hate crimes targeting trans people, and state officials' (juridical actors, police, doctors, forensic medicine people) legal and extralegal relations with trans people in Beyoglu, Istanbul, I scrutinize the transformation of trans lives into the microphysical domain of state power for the symbolic and material production of sexual and gender difference in Turkey. I also analyze how trans people respond to this process in their everyday lives. Starting with the queer history of Beyoglu, and trans people's everyday experiences of spatial discrimination, marginalization and displacement by the police, capital owners, landlords, and neighbors since the 1960s, I investigate how myriad forms of everyday violence shape trans people's political and intimate subjectivities. The construction and deployment of "transsexuality" as a medico-legal category is also part of this violent process. I elaborate on the work of this category to discuss how medico-legal actors of the state evaluate transsexuality, and hence, one's "true" sex, and open trans people's bodies to violent proximities and intimacies. Overall I argue that the categories of sex and gender are integral to the formation and intimate workings of Turkish state power as the state seeks to govern and regulate not only bodies and sexuality, but also subjects' intimate conducts and desires. The second part of my dissertation focuses on trans people's responses to these relations of violence, including the making of transgender community - a form of family and trans activism. In many cases, practices that are understood culturally as essential family duties (i.e. providing emotional and financial protection, caring for the body at death) are re-claimed by the trans community, replacing the assumed role of the family and announcing the community as "the real family." I discuss family as one of the most contested intimate sites in transgender people's lives, a site that is intimately intertwined with an ethics of care in the face of everyday violence. Arguably another expression of this ethics of care is trans activism in Istanbul. By looking at how trans people organize and mobilize around hate crimes, police violence and state control over SRSs, I scrutinize trans people's definitions of and struggle for queer justice in institutional spaces, as well as the street.
The Victorian Automaton: Technology, Agency, and Fiction
Keywords: Agency
Automaton
Subjectivity
Technology
Victorian culture
Victorian literature

This dissertation attends to the complex figure of the automaton in Victorian fiction. The metaphorical potency of this figure is based upon its conceptual instability; as either a machine that imitates the movements of a living being or a living being behaving mechanically, the automaton is an illusory, paradoxical entity that hyperbolizes the gap between what appears as autonomous movement and the obscure sources of that movement. This conceptual instability proves useful in nineteenth-century literary efforts to discover the nature of human agency in a world grown mechanically systematic and epistemologically opaque. At the heart of this investigation is the automaton as a textual phenomenon, an example of figurative language that thematizes the operation of narrative itself. By paying attention to the figurative work performed by the textual automaton, this dissertation complicates previous cultural and literary accounts that reduce the automaton to a symbol of technophobic anxiety centered upon the dehumanizing effects of industrial development. I explore a group of texts that instead evoke the technological register of the automaton to interrogate the manner in which human agency had been positioned as the foundation of existential meaning and knowledge of the world. In so doing, I supplement recent critical work on the relationship between technology and literary representation. I also contribute to discussions of how the Victorians conceptualized knowledge, particularly subjective knowledge of the human mind. Finally, I offer a new perspective on the way in which narrative mechanics encode a concern with agency on the levels of both form and content. In this study, the Victorian automaton emerges as an emblem of the volatile imaginative boundary between the categories of human and machine; as a textual tool for addressing the mechanisms that facilitate or limit subjective, scientific, political, and creative agency; and as a symbolic figure that short-circuits conceptual closure, narrative neatness, and efforts to establish certainties about the constitution of human being.
Is There a Responsibility to Protect in Disaster Relief, And Is It Needed?
Keywords: Humanitarian Crisis
International Cooperation
Natural Disaster
Relief Assistance
Responsibility to Protect
Sovereignty

This thesis examines whether the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) can be invoked, at international law, to compel a state to accept foreign humanitarian relief or aid in cases of humanitarian emergencies arising from natural disasters. Focusing on the 2008 Myanmar Cyclone, the thesis will do three things. First, it evaluates the normative development of R2P and its practice. Second, it addresses the core weakness of R2P arguments in favor of intervention in natural disasters in the light of skepticism from states and the problem of indeterminacy in R2P and how it could trigger criminal sanctions. Third, this thesis frames the argument that R2P is not applicable to natural disaster situations. It further argues that the most feasible approach to dealing with the needs of victims of natural disasters is through the diplomatic mechanism of international cooperation, which is premised on the well-developed, accepted principles of sovereignty and non-intervention.
Antibody-mediated Injury and Kidney Transplantation
Keywords: C4d
Histocompatibility
Panel reactive antibodies
Rejection
Transplantation
Transplant glomerulopathy

We evaluated aspects of the pathogenesis, diagnosis, and prognosis of antibody-mediated injury secondary to anti-human leaukocyte antigen (HLA) antibodies in kidney transplant recipients and candidates. In a nested case-control study from a cohort of adult kidney transplant recipients, we found an increase in the odds of transplant glomerulopathy, a finding on kidney transplant biopsies suggestive of chronic antibody-mediated rejection, as a function of structural donor and recipient HLA class II incompatibility. We also re-evaluated the diagnostic schema of acute antibody-mediated rejection, and found that C4d, a complement degradation product suggestive of antibody-mediated injury to kidney allografts, exhibited modest agreement and sensitivity against histopathological features of acute antibody-mediated rejection and donor-specific anti-HLA antibody (DSA) assays. Prognostically, C4d was associated with inferior allograft survival compared with DSA or histopathology alone. Finally, we conducted a retrospective cohort study using the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients and found that the breadth of sensitization against anti-HLA antigens, measured as panel reactive antibodies (PRA), was an independent predictor of mortality in wait-listed kidney transplant candidates. These findings underscore the importance of anti-HLA antibodies to the outcomes of kidney transplant recipients and candidates, and suggest that anti-HLA antibodies may give rise to complement dependent and complement independent phenotypes of antibody-mediated injury. Whether avoidance of structural HLA incompatibility between donors and kidney transplant candidates and minimization of immune sensitization in wait-listed patients will improve outcomes of kidney transplant candidates and recipients, warrants further study.