VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The “Metes and Bounds” of Manhood: Gender, Property, and Violence in Early Modern England
Keywords: early modern
gender
masculinity
property
space
violence

This dissertation explores the relationship between masculinity and domestic space in early modern England. It argues that property and the body were symbolically linked, and hegemonic masculinity was contingent upon the ability to protect and control both. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of strict legal, spatial, and sensory boundaries around property, as men began to more clearly demarcate what they possessed. But migration, urban development, and shared resources made the creation and enforcement of property boundaries difficult. In London, increased migration from within the British Isles and immigration from Europe led to unprecedented population growth, and these demographic changes were associated with overcrowding, poverty, and disease. In the congested city, Londoners lived cheek by jowl, and overlapping living spaces were a source of tension between neighbours. Similar anxieties existed in rural areas surrounding London, where neighbours fought over the enclosure of common land and access to declining natural resources, like animals and timber. Shared and adjoining properties created conflict between neighbours, resulting in physical and verbal altercations that were litigated in the Court of Star Chamber. Gender historians have challenged the supposedly strict dichotomy of separate, gendered spheres, demonstrating how women traversed the boundaries between public and private while still maintaining links with the domestic space of the home. Less attention has been paid to the ways that men also navigated these spaces. By the seventeenth century, ideal masculinity was modeled through patriarchal authority over the boundaries around property and around the bodies of those who dwelled within.
Oscar Wilde and His Legacy: British Commercial Comedy 1892-1930
Keywords: Noel Coward
Oscar Wilde
Somerset Maugham
St. John Hankin

Oscar Wilde’s successful 1890s works were something new within Victorian comedy. He reinvents a theatrical comedy tradition dominated by a combination of farce and French-inspired well-made plays, creating more psychologically complex characters than the usual stage types, repeatedly adjusting or blending comic forms to disrupt audience expectations, and emphasizing forgiveness and reconciliation over revenge or poetic justice. This dissertation considers how Wilde’s unique approach to comic writing is both reflected and adapted in plays from 1900-1930 by St. John Hankin, Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward, revealing shifts in what it means to behave badly when values are rapidly changing. The analysis considers how these plays were affected by contemporary conditions of theatrical production, which are often neglected in scholarship on the plays as texts. The first chapter considers Wilde’s shrewd assessment of the consequences of courtship practices and the double standard beneath a veneer of manners and cleverness in Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband. The work continues with an examination of The Importance of Being Earnest, particularly its connections to Wilde’s stories for children, the form of farce and recent scholarship about play. The third chapter considers how Hankin reworks comic expectations in a Wildean way to build layered characters, accurately portray their actions, and provide satisfactory, unconventional endings through plays such as The Return of the Prodigal and The Charity That Began at Home. In the fourth chapter, the connections between Wilde and several of Maugham’s better known comedies is examined, as Maugham continues Wilde’s witty discussion of the place of women, the requirements for a good marriage, and the effects of too much leisure time. This work concludes by contemplating the influence of Wilde’s comedies on early plays by Coward, revealing how his characters reject not only etiquette and decorum, but the need for any manners at all.
The Molecular Evolution of Rhodopsin in Marine-derived and other Freshwater Fishes
Keywords: Adaptation
Genetics
Ichthyology
Positive selection
Rhodopsin
Visual evolution

Visual system evolution can be influenced by the spectral properties of light available in the environment. Variation in the dim-light specialized visual pigment rhodopsin is thought to result in functional shifts that optimize its sensitivity in relation to ambient spectral environments. Marine and freshwater environments have been shown to be characterized by different spectral properties and might be expected to place the spectral sensitivity of rhodopsin under different selection pressures. In Chapter two, I show that the rate ratio of non- synonymous to synonymous substitutions is significantly elevated in the rhodopsin gene of a South American clade of freshwater anchovies with marine ancestry. This signature of positive selection is not observed in the rhodopsin gene of the marine sister clade or in non-visual genes. In Chapter three I functionally characterize the effects of positively selected substitutions occurring on another independent invasion of freshwater made by ancestrally marine croakers. In vitro spectroscopic assays on ancestrally resurrected rhodopsin pigments reveal a red-shift in peak spectral sensitivity along the transitional branch, consistent with the wavelengths of light illuminating freshwater environments. Kinetics assays reveal that freshwater croaker rhodopsin might also possess more efficient dark adaptation. In Chapter four I use a comparative approach to show that substitutions with similar functional effects occur convergently during marine to freshwater transitions, but only in deeper-dwelling lineages. In Chapter five I investigate the molecular evolution of rhodopsin in Gymnotiformes, a clade of freshwater fishes with an alternative sensory modality specialized for dim-light environments. Rhodopsin is highly conserved in this clade, but bouts of positive selection are observed in association with ecological transitions, indicating that dim-light vision remains an important sensory modality in these freshwater fishes. Altogether, these studies show that shifts in selection pressures and substitutions that alter the functional properties of rhodopsin are frequently observed during ecological transitions into and within freshwater environments, as long as species inhabit depths where the attenuation of light is non-negligible. Furthermore, this thesis expands our understanding of the effects of ecology on visual evolution and its influence on the structural and functional properties of rhodopsin.
Provincial Cults during the Eighteenth Dynasty: A Dialectical Relationship between Royal Patronage and Non-royal Votive Activity
Keywords: Agency Theory
Core-Periphery Relations
Egyptian Archaeology
Provincial Temple Cults
Sacred Landscapes
Votive Offerings

This dissertation examines the dialectical relationship between royal patronage and non-royal votive activity associated with provincial cults in Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1295 BC). The study focuses on the sites of Mendes, Abydos, Elkab, Elephantine, and Sai Island, which represent a range of geographical regions from the Delta to Nubia. By analyzing architecture, material culture, pictorial evidence, and inscriptional data, this thesis incorporates an integrative approach to Egyptian history. The results of this research demonstrate that the sacred landscapes of Eighteenth Dynasty provincial towns delineated by royal cult institutions (provincial cult temples, peripteral temples, and ka chapels) and festival processional routes enabled royal and non-royal individuals to partake in mutual interactions. Royal involvement in provincial cults solidified economic, administrative, and political ties throughout Egypt and allowed the king to benefit from perpetuating the cults of local deities by appeasing the gods that could grant him favor. A significant development in royal temple construction indicates that this activity was both influenced by local aspects of divine cults and further enriched the built environment of sacred landscapes. At the same time, non-royal individuals could display their social status and devotion to their local deities by participating in festival celebrations and by leaving physical traces of their activity. This dissertation proves that traditionally assumed binary oppositions, or contrasts, between center and periphery, residence versus province, and state versus private religious systems can be moderated through careful analysis of the integration of material remnants of royal and non-royal votive activity acting within specific historical and geographical settings.
Praxis and Critique: On Fugitive Politics
Keywords: Adorno
Critical Theory
Critique
Political Theory
Praxis
Ranciere

Through dialectical reflection upon the predicament of fugitive political praxis – forms of political action or claim making compelled to resist or give expression to political wrongs via the very mediums and contexts that sustain their imperceptibility and uninhabitability – this dissertation engages simultaneously in an immanent critique of the ‘primacy of [decentered/ fugitive] praxis’ and the development of a critical theory of fugitive politics. The ‘primacy of praxis’ names a constellation of contemporary political thinking that has discovered, out of both the ruins of sovereign or autonomous subjectivity (‘the decentering of the subject’) and the impasses of Critical Theory, novel forms of (fugitive) political possibility. The challenge of the dissertation is to salvage the promise of fugitive praxis from the antinomous theoretical architecture that falsifies it by inflating its plurality, agonism and indeterminacy into the status of ontological, affirmative or axiomatic givens. To raise the question of the inhabitability of fugitive politics is to ask after the particular social and political conditions that variably obstruct or facilitate responsiveness to the fragile claims of fugitive politics. Thinking both with and against Adorno – using his own philosophical insights to exceed his philosophy’s particular, historically sedimented limitations – the dissertation aims to rethink the interpretation of fugitive praxis in the historical present by salvaging his critical conception of mediation. Critical political interpretation, I will argue, neither affirms the resistant or heterogeneous power of (de-centered) praxis, nor discloses its impossibility within the mediating context of the historical present. On the contrary, it proceeds through micrological ambivalence to elucidate political praxis it where it emerges – in triumphant and transient flashes as well as in its disappointing, constrained and damaged forms – neither to celebrate nor mourn, but to disclose the conditionality of praxis and so to dis-close concrete insight as to how different form of praxis and different forms of political institutions might be realized.
To the Water’s Edge of Empire: Domestic Class Struggle, White Merchant Sailors, and the Emerging U.S. Imperial System, 1872-1924
Keywords: Gilded Age and Progressive Era History
History of Capitalism
Immigration History
Maritime History
U.S. Empire
Working-Class History

This dissertation examines the process through which the lines between foreign and domestic and nation and empire were established and re-established within the emerging U.S. imperial system between the 1870s and 1920s. It was a fluid process, perpetually in motion. I argue that white working people were both central to and on the front lines of this process, most of all merchant sailors. They were the ones most affected by these boundaries. Sailors who labored in the foreign maritime trade crossed these invisible boundaries every time they went to work. In short, the relationship between nation and empire and foreign and domestic was a labor question. By examining the connection between domestic class struggle and U.S. imperial expansion this dissertation will also reveal the vital role that organized labor—the principle institution through which the white working classes made their voices heard and their influence felt—played in this process and will challenge organized labor’s apparent anti-imperial orientation. With that in mind, the boundaries between nation and empire as well as foreign and domestic emerged through domestic or metropolitan class struggle —ebbing and flowing with the changing power dynamics between capital and labor—though largely expressed through the discourse of racial exclusion. Immigration restriction, therefore, emerged as labor’s primary means of exercising influence over U.S. imperial expansion. While the public and all three branches of government fiercely debated the now famous question of whether the constitution followed the flag. The question most pertinent to America’s labor leaders and the white working class they claimed to speak for was rather: does exclusion follow the flag? They would accept American imperial expansion so long as they were protected from the peoples and practices of the emerging U.S. empire. By demanding protection from certain parts of the U.S. imperial system they were implicitly endorsing the concept of empire by insisting on a privileged and protected position within an emerging imperial hierarchy. When all is said and done, though white working people were far from the principle beneficiaries of U.S. imperial expansion, they were nonetheless important and complicit players in its execution.
Performing Portraiture: Picturing the Upper-class English Woman in an Age of Change, 1890-1914
Keywords: Edwardian
England
Female
Portraiture
Upper class

This dissertation examines the use of portraiture by upper-class women of Britain in the period 1890—1914 as a means to redefine gender and class perception and to reposition aristocratic women as nostalgic emblems of a stable past and as symbols of a modern future. Through a range of portraiture practices, upper-class women promoted themselves as a new model for a continuing upper class that fulfilled a necessary social function in the altered circumstances of the new century. The period 1890—1914 was an era of change that challenged the existing social structure in Britain, destabilizing the hereditary entitlement of the ruling class and questioning the continuing role and relevance of the upper class. In the same period, changes in the technology of print and photography meant that, for the first time, there was the ability to disseminate portrait images through mass media on an economical basis, leading to a proliferation of illustrated journals and magazines. These circumstances provided an opportunity for upper-class women to reimagine the social and political potential of portraiture. My analysis examines different forms of media through intensive case studies arguing a progression from a traditional static image to a fluid interdisciplinary performative portraiture practice. In the first chapter I consider the aristocratic practice of pencil portrait drawings as a symbol of past values. In the second chapter I address the new technology of halftone images and the consequent desire for new forms of portrait images for publication. I argue that upper-class women seized this opportunity to transform the aesthetic of portraiture and to translate a new form of public persona into a platform for political involvement. In the third chapter I consider the advent of the snapshot photograph and the resulting change to ideas of privacy and awareness of forms of self-presentation. Finally, in the fourth chapter I look at the matrix of the upper-class woman, fashion, and the theatre through the perspective of portraiture as a performative practice facilitating the transformation of the upper-class woman into a new type of style celebrity that formed the basis for the celebrity culture of contemporary society.
Poetry and the Pursuit of Consensus in Renaissance England
Keywords: Aesthetics
Consensus
Humanism
Pluralism
Protestantism
Reformation

Despite resistance from historians and literary critics, two narratives continue to hold sway in many accounts of the Protestant state’s rise in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The first, associated with recusant and high Tory nostalgia for a hierarchical Middle Ages, sees the Reformation as the moment when “a rich and comforting consciousness of communal identity” passed away and something more like modern pluralism began to emerge. The second, associated with equally influential Whig narratives of liberation and progress, reverses that story and sees the Reformation in more salutary terms, as the moment when the individual first broke free from the church and became a significant actor on the world stage. This study tells a different story. It looks at the way several writers, including Skelton, Tyndale, Spenser, and Milton, responded to one of their period’s most pressing issues—sectarianism—by positing an “aesthetic community” that binds citizens together not with external laws and institutions, but with a deeper, more internal form of authority that reconciles liberty with community. For these writers, the broad cultural changes brought about by the Reformation, changes that centered on tensions that emerged throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between the institutional authorities of the church and state, on the one hand, and the individual conscience, on the other, required the deployment of new forms of authority that could unite an increasingly divided populace. Chapters consider Skelton’s invocation of his divinely inspired authority as a poet as a way to defend the Catholic consensus fidelium; Tyndale’s fantasy of a spontaneous, affective consensus that would unite the commonwealth in love; Spenser’s moderate vision of a “provisional” consensus that would acknowledge the fictional nature of all common norms; and Milton’s aesthetics of liberty, which aims to reconcile his countervailing desires for liberty and belonging. The result is not only a prehistory of eighteenth-century aesthetics, particularly as it relates to what Terry Eagleton has called “a dream of reconciliation – of individuals woven into intimate unity with no detriment to their specificity,” but also an account of some of England’s earliest responses to the quintessentially modern problem of pluralism.
Elucidating B Cell Tolerance Defects in Lupus-prone Mice
Keywords: autoimmunity
B-cell
DNA
lupus
murine
tolerance

Systemic lupus erythematosus is a chronic autoimmune disease that impacts multiple tissues through the production of pathogenic anti-nuclear autoantibodies and inflammatory immune complexes. Mouse models that develop lupus-like disease due to the presence of specific lupus susceptibility loci or candidate genes have proven incredibly useful in elucidating how these genetic factors contribute to the complex pathogenesis of SLE. Additionally, the use of immunoglobulin transgenic and knock-in mouse models in conjunction with these lupus-prone strains enables interrogation of the defects in B cell tolerance mechanisms and signalling pathways that lead to SLE development. This thesis examined the impact of genetic loci from the lupus-prone New Zealand Black chromosome 1 congenic strains and of the lupus candidate gene BLK on the maintenance of B cell tolerance and the development of autoimmunity in the context of a nuclear antigen-specific B cell repertoire. It was found that NZB c1 congenic mice with an anergic, ssDNA-specific B cell repertoire had a severely attenuated capacity to breach tolerance to nuclear antigen due to impaired development of Tfh cells relative to the generation of Tfr cells. It was also demonstrated that the autoreactivity of a nuclear antigen-specific B cell repertoire is largely determined by the specificity of the B cell immunoglobulin heavy chain, as B cells from c1 congenic mice with the DNA-specific 3H9 heavy chain were appropriately regulated by B cell tolerance mechanisms in the periphery. Finally, examination of how BLK impacts autoimmunity in the context of nuclear antigen specificity revealed that loss of this molecule enhances both central and peripheral B cell tolerance to anti-DNA B cells. Together, these results underscore the resilience of tolerance mechanisms in the regulation of nuclear antigen-specific B cells and reinforces the concept that the development of profound autoimmunity requires concurrent defects in multiple components of the immune system.
Development of a Novel Truncated-correlation Photothermal Coherence Tomography for Non-invasive Biothermophotonic and Non-destructive Materials Imaging
Keywords: Art Defectoscopy
Biomedical Imaging
Dental Imaging
Non-Destructive Testing
Optical Imaging
Thermal imaging

Truncated-Correlation Photothermal Coherence Tomography (TC-PCT) is the most successful class of diffusion-wave methodologies to-date providing 3-D subsurface visualization. To extend depth range and axial and lateral resolution, a novel imaging system with improved instrumentation, and an optimized reconstruction algorithm over the conventional TC-PCT technique is developed in this PhD project. The enhanced TC-PCT system was then used for biomedical and non-destructive testing applications. First, we reported visualization of subsurface defects in a steel sample. The results demonstrate defect detection at the depth range of ∼4 mm in a steel sample, which exhibits dynamic range improvement by a factor of 2.6 compared to the conventional TC-PCT, the Lock-in Thermography and Thermal Wave radar. Lateral resolution in the steel sample was measured to be ∼ 31 μm. Second, we used the system to investigate the possibility of non-destructive imaging of an art object to identify features that often are invisible areas of vulnerability and damage. The enhanced TC-PCT modality identified all the defects such as empty holes, a hole filled with stucco, delaminations and natural features such as a wood knot and wood grain in different layers of the sample. The system was then used for biomedical applications, three of which are early demineralization in tooth sample, early detection of tumor in mice, and structural imaging of mouse brain. First, we introduced dental enhanced TC-PCT imaging with a current subsurface depth profilometric capability of ~ 3.8 mm. Second, the enhanced TC-PCT modality was presented for early in-vivo tumor detection and tested in imaging nude mice thighs. Precise measurement of the size and shape of the detected tumor was validated following histological analysis. Third, enhanced TC-PCT was developed for brain imaging and was successfully exhibited structures of the brain such as brain lobes, blood vessel, olfactory bulbs, and cerebellum.