VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Balancing acts? Relational responses to trauma in twenty-first century French and Spanish women's writings
Keywords: relational lives
narrative voice
women's writing
intergenerational trauma

This thesis focuses on contemporary French and Spanish intergenerational stories in the wake of traumatic loss. Through the lens of these texts, it engages with Paul John Eakin’s theory of ‘relational lives’ and with current conceptions of what constitutes an ‘ethical’ representation of the multiple, interlocking stories in a family history. By drawing the French and Spanish traditions of life-writing into the discussion of relational lives, which has focused primarily on Anglo-American examples, my thesis expands the parameters in terms of geography as well as genre. While French women writers have been at the centre of output and innovation in European life-writing, contributions by their Spanish counterparts are considerably less prominent. The dialogue my study instigates, however, demonstrates that contemporary women writers are in fact grappling with similar questions when giving voice to traumatic experience; the Spanish texts simply tend towards more fictional strategies of representation.
I argue on this basis that the fictional or autofictional staging of intergenerational stories offers as much insight into what it means to write a relational life as do more overtly autobiographical accounts. At the heart of this question are the ethical challenges that the texts in my corpus address and the narrative solutions they offer in response. These texts put questions to the notions of ownership, appropriation, displacement and ventriloquism which pervade existing discussions of ethics in life-writing and trauma theory, and which are inclined to portray the relationship between subjects as fixed and predetermined. In their place emerges a more malleable conception of ethical practice, one which perceives subject positions to be forged instead in the act of telling the story. This thesis seeks to re-describe ‘relational lives’ accordingly as a specific mode of writing and so to clarify why it should be distinguished from the claim that all life-writing is ‘relational’.
Smuggling and its impact on the grand strategy of the Spanish Empire, XIV-XVII centuries
Keywords: grand strategy
contraband
smuggling
Spain

This thesis studies the impact of contraband on the Spanish Empire at the strategic level where it impacted national policy, as well as its impact at the law enforcement and administrative levels. It includes necessarily applicable definitions of concepts such as smuggling, contraband and grand strategy, the difference between tactics, strategy and grand strategy and their applications within Spanish governmental institutions and private organizations.
The thesis proposes that the Spanish government’s preoccupation with its grand strategy of becoming the primary political and religious hegemonic power in Europe hindered the development of adequate policies designed to support it. Thus, Spanish monarchs invested more time in seeking to conquer Europe than in developing a feasible economic policy capable of finance that project of conquest. This concern reduced Spain’s ability to advance its primary objectives.
Spanish monarchs developed a grand strategy based on several major elements: monarchia universalis, religion, diplomacy, international law, military, naval and maritime policy. The efforts to achieve these objectives were habitually blended into policies designed to achieve a monopoly over the use of national power, both domestically and abroad.
The study concludes that illicit economic activity was carried out to such an extent that it detached enough from the Crown’s overall income to significantly hinder Spain’s ability to implement its grand strategy. The importance of the study is that it demonstrates, in the context of the XVI and XVII centuries, what the level of contraband implied to the Spanish rule of law. The high level of fraude robbed the Spanish Crown of more than half of its potential tax income from the Indies, thus interfering with its grand strategy in Europe.
Offence to religious belief and international law
Keywords: incitement to hatred
freedom of expression
freedom of religion or belief
hate speech
offence to religious belief
human rights
non-refoulement
freedom of assembly
blasphemy
apostasy

Offence to religious belief is any form of expression deemed insulting to the religious belief of a person or a group of persons. Blasphemy and apostasy are notable examples of such offences, which are at times regarded as an affront to social and religious morals, but can also be deemed as an infringement of the law or even a violation of human rights. Despite being essentially intangible, such offences have led to prosecutions, arrests, riots, and deaths throughout history. Nevertheless, there is limited research on the legal nature of these offences, as well as little clarity on the terminology used to characterise offence to religious belief. This perplexing scenario is further aggravated by the lack of direction from international adjudicating bodies dealing with expressions deemed offensive to religious belief. Consequently, the issue in question remains highly contentious worldwide.
This thesis seeks to answer the following question: what are the normative underpinnings that international human rights courts and treaty bodies should take into consideration when deciding cases of offence to religious belief? To answer this question, the thesis will be divided into six chapters. The first chapter briefly scrutinises the foundations of prohibitions of offence to religious belief and proposes a re-examination of contemporary concepts related to such offences in order to test their compatibility with international human rights law. Chapters two to six examine structural and jurisprudential issues regarding offence to religious belief in international human rights law, to determine what are the normative principles that can be employed by international human rights courts and treaty bodies to resolve issues related to such offences. Therefore, this thesis addresses issues regarding offence to religious belief from a legal perspective, in order to provide greater legal certainty in such cases and a more holistic protection of human rights to every person.
Investigating the stability of perovskite light-emitting diodes
Keywords: light emission
LEDs
stability
perovskite

Metal halide perovskite semiconductors have recently attracted significant attention as a class of materials with huge potential for a wide array of optoelectronic applications. They have shown great promise as emitters in light-emitting diodes where they demonstrate emission wavelength tunability across the entire visible spectrum, narrow emission spectra and high EQEEL in excess of 20%. Despite this excellent performance they have poor operational stability, resulting in lifetimes of 250 hours in the best case.
In this thesis, I first investigate factors which govern the fabrication of efficient green-emitting perovskite LEDs through the implementation and study of different device structures and passivation strategies for green emitting perovskite LEDs. Following this, I investigate the use of 2D/3D perovskite heterostructures as a strategy for efficient green-emitting perovskite LEDs. I systematically alter composition and examine changes in carrier recombination and device performance. Additionally, I study the effect of different experimental protocols on reproducibility of 2D/3D devices which leads to the development of a novel hole injection layer which affords efficient and highly reproducible devices.
In the final experimental chapter, I study the effect of the composition of 2D/3D perovskite LEDs on stability. I demonstrate that the introduction of the cation phenylethylammonium into the perovskite is highly detrimental to operational stability. This leads to investigations into the drivers behind poor operational stability where I reveal that changes to radiative efficiency and charge injection are the primary factors, which is attributed to increased ionic mobility.
Kassite letters: communicating orders and networking within the administration of Kassite Babylonia
Keywords: governance
governor
Middle Babylonian period
letter
Kassite letters
provincial structure
Nippur
Kassite kingdom
Kassite
administration
state organisation

In this DPhil thesis the language, style, structure, epistolary function and content of 314 Kassite period letters from Nippur, which were available to the author, are analysed. Nippur yielded the largest number of Kassite period letters in comparison with other Kassite period findspots. The Kassite letters not only prove that the governor of Nippur had an elevated status, but also supraregional influence. He was involved in the collection of levies for the king, and in the supraregional distribution of resources, which are tasks ascribed to the royal administration. Provincial officials, such as ḫazannus, from other provinces reported to the šandabakku, because the šandabakku, as the highest official under the king, was involved in the collection of levies for the royal administration. Further, the Kassite letters show that the town of Nippur was surrounded by sub-units called pīḫatus, and that the province of Nippur stretched northeast up until Dūr-Enlilē. The šandabakku had the command over temples in Nippur. Levies of temple grants were collected by provincial officials, and temples were referred to as the šandabakku’s own household. Nippur’s network reached south through Isin and the Sealand to Dilmun, and in the north to Bīt-Pere-Amurru. In the northeast regular communication with Upī, Dēr and Akkade is attested. The involvement of Nippurean officials in distant provinces can be explained through the involvement of the šandabakku of Nippur in the management of temple lands in different provinces.
Development of 3D-printed droplet networks as a platform to build functional synthetic tissues
Keywords: Biomimetics
Chemical Biology
Nanopores
3D-printing
Droplet Interface Bilayers
Synthetic Biology
Lipids
DIB
Bioinspired Materials
Synthetic Tissues
Contact Angle

The development of synthetic multicellular systems that can mimic complex cooperative behaviour of living tissues represents a major challenge for bottom-up synthetic biology. Tissue-like systems would allow the design of devices and materials that can communicate with living tissues and monitor, control or complement their biological activity. Networks of 3D-printed aqueous droplets in oil joined by droplet interface bilayers (DIBs) represent a powerful platform from which soft-electronic devices and synthetic tissues have been developed. Precise control of droplet packing to produce constructs with predictable 3D architectures, assembly of functional constructs of dimensions relevant to biomedical applications, and transfer of functional constructs to aqueous environment will enable design of increasingly sophisticated systems. Here, we achieve highly regular droplet packing in 3D-printed synthetic tissues by controlling the equilibrium contact angle θDIB at the droplet-droplet interface. As a result, we fabricate synthetic tissues with single-droplet precision in three dimensions. We also build larger and modular synthetic tissues by assembling building blocks constructed independently. Lastly, we employ a novel strategy to transfer 3D-printed droplet networks to aqueous bulk phase, forming a functional lipid bilayer at the interface with the aqueous bulk while retaining the architecture and the functionality of the internal lipid bilayers. Using this method, we generate synthetic tissues that can communicate with their environment, as a fundamental step towards interface with living tissues in physiological conditions.
Accessible adaptive optics and super-resolution microscopy to enable improved imaging
Keywords: Microscopy
Adaptive Optics
Super-resolution

Many of the recent innovations in biological imaging have revolved around the quest for greater resolving power, ultimately culminating in the advent of super-resolution microscopy techniques. However, all microscopy techniques are vulnerable to optical aberrations which distort the light wavefront. This leads to a gulf between theoretical and practical resolution for an imaging system. For super-resolution techniques, this can lead to reconstruction artifacts or the failure of the imaging technique entirely.
Implementing adaptive optics (AO) in microscopy has already been shown to be highly effective at reducing these aberrations and yielding significant improvements to image quality and resolution in numerous proof of principle systems. Despite this, AO technology has yet to be widely adopted in microscopy. This is for two principle reasons. Firstly, AO implementations to date have not been robust or generalised which makes transferring them between microscopy systems, imaging modalities and sample type troublesome to impossible. Secondly, AO implementations to date have not been accessible to typical microscope users and instead have been the purview of AO microscopy specialists.
This thesis presents a generalised, robust implementation for AO; Microscope-AOtools. This implementation has all the necessary methods for setting up and operating an adaptive element in microscopy. It has a flexible, modular design which allows for easy transfer between imaging systems, modalities, hardware configurations and sample types. These methods are integrated into Microscope-Cockpit for user accessibility. The evidence of these claims are substantiated by a detailed description of Microscope-AOtools’ successful deployment on both a spinning disk confocal system and a bespoke, upright structured illumination microscope with a range of sample types.
Physical layer security for visible light communication systems subject to eavesdropper location uncertainty
Keywords: beamforming
visible light communication
stochastic geometry
Physical layer security

The past few decades have witnessed the acceleration in the development of groundbreaking information technology applications, such as smartphones/tablets, Internet of Things devices, virtual reality devices, etc. These new applications require a significant amount of data traffic to be conveyed wirelessly. Furthermore, the growing number of devices imposes a big challenge of providing seamless and low-delay communication. To satisfy these requirements, visible light communication (VLC) systems have gained considerable popularity thanks to its inherent advantages, such as unlicensed wide bandwidth, high area spectral efficiency, and high security. At the same time, in VLC systems, network security remains a significant challenge. Even with the inherent wireless communication security of VLC systems, there is still a possibility that an eavesdropper can wiretap important/private information in large open spaces. Therefore, this research investigates physical layer security (PLS) to secure the VLC indoor transmission in the presence of randomly located eavesdroppers, proposing three different beamforming and jamming strategies for different VLC system scenarios. PLS is a set of techniques that enable a transmitter and a legitimate receiver to securely transmit and receive important data, eliminating the possibility of eavesdropping by utilizing the randomness of a channel between transmitter and receiver. Dealing with the random locations of eavesdroppers by using tools from stochastic geometry, the proposed PLS schemes do not require precise locations or channel state information of eavesdroppers. Numerical and Monte Carlo simulation results are provided to verify the performances of the proposed schemes.
Psychiatric illnesses in general hospital inpatients
Keywords: Systematic review
Cross-sectional
Psychiatric Disorder
Inpatient
Older adult
Mental Illness
Depression
Dementia
Prevalence
Alcohol
Phobia
Cognitive Impairment
Substance Abuse
Panic
Meta-analysis
Meta-review
Mental Disorder
Elderly
Psychiatric Illness
Delirium
Anxiety
General hospital

Background: Psychiatric illnesses are problematic in the medically ill, particularly amongst those admitted to general hospitals. An admission to a general hospital provides the opportunity to identify and, where appropriate, treat these conditions. To achieve this by better psychiatric service provision, we first need to know how common psychiatric illnesses are in general hospital inpatients.
Research aim: The overall aim of this thesis was therefore to determine the prevalence of psychiatric illnesses in general hospital inpatients.
Methods: I conducted: (1) a meta-review of the prevalence of psychiatric illnesses in general hospital inpatients; (2) a systematic review of the prevalence of anxiety disorders in general hospital inpatients; and (3) a cross-sectional study of the prevalence and associations of clinically significant anxiety, depression and cognitive impairment in older general hospital inpatients.
Results: The main findings of this thesis are as follows:
(1) Meta-review: The prevalence of diagnosed: depression ranged from 2% to 56% in general hospital inpatients (mean prevalence of 12%); delirium ranged from 10% to 31% in medical inpatients at admission to hospital; and dementia ranged from 2.8% to 63.0% in older general hospital inpatients. I did not find a systematic review of the prevalence of anxiety in the whole population of general hospital inpatients; therefore, I systematically reviewed this literature.
(2) Systematic review: The mean prevalence of panic disorder was 2% and generalised anxiety disorder was 7% in general medical and surgical inpatients.
(3) Cross-sectional study: The prevalence of clinically significant anxiety, depression and cognitive impairment was 41.8%, 43.6% and 64.1% respectively in older general hospital inpatients. I found evidence to suggest psychiatric illnesses were especially common in the “sickest” patients and those without a spouse or partner. Patients with clinically significant anxiety or depression also appeared to be more likely to experience symptoms of other psychiatric illnesses.
Conclusion: The finding that psychiatric illnesses are highly prevalent in general hospital inpatients has important implications for clinical care and healthcare policy. In particular, it suggests that general hospital services must address the needs of patients suffering from both medical and psychiatric illnesses. Better psychiatric care provision in general hospitals has the potential to improve outcomes for these patients.
Militarised cities? Housing and garrisoning the French Empire’s troops in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy
Keywords: napoleonic wars
barracks
logistics
19th century
italy
military history

This thesis examines military accommodation in the Republic/Kingdom of Italy, the main satellite state of France in the north of the peninsula throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Military accommodation, in the form of billeting in civilian homes and barracksing, rekindled long-term problems of army presence in a deeply upset geopolitical context; studying it helps understanding the logistical response to intense fluxes of large-scale military mobility, the hallmark of Napoleonic warfare. Such a response needed contact zones between army, institutions and society to function, challenging notions of militarism and total war applied to this conflict that do not adequately take logistics into account, and the levels of civil-military cooperation and negotiation that logistics had to entail.
The research starts by looking at the French Napoleonic war administration and its regulations on military accommodation, as the template on which Italian institutions and laws were modelled in their specific context. This highlights the importance of the Napoleonic imperial integration for military mobility, where the Kingdom of Italy was a hub of military corridors and étapes. To keep barracks supplied along the lieux d’étape, the Italian government shifted from general contracts to municipal management, while a network of custodianship staff oversaw the edifices and the supply materiel. Devolution of garrison barracksing services to the municipalities also involved barracks infrastructures and maintenance, shared uneasily between the military engineer corps and the municipalities. Space was shared, too, in the barracks and the billets between military and civilians, investing contested usages of the buildings and rising concerns over domestic privacy. The same happened with regard to terrains used for troop manoeuvres, as the military claimed land from agricultural profit and unwittingly pitted the war effort against the interests of the landowning élites on whose support the regime sought to base itself.
Bioavailability of matrix-bound growth factors in cartilage injury
Keywords: growth factor
cartilage
injury
osteoarthritis
extracellular matrix

Articular cartilage is a dense extracellular matrix-rich tissue that degrades following chronic mechanical stress, resulting in osteoarthritis. In this work, hepatoma-derived growth factor, previously uncharacterised in cartilage, was discovered to be bound to extracellular matrix heparan sulfate in cartilage. Previously described pericellular matrix growth factors fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) and connective tissue growth factor (CTGF/CCN2), along with hepatoma-derived growth factor (HDGF) were all rapidly released upon injury, independent of cellular viability, and were displaced by exogenous NaCl. I hypothesised that matrix sodium, sequestered within the further removed, aggrecan-rich matrix, was responsible for displacing growth factors upon injury, thereby enhancing their bioavailability. This was confirmed by showing that NaCl was able to release growth factors from cartilage. Furthermore, growth factor release was abrogated by interleukin-1 mediated depletion of matrix aggrecan and sodium, and also in severely damaged human osteoarthritic cartilage with reduced matrix sodium. Finally, a flux in free matrix sodium upon mechanical compression of cartilage was directly visualised by 23Na-MRI imaging. These data corroborate an increase in free matrix sodium upon mechanical injury, able to displace heparan sulfate-bound growth factors in healthy cartilage, which is lost in osteoarthritis. Preliminary data after inducing osteoarthritis in Hdgf -/- mice indicated that HDGF, like FGF2, is chondroprotective in vivo, with putative proliferative effects on mesenchymal stem cells. Together, these results describe a novel intrinsic repair mechanism, mediated by free sodium, in which heparan sulfate-bound growth factors are released from cartilage upon injurious load. They identify aggrecan as a depot for sequestered sodium, and explain why osteoarthritic tissue loses its ability to repair. Treatments that restore matrix sodium to allow appropriate release of growth factors upon load may therefore restore intrinsic cartilage repair in osteoarthritis.