VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Oblique Genealogies: A Queer Analysis of the Life, Thought, and Works of Mario Mieli (1952-1983)
Keywords: Gay Liberation
Italian LGBTQ+ movement
LGBTQ+ Literature
LGBTQ+ Theatre
Mario Mieli
Queer Theory

This dissertation explores the life, thought, and works of Mario Mieli (Milan, 1952-1983), an Italian author whose theories, activism, and cultural production have had a significant impact on contemporary understandings of queer identities in Italy and elsewhere. While Mieli’s work has been studied by Italian Queer scholars, it remains largely unmentioned in North American Queer Studies, as well as in the study of Italian cultural history. This project analyzes Mieli’s revolutionary thought and creative work to show important lineages between this thinker and contemporary theories on gender and sexuality. It also argues for the relevance of Mieli’s forward-looking reflections on human emancipation, through sexual liberation, in our current times of global crisis. Furthermore, this analysis helps to identify a root of Queer thought in Italy, pointing to the importance of this cultural setting in scholarly conversations on sexual diversity while recognizing that the often perceived universality of Queer discourses, mainly produced in the English-speaking world, must be challenged by efforts to localize sexual diversity such as this dissertation’s. The project begins with an introductory chapter, offering an overview of the Queer theoretical phenomenon, of male same-sex desire in the Italian context (before and after Italian unification in 1861), and a biographical introduction to Mieli. It then discusses Mieli’s main theoretical work, Elementi di critica omosessuale (1977) by identifying its main tenets (transessualità, educastrazione, and the schizophrenic trip) and by placing Mieli’s thought in conversation with contemporary Queer theories on such topics as gender performativity, homonormativity, antisociality, death, and futurity. Finally, the project studies Mieli’s cultural production, particularly literature (the novel Il risveglio dei Faraoni, published posthumously in 1994) and theatre (the Collettivo Nostra Signora dei Fiori’s La Traviata Norma, ovvero: vaffanculo…ebbene sì!, 1976-1977). The examination of cultural production explores the dialectical relationship between theory and creative practice and highlights how Mieli’s cultural production can make evident both the (productive) impossibility and the potential of his radical theorizations. It also brings to light significant elements of queer culture, such as the importance of self-creation through autobiographical/autofictional literary practice and the productive tension between performativity and performance in theatre
The Effects of Exercise and Brca1 on Mitochondrial Function in the Ovary and Adipose-epithelial Ovarian Cancer Microenvironment
Keywords: BRCA1
Exercise
Fertility
Metabolism
Mitochondria
Ovarian Cancer

As women age, their follicular reserve in the ovary depletes and the quality of oocytes declines. Aged oocytes have an increased risk of DNA damage and a subpar mitochondrial pool that compromises their ability to generate viable embryos. Mitochondria are the most abundant organelle within the oocyte which co-ordinates energy-sensing pathways with biosynthetic processes in the oocyte. Exercise can impede the age-related decline of mitochondrial health in muscle and adipose tissue. In the oocyte, we show that exercise induces hallmarks of mitochondrial uncoupling that include: an abundance of mitochondria that generate heat, elevated substrate oxidation with reduced levels of ROS and lipid droplet accumulation. We identified and characterized uncoupling protein 5 (UCP5) as the protein responsible for metabolic uncoupling in the oocyte. The energy sensor AMPK (AMP-activated protein kinase) works in conjunction with BRCA1 to stabilize the phosphorylation of acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC). The absence of BRCA1 in the oocyte increased its sensitivity to DNA damage and altered AMPK-ACC signaling in both growing and ovulated oocyte. The metaphase II arrested ovulated oocytes had lower levels of mtDNA and an increased proportion of abnormally shaped mitochondria, a phenotype that contributes compromised the oocyte’s developmental competence. Repeated wounding and repair mechanisms of ovulation increases the risk for the oncogenic transformation of ovarian epithelial cells. The high mortality of women with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) reflects its strong metastatic potential which is difficult to detect. EOC develops in post-menopausal women whose adiposity contributes to disease progression. Using an orthotopic mouse model I show that limiting adiposity by physical activity slowed down cancer growth and reduced overall tumour burden in mice. BRCA1 mutations increase the risk of EOC, yet patients have an improved short-term prognosis. In mice, adipocyte BRCA1 deficiency reduces adiposity and alters the adipocyte's phenotype to influence cancer cell behaviour. Thus, genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors play a role in regulating ovarian health and disease.
Nutrition Claims and Symbols on Food Packages: Examination of Current Practices to Monitor and Inform Food Policy
Keywords: Food Labelling
Food Policy
Front-of-Pack Labelling
Nutrition Claims

Unhealthy diet is a major risk factor for non-communicable diseases. Many governments and health-oriented organizations have stressed the need to implement strategies to encourage healthier diets. Nutrition labelling (i.e., description intended to inform about the nutritional properties/ingredients of a food) is one of those strategies. In Canada, food labels are required to display nutrient declarations (i.e., Nutrition Facts table [NFt]) and ingredients lists since 2003. Food labels could also display voluntary nutrition claims, which are representations that imply a food has certain nutritional properties. In Canada, new nutrition policies and guidelines have been recently issued. For example, new nutrition claims were approved between 2010-2013, and front-of-pack labelling (i.e., supplementary nutrition information displayed on the front of food labels) was proposed in 2018 to highlight foods and beverages with high levels of sodium, saturated fat and/or sugars. However, few studies have assessed how have these changes impacted the packaged food supply and consumers’ perceptions of foods. This research assessed trends in the use of nutrition claims on food labels, examined the nutritional quality of products with and without nutrition claims, and examined the influence of nutrition claims, health-related messages and front-of-pack labelling on consumers’ perceptions. Nutrition claims continue to be displayed on nearly half of packaged foods. While products with nutrition claims have a healthier profile than those without; 42% of products displaying nutrition claims were considered not eligible to carry claims (i.e., “less healthy”), as determined by the Food Standards Australia New Zealand Nutrient Profiling Scoring Criterion. Consumer studies revealed that most consumers based their product judgement using the information presented on the front of labels, and very few viewed the NFt. Front-of-pack labelling had a stronger influence than nutrition claims among consumers with different levels of health literacy, and despite the ‘halo’ effect created by claims. Importantly, the use of the NFt limited the influence that nutrition claims have on consumers’ perceptions. These studies suggest that front-of-pack labelling could be the nutrition labelling component that better helps consumers to discriminate products with different nutritional quality, and highlight the importance of implementing nutrition labelling policies that support fast healthy food choice.
Male Hysteria, Degenerate Opera: Post-Wagnerian Music Drama in the Era of World War I
Keywords: Fin-de-siècle
First World War
Male hysteria
Masculinity
Modernism
Opera

This dissertation interrogates ideas about gender and Austro-German identity in the years before, during, and after World War I, offering historically informed hermeneutic readings of Berg’s Wozzeck, Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, and Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. Specifically, by drawing on concepts from critical disability and masculinity studies, this research considers how the operas under investigation — each of which features a seemingly emasculated protagonist and music that resists the traditional (masculinist) confines of modernism — were in dialogue with broader socio-political and aesthetic anxieties about being a man during the war years. This project centres on issues of vocality, departing from the kinds of formal-motivic analysis that have prevailed in previous studies of twentieth-century Austro-German opera. Such emphasis on voice allows Chapter 1 to raise questions about what sounded “natural,” therefore healthy and virile in the German nation, as it interrogates the musical-linguistic expressions in Berg’s Wozzeck. A further research focus is to explore aspects of the operas that seem tangential but in fact featured prominently in historical performance reviews. Chapter 2 thus examines the moralistic stance of Die Gezeichneten’s numerous but hitherto overlooked secondary characters, contextualizing that stance in light of the fin-de-siècle press’s tendency to sensationalism and arguing that provocative vocabularies of “degeneracy” occupied a positively celebratory place in Schreker’s pre-Nazi reception. Finally, Chapter 3 turns its attention to the figure of an ostensibly lone Jewish man to probe questions of “Jewish difference” and Die tote Stadt’s rarely discussed commedia dell’arte sequence of Act II. Placing side by side Wagnerian symbolism and commedia dell’arte — that is, ingredients from Christianity and contemporary popular Jewish theatre — Korngold’s opera asked timely questions of Jewish manhood and citizenry in Austria’s First Republic. This dissertation’s interrogation of masculinity adds to opera studies’ long-standing investment in representations of gender. It further contributes to musicology’s burgeoning engagement with disability aesthetics, as its historically oriented work asks how the operas studied herein underscore post-/WWI politics of injury, rather than seeking in the music symptoms of illness. These wartime works ultimately offer audio-visual experiences that challenge Austro-German nationalist ideals — and authoritarian aesthetics — of the first decades of the twentieth century.
City and Resistance in Kurdistan: Poverty, Urban Development, and the Struggle for Democratic Autonomy in Diyarbakir
Keywords: City and Urban Development
Kurdistan
Political Anthropology
Poverty
Self-Determination
State Violence

How does an excluded population engage a hostile state to affect transformations of its social and political situation? Focusing on the Kurdish movement for self-determination in Turkey, this dissertation examines different modes of engagement with the Turkish state adopted by the Kurds in Kurdistan. These modes of engagement comprise a set of imbricating and at times conflicting practices that variably draw on Kurdish cultural repertoires of struggle, collective experiences of ethnohistorical oppression, and symbolic topographies of past and present resistance (mountain and city). I explore how the Kurdish struggle is shaped by and responds to the process of state formation in Turkey based on Turkish ethnonationalism, which has been historically entrenched by violent denial and exclusion of the Kurds. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 in the city of Diyarbakir, I examine the process through which the city became the center of Kurdish politics with multiple instantiations in urban modes of political engagements. I argue that the Kurdish movement was caught in managing the contradictions that arose once the battle for Kurdish self- determination—a struggle that had predominantly been fought from the mountains—moved onto the urban terrains of Kurdistan, especially the city of Diyarbakir, in the last two decades. The shift of confrontation to the city resulted in a significant transformation in Kurdistan that was manifested in a flourishing civil society as well as in municipalities for the Kurds to exercise self-government. I analyze how the Kurdish movement and the modes of political engagement with the state in urban spaces came under the influence of class-based dynamics and the European Union’s reform packages for Turkey. My examination also includes the devastating destruction wrought by the Turkish state after many cities in Kurdistan declared autonomy or what was later called “self-rule resistance” in 2015. My research contributes to anthropological studies of the state and political movements by expanding our knowledge on how excluded and marginalized populations, often indigenous to their lands, take part in political movements, and how communities of resistance engage, react to, or refuse state power in the environment of political violence.
Managing Crisis: Decision-making, Memory, and Legality in Post-World War Two France and Romania
Keywords: Cold War
Crisis
Legality
Political transition
World War Two

The three papers that comprise this dissertation deal with how how politicians create, use, manage, exacerbate, or diminish crisis. The empirical focus is on Romania and France in the mid and late 1940s. At the time, politicians in both countries were dealing with multiple crises: managing the devastation of a far-reaching war, political transition as wartime leaders were removed from power, and of course the beginning of the Cold War. Moreover, the crises differed according to each actor within a political field: differing involvement in the war, more or less power within the respective political transition, and divergent ideological positioning within the emerging Cold War. In the first paper, I theorize the concept of a failure of imagination. Drawing on core sociological theories of behavioral change during crisis, I point out that the discomfort caused by a changing context does not seamlessly translate into behavioral change. Instead, the gap between the pre- and post-reflexive aspects of a crisis can be pronounced, and the expected behavioral change may potentially not happen at all. In the second paper, the focus is on actors taking advantage of crisis to pursue their political goals. Here, I argue that trials can be integral to the symbolic aspects of regime change, even when hard power has been won. And in particular, the use of trials highlights the extent to which regime change is a transnational phenomenon. Legitimacy is not bound within national borders, and so regimes can face legitimacy threats from abroad even after consolidating control of the state. In the third paper, I argue that political transition can be understood through the frame of moral panic. The moral faults of a small group of people can be quickly and easily addressed. But if a diffuse and ill-defined group of people can potentially pose a moral threat to a new regime, dealing with these individuals will be effortful, continuously inchoate, and highly political.
Pietro Aretino: Recapturing the Chivalric Tradition
Keywords: Chivalric Tradition
Italian
Italian Renaissance
Literature
Pietro Aretino
Renaissance

The purpose of this thesis is to offer an original overview of Pietro Aretino’s experience in navigating and attempting to dominate the chivalric tradition. Aretino, usually considered — if at all — an ‘additional chivalric writer,’ longed to be recognized as one of the greats in this field; however, his four attempts — Marfisa (1535), Angelica (1536), Orlandino (1540), and Astolfeida (1547) — were left unfinished and for the most part have remained buried beneath other countless chivalric imitative works. The Marfisa and the Angelica are directly linked to Ludovico Ariosto’s ‘bestseller,’ the Furioso, and aimed to be an integration of tradition and invention, bridging the gap of the literary values of the past while still maintaining a unique poetic interpretation. The Orlandino and the Astolfeida are anti-chivalric fragments that portray a different view of the chivalric tradition, redesigning the model and foreshadowing what would later be considered the poema eroicomico. Aretino’s place in the chivalric tradition falls between the expiration of the chivalric genre and the launch of the mock-epic, rendering his experience and position unique and matchless in relation to the studies of court culture in Renaissance Italy and the historical context of the romance epic and its metamorphosis. This dissertation explores Aretino’s four chivalric fragments and demonstrates that the whole picture — Aretino’s multi-layered life experiences, his unconventional writing trajectories, the unique space and time in which his distinct chivalric fragments came to be — offers a significant and never-before-seen glimpse of Pietro Aretino as he recaptured the chivalric tradition. The investigation is carried out in five chapters and a conclusion: Chapter 1 (Life and Works), Chapter 2 (Marfisa), Chapter 3 (Angelica), Chapter 4 (Orlandino), Chapter 5 (Astolfeida). Chapters 2-5 consist of a preface to the work being analyzed and five subsequent parts: Content, Characters, Structure, Language and Style, and Legacy. The Conclusion, followed by the Bibliography, summarizes and reflects on the research.
Electrophilic Tuning of Novel Pentafluorobenzenesulfonamide Warheads
Keywords: Chemical Biology
Drug Design
Reactivity
Small Molecules
Tuning
Warhead

This thesis details research in our lab which identified a novel reactive pentafluorobenzenesulfonamide (PFBS) warhead, delivering four separate projects focused on protecting and tailoring a reactive warhead towards biological nucleophiles and systemic application in vivo. Discovery of AC-3-019, a novel and potent molecule harbouring a modified PFBS group uniquely demonstrated a conformational mechanism that provided suitable pharmacokinetic (PK) stability compared to its predecessors. AC-3-019 was subsequently evaluated in two in-vivo animal models (MB and AML) to assess its anti-cancer ability. In follow-up work, DR-1-055, combined the conformational approach with synergistic electronic tuning of PFBS to deliver another metabolically stable scaffold with enhanced PK parameters. DR-1-055’s enhanced potency is displayed against two in-vivo breast cancer mouse models, as well as in-vivo facial tumour model towards Tasmanian devils. A simplified version of the PFBS bearing an alkyne handle was used in an activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) approach to interrogate its intrinsic reactivity against biological nucleophiles in HeLa cell lysates. Gel-based click experiments were performed to compare reactivity against common covalent cysteine-targeting warheads. Subsequently, a semi-quantitative approach called tandem orthogonal proteolysis-ABPP (TOP-ABPP) demonstrated that the PBFS warhead is cysteine-specific. Lastly, we demonstrated a unique ortho-substitution technique to systematically control the reactivity of PFBS by electronic tuning and applied it towards a known PFBS-containing clinical candidate. Directed-ortho-metalation (DOM) chemistry was used to synthesize ortho-substituted warheads allowing for systematic tuning of reactivity. Finally, Batabulin, a PFBS containing molecule previously failing in phase II clinical trials, was utilized as an example for application of the ortho-substitution platform to potentially rescue a failed clinical candidate.
Recollection of an Audience: Style, Experience, and Change in the Study of Theatre Spectatorship
Keywords: Audience studies
Change
Empirical research
Mixed methods
Reception
Spectatorship

This emic-oriented, uniquely mixed methods project explores the evidence for theatrically induced change and the individual contexts and processes that accompany it. The transformative power of theatre has been the source of much speculation and increasingly marked by agnosticism in recent years, but it has rarely received rigorous empirical consideration nor solicited the extended investment of first-hand spectatorial input. To address this lack, this dissertation offers unique models of theatrically induced change drawn from quantitative and qualitative data collected from 180 pre/post-show surveys and 30 extended interviews in partnership with four aesthetically and persuasively distinct Toronto-based theatre companies. The data is put into conversation with reception scholarship from theatre studies, media studies, and psychology in order to yield new insights into theatrically-induced change. Change – often incoherently conceptualized and unsubstantiated in audience theory – is interrogated here as both a shift in the valence and intensity of a spectator’s attitudes over the course of a show, and the perception of artistically induced affective disruption leading to distinct channels of rethinking and possibly inner realignment. In light of accounts offered by the spectators, the process of change seems to be largely generated by the mismatch between a production’s dominant artistic modes and the familiar perceptual patterns adopted by spectators to help mediate their often unappreciated levels of anxiety and degrees of investment. The dynamic and patterned influence of a spectator’s disposition toward theatrical style, their personal identity, and their past theatre-going on in-show sense-making are given particular attention. Spectators seem to orient their attention (toward stories, craft/process, or ‘real’ messages) and modes of engagement (affective, identificatory, or cognitive) in discrete ways that are especially shaped by their stage of life, real-life occupations, and degree of familiarity with theatre/artists. This project has sought to engage in a methodology that promotes the value of intercourse between quantitative, qualitative, and philosophical approaches to an emerging field of scholars and theatre-makers. To that end, tools are proposed for interrogating style and its dimensions (The Persuasively Inflected Theatre Scale); categorizing age, income, and theatre-going; and organizing the types of memories, questions, and forms of change spectators share.