VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Impact of Physical Exercise on the Hippocampal Pathology and Cognition in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer's Disease
Keywords: Alzheimer's disease
Amyloid Pathology
Cerebral Vasculature
Neurogenesis
Physical Exercise
Spatial Memory

It is recognized that neuronal and vascular functions are affected during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The accumulation of amyloid-beta peptides (Aβ) in the parenchyma and around blood vessels can contribute to neuronal and vascular compromise, and exacerbate cognitive impairment. Exercise has been described as one of the most influential modulators at preventing cognitive deficits observed in AD. The present work examined the extent to which physical activity is capable of reducing Aβ-related pathologies. I hypothesized that physical exercise stimulates memory and neurogenesis, remodels vasculature and lessens Aβ burden in the hippocampus of TgCRND8 mouse model of amyloidosis. All animals entered the study at 3 months of age and separate cohorts ran for 1, 2, or 3 months. My results indicate that voluntary running promotes spatial memory, neurogenesis, and cerebrovascular morphology in TgCRND8 mice. Specifically, the number of proliferating cells was significantly greater in running compared to non-running (sedentary) TgCRND8 mice as disease progressed. The number of doublecortin-positive new immature neurons was higher in TgCRND8 mice running for 1 month, compared to sedentary transgenics. Neuronal maturation was increased after 2 months (and not 1 month) of running in TgCRND8 mice. Running reduced plaque load in the dentate gyrus and Cornu Ammonis subregions of the hippocampus only after 2 months (5 month-old mice), and not after 1 month (4 month-old mice) or 3 months (6 month-old mice) of exercise. In 6 month-old mice, cerebral amyloid angiopathy levels were significantly reduced in running compared to sedentary mice. At 6 months of age, sedentary TgCRND8 mice had higher capillary density, capillary length, branch density, and non-capillary tortuosity compared to age-matched non-transgenics. These changes in vascular morphology suggest an adaptative response to Aβ pathology. In contrast, the vascular parameters of TgCRND8 mice running for 3 months were indistinguishable from non-transgenics animals. Memory improvements were observed at 4, 5 and 6 months of age in TgCRND8 mice running for 1, 2, and 3 months, respectively. Running TgCRND8 mice spent more time in the novel arm of the Y-maze compared to the familiar arms. Overall, these data indicate that as amyloidosis progresses in the hippocampus of TgCRND8 mice, physical exercise has a pronounced impact on cognition, with spatial memory rescued even when the number of new mature neurons (at 4 months) and plaque burden (at 4 and 6 months) are not significantly altered compared to sedentary transgenic animals. These data suggest that increasing neurogenesis and lowering plaque buildup may not be individually necessary to promote cognitive function. In conclusion, this work demonstrates that exercise as a lifestyle modification can improve cognition and reduce the negative impact of AD-related hippocampal pathologies.
Feeling Capitalism: The Victorian Novel as Affective Response to Social Transformation
Keywords: Affect Theory
Literary Theory
Novel Studies
Victorian Literature

This dissertation argues that Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2) constellate the affective dimensions of life under advancing capitalism around three dominant emotions: desire, guilt, and disappointment. In each case, the focalizing emotion, I argue, is not only specific to this or that character, but also a dominant structuring affect of the work as a whole, which, in turn, has historical specificity to the decade of the novel’s production. Chapter 2 relates Brontë’s depiction of Heathcliff and Catherine’s insatiable desire to the romantic-libertarianism of the 1840s and the autonomization of desire in the newly privatized space of the bourgeois family, which, I argue, widened its symbolic valences, making it available for Brontë’s mythologization of history as the struggle of desire against repression. Chapter 3 explores Dickens’s sense of society’s inexorable guilt in relation to the “liberal guilt” that followed in the years after the failed proletarian revolutions of 1848, attaching negative connotations to individual “great expectations,” which now appear to be necessarily at the cost of the less fortunate. Such negative connotations ironize Dickens’s title providing it with its dominant “structure of feeling.” Chapter 4 connects Eliot’s sense of inescapable disappointment and resignation to the lowered expectations of the 1870s, when the millenarian spirit of the former decades subsided into what, for many, felt like a Victorian “end of history.” Disappointment, however, comes with a new clarity—a realism that now grasps society as an evolving historical totality. Against theorists like Brian Massumi, who posit affect as ahistorical and nonrepresentational, this dissertation argues instead for the centrality of affect to a historicizing literary criticism that attempts to forge a connection between a novel’s narrative style and what Fredric Jameson calls its “political unconscious.” In so doing, I put forward a theory of affect as a mediatory category, bringing together novelistic representations and lived historical experience in such a way that allows us to interpret Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, and Middlemarch as three affective responses to social transformations wrought by capitalism in the nineteenth century—three different ways of feeling capitalism.
Eating Beyond Ecology: The Impacts of Hunting Technologies on Archaeofaunas from the Eastern Arctic
Keywords: Arctic Archaeology
Hunter-gatherers
Hunting technologies
Late Dorset
Thule Inuit
Zooarchaeology

This dissertation explores human-animal relationships within two very different societies, Late Dorset (500 CE to 1300 CE) and Thule Inuit (1200 CE to 1500 CE), who occupied common geographical areas throughout the eastern Arctic. While scholars interested in the behaviour of Northern hunter-gatherers have tended to focus on the primacy of environmental factors and changing environments, this dissertation aims to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the role of cultural factors in shaping human-animal interaction. I pursue this goal by focusing on distinct Late Dorset and Thule Inuit hunting technologies and practices, using zooarchaeological analyses to directly examine their impacts on subsistence strategies, including encounter rates, labour strategies, resource scheduling, and diet breadth. To address marked variability in resource availability between different areas in the eastern Arctic and allow for a cross-Arctic comparison, I consider three separate regions where Late Dorset and Thule Inuit occupied either the same site or sites that are located in close proximity. Although hunting strategies in each region were greatly influenced by regionally-specific environments, I argue that this research shows they are also culturally distinct. Results suggest that differences in Late Dorset and Thule Inuit hunting technologies impacted their archaeofaunas in various ways, they directly influenced each groups hunting strategies, and ultimately, helped shape the human-animal relationship in each society. In comparison to Thule Inuit, Late Dorset were constrained by their hunting technologies, having to rely more heavily upon specific types of terrain features and seasonal changes in the environment. Thule Inuit hunting technologies, by contrast, allowed for larger harvests of key resources, providing better provisioning and perhaps an increase in food security. These results serve to highlight the role of culture in prehistoric lifeways, even in â marginalâ environments.
Rebels, Wanderers, and Castaways: Characterizing Small Social Groups in the Literature of Empire, 1849-1914
Keywords: character
empire
kinship
networks
small social groups

This project uses pivotal texts belonging to several nineteenth-century literary subgenres—adventure fiction, school stories, the historical novel and spy fiction—to argue that literary representations of small social circles create distinct narrative shapes and modes of characterization. The small groups that shape these texts generate an ambivalent dynamism of small circles that offers modes of resisting, renegotiating or extending models of authority in the age of empire. While studies of the literature of empire often focus on the figure of the solitary “imperial man” or the consolidation of large imperial bureaucratic systems, the scalar scope of this project considers what lies in between. While the Bildungsroman and the love-plot dominate accounts of nineteenth-century narrative trajectories, small group narratives structure the shape of key genres concerned with empire-building or empire-breaking. The groups I analyze include the castaways of the Robinsonade adventure in Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852); the schoolboy tribes in the school fiction of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) and the stories comprising Rudyard Kipling’s The Complete Stalky Co. (1897-1929); the quadrangle of lovers and friends in Charlotte Brontë’s historical romance Shirley (1849); and the revolutionary circles of Joseph Conrad’s spy novel Under Western Eyes (1911). The small group lends itself to a narrative form in which the character of imperial culture is debated and renegotiated. The interlocking metaphors of kinship and friendship in small-group narratives emphasize the inextricability of individuals from the social. I show how the representations of social interactions within groups are used to challenge racial hierarchies, ideals of national character, and individual agency. Rather than hierarchical patterns of imperial cultural transmission, my readings find that, even in pro-imperial texts, the small group establishes private codes of conduct that run alongside or even against the rules of larger social organizations. The narrative representation of a group’s ability to create networks with other groups models the process of creating cultural change (or, in some cases, maintaining cultural stasis). My analyses demonstrate that the small group form articulates the complexities of governance within imperial space.
Melancholy Utopia: Loss and Fantasy in Contemporary American Literature and Film
Keywords: Grief
Melancholia
Queer Theory
Utopia

My project examines sites of social and psychic resistance to forfeiting loss in contemporary literature, film, and philosophy. I call these textual, cinematic, and performative spaces of resistance melancholy utopia. Working at the intersection of affect theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, I argue for the utopian potential in the protracted grieving of melancholia. The pathologization of grief in contemporary Western culture proceeds from the incessant demand for productivity inherent to late-stage capitalism: extended mourning is unproductive and economically inefficient, an emotional nuisance. Therefore, I focus on the violence that is intrinsic to the temporal demands made on mourning and argue that there is an innate counterhegemonic impulse in the melancholic’s steadfast grief. The melancholic subject resists the violent injunction to “move on” from her sorrow and creates instead an affective utopia that allows him or her to experience his or her pain and new forms of thinking. By focusing on post-1945 literature and film, I chart the “ugly” affect of melancholia and the contemporary salience of utopian dreaming. Although the authors and directors through whose work I develop the concept of melancholy utopia are otherwise diverse, they share a preoccupation with the relationship between loss and fantasy. My first chapter interrogates critical analyses of grief (Jacques Derrida), failure and lack (Judith Halberstam; Jacques Lacan), queer futurity (Lee Edelman), and utopia (José Muñoz). My next three chapters chart melancholy utopia and the alternative kinship relations it fosters in the kitchens of the American South (Carson McCullers; Harmony Korine), in the literary archive (David Foster Wallace), and in New Queer Cinema (Jennie Livingston; Sean Baker). Each chapter illustrates melancholy utopia as the nexus of pain and hope in modern grief. My project thus has broader implications for rethinking the discursive limits of kinship, love, and ethical fidelity in our contemporary moment.
The Construction and Transformation of Socialist Space in the Planned Cities of Stalinstadt and Sztรกlinvรกros
Keywords: Socialism
socialist cities
social planning
Stalinstadt
Sztรกlinvรกros
urban space

This dissertation explores and compares the social history of two towns named for Joseph Stalin during the 1950s in Eastern Europe. Stalinstadt in the German Democratic Republic and Sztálinváros in Hungary were new towns built along similar principles in the vicinity of large iron combines. As representational spaces of state socialism and “Stalinism” these towns presented, beside many similarities, a number of distinct features which are the result of different understandings and implementations of socialism throughout the region. Histories of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have acknowledged such distinctions and dismissed the idea of a uniform Soviet bloc as early as the 1970s. However, a comparative social history of these two “socialist cities” named for Joseph Stalin has not yet been written. The study consists of two parts. While the first chapter delves into the official, public and private memory of these two towns, the subsequent four chapters discuss the social history of Stalinstadt (1953 to 1961) and Sztálinváros (1951 to 1961) and explore four major spheres of everyday life under state socialism: the public sphere, the sphere of work, the sphere of leisure and the private sphere. These spheres have acquired new meanings under state socialism: hybrid spheres like public or secret privacy or private(ized) publicity render the public-private dichotomy used to describe Western societies problematic; a heavily politicized sphere of work and an equally ideology-laden sphere of leisure render a reconsideration of the meaning of work and free time under state socialism necessary. This comparative social history of Eisenhüttenstadt and Dunaújváros, as the two towns are named today, is thus also intended to contribute to the further developing of methodological tools used in the analysis of Eastern European socialist societies during the second half of the 20th century.
New Woman Sympathies: The Affective Innovations of Fin-de-SiĂ¨cle Feminist Fiction
Keywords: Mabel E. Wotton
Mary Cholmondeley
Mona Caird
New Woman
Sarah Grand
sympathy

This dissertation argues that the late-Victorian construct of the “New Woman” was integral to the development of a previously unrecognized literary and historical form of sympathy. Examining contemporaneous discussions of evolution, art, and affect alongside New Woman fiction, I explore how fin-de-siècle feminist authors uncoupled sympathy from essentialist understandings of femininity in order to align their heroines with more expansive forms of selfhood. This new sympathetic subjectivity was flexible rather than biologically fixed, socially directed rather than limited to the home, and imaginative and unorthodox rather than defaulting to normative familial allegiances. My first chapter reads Hester, the New Woman heroine of Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage, in relation to Edward Carpenter’s theory of the gender malleability and sympathetic elasticity of the intermediate sex. I argue that Hester’s fluctuation between “masculine” and “feminine” dispositions redirects her sympathies from circumscribed domesticity to wider possibilities of aesthetic and social commitment. Chapter two situates Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins alongside Vernon Lee’s concept of aesthetic empathy, which builds on William James’s embodied theory of emotion, to assert that corporeal responses to art can extend one’s sympathies. I suggest that when Grand’s Angelica cross-dresses as a boy, her newfound physical mobility and aesthetic invigoration lead to vitalizing sympathies antithetical to the imperative of feminine self-denial. Tracking another relationship between sympathy and art, chapter three shows how Mabel E. Wotton’s “The Fifth Edition” undermines the Victorian conflation of a supposedly imitative female sympathy with forms of literary derivation such as plagiarism. Instead, Wotton casts the transpersonal feelings of her female author figure as a creative force. The final chapter examines how Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus draws on post-Darwinian concepts such as atavism and ancestral memory to uphold inter-temporal sympathies, which enable its New Woman, Hadria, to transcend narrowly biological notions of sympathetic descent. Repurposing Victorian theories of the evolutionary diffusion of sympathy, these authors position their New Woman heroines as the harbingers of a more capacious affective age. This project thus illuminates how New Woman authors supplanted the fundamentally “feminine” feeling that constrained nineteenth-century women, reconfiguring sympathy as gender hybridic, socially expansive, and ultimately transformative.
The New Medical Model: Chronic Disease and Evidence-based Medicine
Keywords: chronic disease
epistemology
evidence-based medicine
metaphysics
philosophy of medicine

In the traditional medical model, physicians cure acute diseases using knowledge from the basic biomedical sciences. With the rise of chronic disease and evidence-based medicine (EBM) in the second half of the Twentieth Century, ‘the new medical model’ emerged. In the new medical model, physicians prevent or manage chronic diseases using the principles of EBM. Chronic diseases and EBM have created a host of daunting problems for modern medicine. In this thesis dissertation, my Central Aim is a philosophical analysis of chronic disease and of EBM, especially concerning treatment and prevention. I also maintain a Central Thesis: many practical problems in chronic disease care and in EBM are intimately connected to conceptual, metaphysical and epistemic problems. The practical problems include: reductionism; fractured care; multifactorialism; the growing burden of chronic diseases; treatment effect heterogeneity, treatment futility and treatment harm; cookbook medicine; the tyranny of aggregate outcomes; RCT worship; unrepresentative trials; and multimorbidity. The philosophical problems I explore are the following. In Chapter 2, I examine the nature of chronic diseases and advance a metaphysical account in which chronic diseases are bodily properties. In Chapter 3, I re-examine existing models of disease classification and argue for a new descriptive model (the ‘constitutive model’) as well as a new guiding principle for disease prevention (‘the monomechanism ideal’). In Chapter 4, I develop a general account of why mechanistic models often fail to predict the results of medical interventions. In Chapter 5, I reconstruct the standard model of prediction in medicine, the ‘Risk Generalization-Particularization (Risk GP) Model’. In Chapter 6, I develop a theory of causal inference in comparative group studies that illuminates the roles of randomization, confounders and causes. Finally, in Chapter 7 I show why EBM’s preferred approach to generalizing trial results, ‘simple extrapolation’, is a deeply problematic solution to the problem of extrapolation. Throughout the ongoing discussion, we indeed find that many practical problems in modern medicine are tangled up with philosophical problems. It will require both medical and philosophical wisdom to unravel them.
Infrastructures of Critique: Art and Visual Culture in Contemporary Beijing (1978-2012)
Keywords: Beijing
Contemporary Art
Urban Studies

This dissertation is a story about relationships between artists, their work, and the physical infrastructure of Beijing. I argue that infrastructure’s utilitarianism has relegated it to a category of nothing to see, and that this tautology effectively shrouds other possible interpretations. My findings establish counter-narratives and critiques of Beijing, a city at once an immerging global capital city, and an urban space fraught with competing ways of seeing, those crafted by the state and those of artists. Statecraft in this dissertation is conceptualized as both the art of managing building projects that function to control Beijing’s public spaces, harnessing the thing-power of infrastructure, and the enforcement of everyday rituals that surround Beijinger’s interactions with the city’s infrastructure. From the spectacular architecture built to signify China’s neoliberal approaches to globalized urban spaces, to micro-modifications in how citizens sort their recycling depicted on neighborhood bulletin boards, the visuals of Chinese statecraft saturate the urban landscape of Beijing. I advocate for heterogeneous ways of seeing of infrastructure that releases its from being solely a function of statecraft, to a constitutive part of the artistic practices of: Song Dong (宋冬b. 1966), Cao Fei (曹斐b. 1978), Lu Hao (卢昊b. 1969) and Ning Ying (宁瀛b. 1959) where it is reconfigured as a space of critique. Structured around four typologies, I begin with roads and Ning’s films where the outdated roads refuse to keep pace with the rise in private car ownership. From traffic, I move to Song’s trash based works that make visible the contemporary buying habits of Beijingers in contrast to earlier state policies of frugality and recycling. Then, I consider the migrant workers whose labour is building the city, whose multitudes the state strives to conceal, and whose bodies artists exploit as a medium. Lastly, from embodied practices and spaces, I excavate the buried fiber optic networks that produce the immateriality of the Internet to discuss how Cao’s online practice parodies China’s rapacious urbanization predicated on the real estate market. Iconic buildings of contemporary China colonize her works, but instead of being aesthetically pleasing monuments to the global contemporary, they are a critical commentary on state policies that monetize collectively owned land.