VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Literature, architecture, and postmodernity: Donald Barthelme and J.G. Ballard
Keywords: postmodernism
surrealism
Barthelme
avant-garde
Ballard
cubism
literature and architecture

Focusing on works between the 1960s and the early ’80s, this thesis sets the literature of Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) and J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) within the context of twentieth-century architectural theory and history (written), design (drawn), productions (built), professional practice (managed), and pedagogy (taught). The primary aim of this study is to explore the discursive exchange between literature and architecture, while probing the putative association between postmodernity and architecture. By introducing a broader set of social phenomena into debates about postmodernity, my thesis enables a revaluation of how the architectural idiom is interpreted in literature.
Using textual and visual analysis, this thesis argues that Barthelme’s and Ballard’s literary works operate at an intersection of the visual arts and mass media. Responding to American and European twentieth-century visual avant-gardes and socio-cultural transformations, architecture participates in the formulation of avant-garde conceptual frameworks. Critically, architecture is not only an aesthetic discipline; it is also a social discourse. Through the discipline’s alignment with ‘new’ and ‘old’ avant-gardes, Barthelme and Ballard use architecture as a point of creative departure to undertake formal and thematic literary experiments. For both authors, contact with the architectural avant-garde has literary consequences.
This thesis considers four interconnecting ways literature and architecture ‘speak’ to each other: representation, discourse, formal comparisons, and influence or inspiration. Within my study these topics are examined through critical meditations on architecture from geographical (Fredric Jameson, David Harvey), architectural (Robert Venturi, Charles Jencks) and visual cultural (W. J. T. Mitchell, Marshall McLuhan) sources. Also figuring prominently are epitextual materials, especially archival documentation from the Donald Barthelme Literary Papers at the University of Houston and the Papers of J. G. Ballard collection at the British Library. This thesis opens up new ways of understanding the interart pluralism that characterises the postmodern.
Evolution and the novels of D.H. Lawrence
Keywords: Literature and Science
D.H. Lawrence
Henri Bergson
Modernist Literature
Evolution

This thesis examines the degree and nature of D.H. Lawrence’s interaction with the concept of evolution, as manifest in his novels and the longer of his short stories. It addresses both Lawrence’s engagement with evolutionism directly informed by biology and his relationship with extrapolations of evolutionary ideas from outside the scientific sphere. In particular it considers the theories of Henri Bergson, and theosophical and occultist appropriations of evolutionary concepts. Instead of approaching Bergson as a philosopher of time, as has much previous research into Bergson’s impact upon modernist literature, the thesis considers how the Bergsonian notion that a ‘need of creation’ drives evolutionary development is reflected in Lawrence’s fiction.
Chapter One investigates the role of the imagination in interaction with nature in Lawrence’s earliest novels, in particular The White Peacock (1911). It suggests that while creative imagination may appear to give a distorted impression of wider nature, it is nonetheless seen to be necessary for contact with the world to be enriching. Chapter Two considers the relationship between creativity and development in The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), suggesting that creative force is seen to provide a means to resist the effects of wider cycles in nature between evolution and dissolution. In Chapter Three, Lawrence’s novels of migration and self-discovery, The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron’s Rod (1922), are suggested to employ intricate Bergsonian structures, whereby the respective protagonists simultaneously explore multiple paths of evolutionary development, despite the ostensible paradoxes which result from this. Chapter Four, focusing upon Lawrence’s Australian fiction, considers the relationship between the hostile environment of Australia and the evolutionary development of its inhabitants. Chapter Five considers the importance of occultist evolutionism to Lawrence, using his annotations to P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum as a means to better understand the mystical aspects of the fiction he wrote while in North America. Finally, Chapter Six addresses the presentation of illness and injury in Lawrence’s work, particularly in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), examining the relationship between the composition of an individual and his or her ability to fit into the structures of wider nature.
The silicon isotopic composition of inner Solar System materials
Keywords: Moon
stable isotopes
cosmochemistry

This study uses high precision silicon isotopic measurements to understand events that occurred during the earliest stages of formation of the terrestrial planets. The isotopic compositions of diverse materials such as chondrites, lunar rocks and asteroidal basalts can shed light on the homogeneity of the solar nebula, metal-silicate differentiation on planetary bodies, and terrestrial moon formation.
Limited variation in the Si isotopic composition of meteorites is evidence for a relatively homogeneous inner solar system with respect to silicon isotopes. The Si isotopic composition of bulk silicate Earth (BSE) is, however, heavier than meteorites. This points to an event unique to Earth that fractionated Si isotopes, such as core formation at terrestrial conditions. The Δ30SiBSE-meteorite value from this study indicates that the Earth’s core contains 8.7 (+8.1/−6.2) wt% Si.
No systematic δ30Si differences were found between any of the lunar lithologies analysed, implying a Si isotopic homogeneity of the sampled lunar source regions. The lunar average, δ30Si = −0.29±0.08permil (2σSD), is identical to the recent value of Savage et al. (2010) for BSE of δ30Si = −0.29 ± 0.08permil (2σSD). The best explanation of the data is that Si isotopes must have homogenised in the aftermath of the Moon-forming impact with no subsequent fractionation in the proto-lunar disk.
The Si isotopic composition of olivine within lunar basalts was found to be the same or heavier than δ30Si(pyroxene). This is not consistent with terrestrial data where δ30Si(pyroxene) is always lighter than δ30Si(olivine). Crystallisation history cannot explain the data, and the slow diffusion rates of Si rule out cooling rates as a cause. Therefore, it appears that inter-mineral fractionation of Si isotopes occurs differently on the Moon.
The δ30Si of chondrules picked from Allende spanned a range of ~0.6permil, a factor of two greater than the bulk meteorite range. There is no evidence for the variable δ30Si of the chondrules being the result of post-formation alteration and there is no convincing evidence for precursor heterogeneity being the primary cause. It is likely that Si isotopic composition of chondrules is the result of evaporation and reequilibration with the evaporated phase.
"Transforming cannons into cultural currency": the Fulbright Foreign Student Program and the transmission of the American creed abroad
Keywords: educational exchange
American foreign policy
international relations
Fulbright Program

This thesis attempts to demonstrate how the Fulbright Foreign Student Program has transmitted the values of the American Creed—the normative values that underpin U.S. hegemony—to foreign individuals by encouraging, funding, and facilitating academic experiences in U.S. universities since 1946. It builds on constructivist attempts to understand the role of ideas in international relations, particularly in relation to U.S. foreign policy and hegemony. The thesis argues that the exchanges under the auspices of the Fulbright Program constitute a “transmission belt” or socialization mechanism for the values of the American Creed— individualism, democracy, equality, and capitalism—among young foreign intellectual elites, many of whom go on to have careers in their home countries where they put those values into practice. The first empirical section analyzes essays in The Fulbright Difference written by alumni of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, coding and categorizing their responses according to the values of the American Creed that they invoke. The second empirical section explores a single case in depth: that of renowned Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus—founder of the Grameen Bank, pioneer of the concept of microcredit, and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize—who was a Fulbright Scholar at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the mid-1960s. His memoirs, speeches, and publications demonstrate how his experiences in the U.S. shaped his beliefs in the power and freedom of the individual, in democracy, in equality, and in free-market capitalism, and how those beliefs in turn shaped the Grameen Bank as an institution that upholds and furthers these values.
Working-class women's diet and pregnancy in the long nineteenth century
Keywords: food
diet
nutrition
19th century
motherhood
childbirth
spina bifida

Food historians have revealed that what constituted a working-class British woman's diet in the nineteenth century was quite different in calorific and nutritional content from what her family consumed. This work explores the nineteenth-century maternal diet and the effect this nutritional inequality had on the health of women and their infants. Divided into three sections, this dissertation deals with different aspects of nineteenth-century maternal nutrition. Section one explores the nineteenth-century medical understanding of diet, as well as the influences of class and traditional beliefs on eating habits, and how these factors determined the diet prescribed to mothers during pregnancy. Section two investigates the factors that perpetuated the unequal distribution and consumption of food within households. Factors explored include regional variations in working-class diet; gender associations with foods; economic changes in material wealth and expectations, and the pressures of respectability on female food denial. This section concludes that food refusal and unequal distribution were reinforced throughout the long nineteenth century because these behaviours appeared to have value, real or imagined, as long-term economic strategies. Food refusal maintained respectability, and helped women secure an economic support network. Mothers' self-denial seems to have secured the economic loyalties of children, making her the recipient of their income. The final section addresses how deprivation and dietary changes affected infant and maternal health, specifically examining how insufficient vitamin D and rickets influenced birth outcomes, and how the switch from a rural diet to an urban diet contributed to a rise in neural tube disorders in Wales. The analysis of childbirth data revealed a significant correlation between rickets and childbirth complications. The findings of this section also suggest that the dietary changes that followed migration and the change from an agricultural lifestyle to a market-integrated, industrial lifestyle for a majority of the Welsh population reduced women's intake of folic acid leaving their children susceptible to neural tube disorders.
Proxenia: inter-polis networks and relations in the Classical and Hellenistic world
Keywords: interstate relations
euergetism
proxeny
Greek epigraphy
polis

This thesis examines the Greek institution of proxenia and uses it to explore how inter-polis institutions functioned in shaping the behaviour of both individuals and communities in the ancient world. In response to continuing debate concerning the nature of proxenia, I demonstrate that, throughout the Classical and Hellenistic periods, it was defined as an honorific status by the practical intermediary role which it performed in facilitating interactions between different poleis. As such proxenia was a central element of a broader system of inter-polis institutions which constituted the dominant interstate discourse in the ancient Mediterranean. This thesis shows that Proxenia with its particularly rich epigraphic record allows us to explore how poleis made use of this institutional language of status and legitimacy to assert membership of an interstate system which was conceived of as a society of poleis.
In Chapter 1 I propose a new model for reconstructing how proxenia was understood based on the expectations – of what proxenoi should be and do – which poleis communicated in their stereotypical descriptions of honorands in proxeny decrees. Chapter 2 then explores how this abstract understanding of proxenia worked in practice in the political realities of elite competition in the Greek poleis. In Chapter 3 I use proxeny lists to reconstruct the perspective of the polis on proxenia – in the networks of hundreds of proxenoi which even small poleis amassed as a result of constant interaction. Chapter 4 explores the role of proxenia, within a broader system of institutions, in the construction of communal identity within an anarchic interstate system. In Chapter 5 I develop quantitative methods to explore the epigraphic record for proxeny’s decline, arguing that proxenia, along with the other inter-polis institutions, disappeared because the Roman authorities at the centre replaced inter-polis connections as the source of communal identity and prestige.
Enacting connectivity: woodland mammal conservation practices in England &amp; Wales
Keywords: Animal Geography
Connectivity
Conservation
Nature

In recent years ideas about connectivity have become increasingly influential in theories pertaining to wildlife conservation. These ideas range from concerns with spatial habitat linkages or species' movements, to the forms of connection existing between 'people' and 'nature'. This thesis is concerned with how these various forms of connectivity are enacted in wildlife conservation through varied spatial practices. Following Mol (2002), I suggest that these modes of connectivity are enacted not separately but as a multiple. Indeed, through tracing how connectivity is enacted in a series of conservation situations relating to woodland mammals in England and Wales (red squirrels, pine martens, and wild/feral boar), I suggest that these multiple spatial practices of connectivity shape the biopolitical possibilities for living with non-human life. Since the connectivity multiple is composed, following Latour (2010) I further argue that it can be recomposed. Thus, I make the normative suggestion that contemporary trends in conservation policy (towards larger-scale action, process-based objectives, and neoliberal modes of governance) might be rethought and differently articulated through a conceptual and practical approach I term revitalizing conservation. This thesis thus makes several important contributions to geographic literatures. Following a widespread (re)affirmation of nonhuman agency in social science (e.g. Latour, 2005; Callon et al, 2009; Braun & Whatmore, 2010), and particularly the agential capacities of animals (Wolch & Emel, 1998; Philo & Wilbert, 2000), it foregrounds the role of woodland mammals in enacting connectivity through developing the concept of animal mobilities. Furthermore, it engages with existing work tracing affirmative possibilities for conservation (bio)politics (Whatmore, 2002; Lulka, 2009; Hinchliffe et al, 2005; Hinchliffe, 2008; J.Lorimer, 2010, 2012, 2015), by illuminating the intersection of spatial practices of connectivity, and the potential these offer for alternative modes of 'living with' more-than-human lives.
Chemical tools for the study of epigenetic mechanisms
Keywords: protein NMR
posttranslational modifications
Epigenetic regulation
DNA modification

The overall goal of my work was to develop and apply new chemical methods for the study of epigenetic DNA and protein modifications.
In Chapter 3 the development of Suzuki-Miyaura cross coupling (SMcc) for the post-synthetic modification of DNA is described. DNA modification by SMcc is efficient (4-6h) and proceeds under mild conditions (37°C, pH 8.5). The incorporation of various groups useful for biological investigations is demonstrated using this methodology. Using a photocrosslinker, introduced into the DNA by SMcc capture experiments are performed to identify potential binding partners of modified DNA.
In Chapter 4 a dehydroalanine (Dha) based chemical protein modification method is described that enables the introduction of posttranslational modification (PTM) mimics into histones. The PTM mimics introduced by this method are tested using western- and dot-blot and binding and enzymatic assays, confirming they function as mimics of the natural modifications.
Chapter 5 describes the use of a generated PTM mimics to elucidate the function of O-linked β-Nacetylglucosamine (GlcNAc) of histones in transcriptional regulation. It is shown that GlcNAcylation of Thr-101 on histone H2A can destabilize nucleosome by modulating the H2A/B dimer – H3/H4 tetramer interface.
N- and C-terminal histone tails play an important role in transcriptional regulation. In Chapter 6, nuclear magnetic resonance is used to investigate the structure of the histone H3 N-terminal tail in a nucleosome. The H3 tail, while intrinsically disordered, gains some α-helical character and adopts a compact conformation in a nucleosome context. This H3 tail structure is shown to be modulated by Ser-10 phosphorylation.
The effect of a new covalent DNA modification, 5- hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), on transcription factor binding is investigated in Chapter 7. 5hmC influences HIF1α/β, USF and MAX binding to their native recognition sequence, implying involvement of this modification in epigenetic regulation.
Linear programming algorithms for detecting separated data in binary logistic regression models
Keywords: binary data
linear programming
infinite parameters
monotone likelihood
logistic regression

This thesis is a study of the detection of separation among the sample points in binary logistic regression models. We propose a new algorithm for detecting separation and demonstrate empirically that it can be computed fast enough to be used routinely as part of the fitting process for logistic regression models. The parameter estimates of a binary logistic regression model fit using the method of maximum likelihood sometimes do not converge to finite values. This phenomenon (also known as monotone likelihood or infinite parameters) occurs because of a condition among the sample points known as separation. There are two classes of separation. When complete separation is present among the sample points, iterative procedures for maximizing the likelihood tend to break down, when it would be clear that there is a problem with the model. However, when quasicomplete separation is present among the sample points, the iterative procedures for maximizing the likelihood tend to satisfy their convergence criterion before revealing any indication of separation. The new algorithm is based on a linear program with a nonnegative objective function that has a positive optimal value when separation is present among the sample points. We compare several approaches for solving this linear program and find that a method based on determining the feasibility of the dual to this linear program provides a numerically reliable test for separation among the sample points. A simulation study shows that this test can be computed in a similar amount of time as fitting the binary logistic regression model using the method of iteratively reweighted least squares: hence the test is fast enough to be used routinely as part of the fitting procedure. An implementation of our algorithm (as well as the other methods described in this thesis) is available in the R package safeBinaryRegression.
Investigation of protective mechanisms of organic coatings by thermal testing and electrochemical techniques
Keywords: Organic Coating
Thermal Testing
Coating Degradation
Electrochemical Techniques

This work investigated the protection of mechanism of organic coatings on steel exposed to 3% sodium chloride solution at 50°C, coupled with the use of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) to monitor progress of corrosion and degradation of coating. Unlike Walter, EIS measurement was conducted at 50°C as well as after cooling, and measurements at intermediate temperatures have been used to characterize the dependence of the process involved.
The proposition that corrosion rate is controlled by the ionic resistance of an organic coating has been tested. EIS results were fitted to a model circuit and changes in the film resistance and charge-transfer resistance with temperature were analyzed to deduce activation energies for the processes involved. Surprisingly, the calculated activation energy for coating resistance is significantly lower than the activation energy for the charge transfer resistance. This suggests that ion conduction in the coating, as apparent in an AC measurement, cannot be controlling the corrosion rate.
Potentiostatic pulse tests on coated metal enable iR-corrected polarization curves to be plotted at different temperatures. From this, the activation energy determined from the corrosion currents also higher matches the higher activation energy value calculated from the charge transfer resistance. However, measurements of coating resistance on free films of the same coating also generate higher activation energy values, leaving two possible models that can account for the results.