VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Conceptions of place in Old English poetry
Keywords: Beowulf
poetics
space
hagiography
place
elegy
poetry
Old English

Previous studies of place and space in Anglo-Saxon literature and culture have tended to focus on the engagement with these phenomena as a means of understanding the world and of imposing order on it. The analysis offered here scrutinises instead the literary representation and function of place in the vernacular poetic tradition, as well as its symbolic significance. In its examination of conceptions of place in Old English poetry, this thesis contends that place is fundamentally fleeting and symbolic of the transience of all earthly things.
The present study first assesses the role of the hall as the chief location for aristocratic human society, especially as manifested in the hall of Heorot. The attributes of this structure are closely linked to the features of homosocial life in the comitatus. However, the hall and life in the comitatus are, like the city and society depicted in The Ruin, revealed to be fleeting. Whilst this is an inescapable reality for human society, the transitory experience of place is also common to individuals exiled from human company, as exemplified in a number of more overtly elegiac poems. Yet this characteristic aspect of place is not always necessarily a negative thing, since, in certain verse saints’ lives, places initially inhabited by demons and heathens are converted into Christian sites. Additionally, these locations take on particular salvific and narrative significations, demonstrating further the varied literary significance of place. Finally, the analysis examines the diverse manifestations of place in Beowulf. The dwelling of Grendel’s mother inverts the familiar place of the hall, unsettling notions of human social space; the dragon’s barrow evokes architectural features of Britain’s Roman past to convey the passage of time; and despite memorialising the poem’s hero, Beowulf’s own burial mound stands as a monument to impermanence. Ultimately, in contrast to the eternal place of Heaven, earthly places are shown to be emblematic of the transience of all earthly things.
Negotiating English language teacher identity—an autoethnography
Keywords: Hong Kong
native speakerism
transnationalism
English teachers
autoethnography

Identity construction is an integral part of learning how to teach. As a former British colony, Hong Kong provides a unique educational and research context where East meets West. This study examines my identity construction as an English language teacher (ELT) in Hong Kong and the United States using an autoethnographic approach, which serves as an attempt to answer recent calls in the field of applied linguistics for more innovative and authentic research. Reflexive journals and essays written for my postgraduate courses were used to reconstruct my life stories and identify the critical events pertinent to my professional identity formation as an ELT and meaningful lived experiences as a transnational woman. To analyse the important events that contributed to the construction of my professional identity, critical event analysis was used in tandem with salient literature pertaining to teacher identity development and teacher education. Based on my lived experiences as a transnational woman educator, I provide some suggestions regarding teacher identity construction for school administrators, researchers, and teacher educators to consider when implementing ways to recruit, support, and retain English language teachers.
Sugar in the British Atlantic World 1650-1720
Keywords: Sugar
Slavery
Consumption

This DPhil thesis, Sugar in the British Atlantic World 1650-1720, seeks to analyse the effect and extent of the sugar trade in the seventeenth century. By 1700, sugar was one of the most important commodities in Europe. It was the driving force behind the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of people, huge accumulation of capital, the growth of international trade, and a number of important subsidiary industries. The development of the institution of chattel slavery and its influence on the history of capitalism has been the subject of many scholarly investigations, however there has been comparatively little work done on the consumption on sugar itself. The thesis, therefore, examines trade in sugar across the Atlantic Ocean and tracks the ways in which the good was consumed.
The intellectual contribution of the thesis comes from its discussion of extensive archival material which identifies the extent of early sugar consumption and which traces how the good transformed from luxury to everyday comestible. Building on from this, the work also seeks to understand the repercussions of such consumption for the Atlantic economy. It demonstrates the key role played by sugar in the rapidly changing economic systems and culture. Tracking consumption of sugar in the British Atlantic world tells us more about the state of the sugar trade as a whole, and the global economic system which it helped to forge. The research gives insight into the development of international trading networks, the commercialisation of the British Atlantic economy and, underneath it all, the reliance of the metropolitan environment on exploitation in the colonies.
Big data approaches to microbial genomics

Keywords: genomics
machine learning
bioinformatics

Alongside tremendous challenges in infectious diseases, like the rise of antimicrobial resistance and the coronavirus disease pandemic, the 21st century is also witness to the big data revolution, which offers opportunities to design methodology capable of addressing these great challenges. Whilst developing tools there are two competing philosophies of how to gain insight from big data: The modelling approach, where the natural data generating mechanism is approximated by statistical inference, and the algorithmic approach, where general-purpose algorithms are tuned to capture hidden structure in the data for prediction. The aim of the thesis is to contribute existing infectious disease problems, by motivating, designing, and applying the correct big data methodology, whilst facilitating future use through generating applications can be easily re-purposed. I first design a machine learner that can predict the source of Campylobacteriosis 33% more accurately than the previous most commonly used methods. Our method broadens the data input spectrum to captures of whole genomes, which uniquely allows assigning sources to individual samples showing a shift in host affinity of one of the most common lineages of Campylobacter jejuni. Based on the individual prediction of the machine learner,I infer which genetic changes are associated with host specificity by conducting a genome-wide association study. I find fluoroquinolone resistant genes pre-adapting chicken isolates to infection for humans and polyphosphate pathway associated genes to distinguish adaption to chicken and ruminant niche. For the study of COVID-19 risk, I conduct a machine learning prediction of very severe forms of the disease, hospitalisation, and susceptibility, whilst also inferring risk factors for all phenotypes by applying Bayesian model averaging. I re-discover commonly defined risk factors describing socio-economic standing, ill health and ethnicity whilst discovering more novel factors like previous lung injury predisposing very severe COVID-19 and bring order to the wealth of published COVID-19 risk studies. In the closing arguments I give limitations of my work and give recommendations on how the developed tools can be re-applied to make big data research more accessible. I also expand how statistical inference and machine learning prediction can be used in unison to tap into the potential of big data to address the foremost infectious disease challenges of our time.
Exploiting sulfinate coupling partners for the preparation of diversely functionalised heterocycles
Keywords: sulfinate
reductive coupling
diarylmethane
palladium
cross-coupling
catalysis
desulfinative

In the following thesis, sulfinates have been exploited for the formation of di(hetero)arylmethanes and bi(hetero)aryls, either by being formed in situ or through a straightforward synthetic sequence.
Chapter 1 discusses previously developed desulfinative cross-coupling methodologies, an overview of the application of sulfinate salts in synthetic chemistry, and cross-coupling reactions to construct C(sp2)- C(sp3) bonds.
Chapter 2 details the route development for the synthesis of benzyl sulfinate starting materials.
Chapter 3 presents a palladium catalysed C(sp2)- C(sp3) desulfinative cross-coupling to form di(hetero)arylmethanes from benzyl sulfinates and heteroaryl halides.
Chapter 4 demonstrates further developments to the palladium catalysed C(sp2)- C(sp3) desulfinative cross-coupling to form di(hetero)arylmethanes, through a one-pot protocol. The benzyl sulfinate is formed in situ before entering the cross-coupling step. This methodology avoids problematic preparation and storage of unstable benzyl sulfinates, allowing a wider variety of di(hetero)arylmethanes to be accessed.
Chapter 5 describes practical and safety improvements made to the palladium catalysed C(sp2)- C(sp2) desulfinative cross-coupling process, to form bi(hetero)aryls on large scale.
Chapter 6 concludes the work and evaluates potential avenues for future research.
Chapter 7 details the experimental procedures and data.
Supramolecular halogen bonding and photo-responsive transmembrane anion transporters
Keywords: anion recognition
anion binding
chloride
transmembrane transport
HPTS
chalcogen bonding
halogen bonding

This thesis describes the design, synthesis and testing of novel anion host architectures which exploit hydrogen, halogen, and chalcogen bonding for the purpose of selective and stimuli-responsive anion transport across lipid bilayer membranes.
Chapter 1 introduces the field of anion supramolecular chemistry, with particular focus on areas of relevance to this thesis, namely transmembrane anion transport.
Chapter 2 describes the design, synthesis and testing of monodentate halogen and hydrogen bonding anion transporters.
Chapter 3 describes the design, synthesis and testing of bidentate halogen and chalcogen bonding anion transporters with non-protonophoric activity and carriers with higher denticity.
Chapter 4 describes the design, synthesis and testing of photo-caged, stimuli-responsive anion transporters.
Chapter 5 describes the experimental procedures used within this research and details the characterisation of compounds presented in Chapters 2–4.
Chapter 6 summarises and concludes this thesis.
The Appendix holds all the original data for the 1H NMR titration experiments and the anion transport assays.
Family language policy and Chinese-English bilingualism: an exploratory study of Beijing families
Keywords: Chinese-English bilingualism
family language policy
parental language ideology

Family language policy (FLP) studies language ideology, management, and practice among family members in the home domain. Although English is a global lingua franca and the fever for English learning has persisted in China for decades, there has been little research on how mainland Chinese parents perceive, manage, and practice English language learning and use for their children. This study aims to learn how some Chinese parents perceive Chinese-English bilingualism, manage English learning for their children, and practice English use with their children. With a mixed methods design, this study recruited 26 parents of primary school children in Beijing for the questionnaire and three of the 26 parents for the semi-structured interview. The children (aged 6 to 12) went to a Chinese monolingual primary school where they learned English as a foreign language (EFL). Results show that the parents had highly positive attitudes toward their children’s Chinese-English bilingual development, but they were unable to communicate with their children in English at home due to their limited English proficiency. As a result, the parents sought alternative methods to help develop and improve their children’s English skills. The findings reveal an ideology-practice gap among these Beijing parents and significant barriers to parent-child communication in English at home.
Crosslinguistic influence in L3 acquisition: a systematic review
Keywords: systematic review
multilingualism
L3 acquisition
crosslinguistic influence

Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) denotes the facilitative and/or negative influence from a bilingual’s L1 to their L2 and vice versa (e.g., Sharwood Smith & Kellerman, 1986). Most studies on CLI target simultaneous bilinguals (Serratrice, 2013), and have found that certain variables like language dominance (operationalised as the societal language) affect the presence of CLI in this population (Van Dijk et al., 2021). A less investigated but growing area of CLI research explores the acquisition of a third or further language(s) (L3/Ln) (Puig-Mayenco, et al., 2020). The fact that many children across the globe speak two languages/dialects from birth and/or at an early age (OECD, 2014), in turn making learning an L3 a more prevalent occurrence, highlights the importance of focusing more on CLI in the L3 context. Furthermore, estimates indicate that over 15% of the population are multilingual. Drawing on 27 studies, this systematic review therefore investigates the effect of CLI and learner/language specific variables (such as language proficiency) which may interact with this process, across linguistic domains including phonology and lexis. Furthermore, in focusing on successive/sequential bilinguals (referring to those who have had a gap between learning their L1 and L2), this review intends to clearly target L3 learning, as in simultaneous bilinguals there may be no distinction between an L1 and L2 (instead referred to as 2L1), therefore challenging whether additional languages would in fact be L3s. Evidence of CLI was found in 26 of the 27 studies, albeit to varying degrees, with a variety of linguistic domains and features represented in the research. The data extracted from these studies contained a mixture of results, but CLI was found to be on the whole more facilitative. Major observations from this review include the ongoing challenges researchers face with terminological discrepancies. This work carries importance for both academic and non-academic audiences: from a theoretical perspective, understanding what variables underpin CLI in L3/Ln can develop the research community’s current understanding of the cognitive experiences of multilinguals; from a pedagogical perspective, assessing what we do know about CLI in L3/Ln acquisition through a robust review can inform learning and teaching practices among learners and educators alike. Despite a trend of monolingualism in the UK due to the lingua franca status of English, multilingual individuals are increasingly becoming the norm rather than the exception worldwide, and this should be reflected in current research.
Hedgehog Acyltransferase: Structure, Function and Inhibition
Keywords: Structural biology
Cryo-electron microscopy
Nanobodies
Membrane proteins
Acyltransferase
Hedgehog signalling
Inhibitor
Drug discovery

The Hedgehog signalling pathway is essential for mammalian development. Errors in Hedgehog signalling resulting in loss of function during development, lead to a variety of congenital diseases, including holoprosencephaly, brachydactyly and disorders of sex development. In adults, Hedgehog signalling is largely dormant, and aberrant Hedgehog signalling has been implicated in cancers of various organs. As such, the Hedgehog signalling pathway is an important anti-cancer drug target and drugs against the Smoothened cell-surface receptor, which relays the Hedgehog signal across the receiving cell membrane, have proven useful in treatment in the clinic. A critical step in this pathway is the maturation of the sonic Hedgehog (SHH) morphogen. SHH undergoes a unique maturation process in which it is expressed as a 45 kDa pre-protein with N-terminal “hedge” and C-terminal “hog” domains. The C-terminal hog domain has homology to intein domains and induces autocleavage and concomitant addition of a cholesterol moiety at the C-terminus of the “hedge” domain. The N-terminal amine of the hedge fragment is palmitoylated to yield a dually-lipidated N-terminal SHH signalling fragment – the mature morphogen. SHH palmitoylation is catalysed by Hedgehog acyltransferase (HHAT), an integral membrane enzyme, located in the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. This thesis explores the structure-function relationship of HHAT and its interaction with the SHH morphogen. In Chapter 3, the expression of HHAT and production of a high quality sample for structural studies is discussed. Creation and characterisation of single-chain camelid antibody fragments (nanobodies) against HHAT for use in structural studies is covered in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5 the structure of HHAT is presented and the binding mode of the acyl-donor substrate is discussed. Furthermore, structural information is confirmed through mutagenesis assays. In Chapter 6, the interaction of HHAT with the acyl-receiving substrate, SHH, is explored through the use of biophysical approaches to identify the SHH binding site. The final chapter, Chapter 7, covers the determination of the structure of HHAT in complex with inhibitor compounds and discusses the mode of inhibition. Overall, this work provides a basis for the function of HHAT, details the HHAT structure and explores HHAT inhibition at the structural level.
Living standards and market integration in the rural economy of Roman Britain
Keywords: Roman Britain
Roman agriculture
peasant economies
peasant consumption
rural consumption
Roman peasants
Roman archaeology
ancient economy
rural archaeology
Roman economy

Rural non-élites (i.e. ‘peasant producers’) are thought to have comprised 50–95% of the Roman population, and yet, because they are seen as having operated largely at subsistence, models of ancient economic development see them as having had little effect on the wider economy. The spread of commercial excavation regulations across Britain (and in other parts of the former Roman world) has created a growing body of evidence pertaining to rural settlement and economy. Economic historians and archaeologists alike have used these data to make arguments about the Roman economy—but continue to debate whether or not excavated rural sites should be seen as representative of the ancient settlement landscape at all.
This thesis examines data from four microregions in Southern Britain, arguing, first, that the new archaeological data available since the passing of PPG16 provide representative samples of sites up and down the socio-economic spectrum. Second, it argues that farm sites of all statuses were integrated into local, regional, and supra-regional markets to a degree typically not recognised in current economic models of the Roman agricultural economy. The variegated landscape revealed by commercial excavations demonstrates that this integration was the result of the complex interaction of multiple macro- and micro-economic factors—changes in consumer culture (beginning in the Late Iron Age), expanding markets, and site status alongside institutional changes (taxation)—that fostered widespread integration in the Roman world. These data suggest that models of the Roman ‘peasantry’ and the wider economy must be re-theorised to accommodate changes in rural demand, as well as production, as a possible factor in economic change.
Champions of the crowd: aediles in Roman society
Keywords: elections
aediles
aedileship
magistracy
politics
Rome

This thesis provides a social history of the plebeian and curule aedileships of the Roman republic. It examines the relationship between aediles and the Roman people, both in the idealized form described by the Roman aristocracy and from the perspective of the aediles' audience, the 'crowd'. To do this, it looks at where aediles interacted with the people, how they communicated, and which groups of people they interacted with. It asks several questions usually unasked in studies devoted to the constitution of republican Rome. How did Rome’s politicians communicate ideas to the people and their peers? In what spaces did they interact? What did Rome's politicians think the social role of a magistracy was, or ought to be? And, more elusively, what did the Roman people expect of their magistrates?
The thesis is divided into three sections. The first provides a topography of the aedileship of the republic, allowing us to see where aediles opted to interact with the Roman people. The purpose of this section is to set the scene and to map attested aedilician theatres of interaction. The second section looks at how the aristocracy spoke and wrote about the aedileship. It analyses how some Roman aristocrats expected aediles to act, and how they imagined the people expected them to act. The final section investigates the question of popular expectations further. It examines the interactions that an aedile could anticipate having during his year of office. It questions how aediles comported themselves before the Roman people. Men who held the aedileship were expected, both by their peers and the people at large, to perform on the public stage and interact with the people in a distinctive, aedilician, way.
Forgotten Men: Post-war memory of Indian Prisoners of War of the Japanese in World War Two
Keywords: British Indian Army
Memory
Prisoners of War
World War Two
Indian National Army

During the Second World War some sixty-seven thousand Indian personnel of the British Indian Army were captured by Imperial Japanese forces, including a large number at the surrender of Singapore in February 1942. This thesis examines why these colonial Prisoners of War were largely forgotten in the post-war period, and therefore represents a case study in the formation of British wartime historical memory. It does so by addressing three questions, relating to the impact of evidence that some Indian prisoners were disloyal, the role of British colonial propaganda, and the unavailability of important documentary sources. It argues that the process of forgetting can be understood in terms of three active memory practices, namely: suppression; obscuration; and selection. Examples of how each of these have impacted British memory of Indian prisoners are provided within the thesis. These practices acted in a colonial context within which a pertinent element was a “Myth of loyalty”, namely the idea that, whatever may have occurred in captivity, most Indian prisoners stayed fundamentally loyal to the British. Newly available sources, in particular records from British Military Intelligence, allow a reassessment of such narratives. The thesis consists of an Introduction, four thematic chapters, and a conclusion. The first thematic chapter examines British responses to the loss and recovery of Indian prisoners. The second chapter examines how the experiences of Indian prisoners were remembered. The third examines how those Indian prisoners who fought against British forces later in the war, were often marginalised and forgotten in British accounts. While the fourth reviews post-war war-crimes trials of Japanese military personnel where the victims were Indian prisoners, the focus being the effect on trial outcomes of British suppression of knowledge regarding Indian prisoners. Throughout, the emphasis is on the role of forgetting in the management of unpalatable truths.