VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Quotquot invenire posset: Inventiones and Historical Memory in Southern Italy, c. 900-1150
Keywords: Lombards
Memory
Normans
Sanctity
Southern Italy

This dissertation examines inventiones, that is narratives of relic discoveries, written in southern Italy between the tenth and twelfth centuries. During this period, communities dealt with sweeping changes brought on by political upheaval, invasion, and ecclesiastical reforms. Several inventiones written concomitantly to these events have received little scholarly attention. This dissertation has two goals: to enhance our understanding of the genre in general and to explore further the local circumstances that prompted their composition and copying. The following four case studies pertain to Christian communities in Naples, Benevento, and Larino, and the abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno respectively. This dissertation argues that, because of their “inventive” nature, these sources were powerful means of writing and rewriting history and, more often than not, the exercise of historical memory fueled their production. In particular, this dissertation contends that in eleventh-and twelfth-century southern Italy, as communities underwent the transition from Lombard to Norman authorities, the memory of the Lombard lords of the past was utilized in inventiones as a powerful tool to rewrite the identity of a community as it negotiated the changing political and ecclesiastical landscape. Furthermore, this dissertation argues that because of the devotional nature of inventiones, typically composed for use in the liturgy and thus potentially exposed to a large public, the history encoded within these sources was made all the more powerful. Inventiones reveal how the liturgy, ritual, and devotion were mobilized by medieval communities and display an inherent reciprocity between historical and devotional writing and thought. In order to unlock these features as well as the local conflicts and agendas that prompted the production of inventiones, both a close study of the original manuscripts of extant inventiones as well as attention to contemporary liturgical, diplomatic, and material sources are major components of each case study.
Who Lives in Us and How? How Beginning Counsellors Experience Internal Representations of People who were Significant to their Clinical Development
Keywords: Counsellor development
Counsellor identity
Psychotherapy training

Relationships of teaching and learning play a key role in what counsellors are learning, who they are becoming, and how. This study aims to understand more about the psychological processes by which this takes place. It explores how beginning counsellors experience internal representations of people who were significant to their clinical development (guides). It defines internal representations as (1) a felt presence of the guides that arises internally through emotional, sensory, visceral and other bodily impressions, and inter-personally through replications with others (2) dynamics of narrative voice in counsellors’ stories about these guides. Transcripts of narrative interviews conducted with 5 counsellors who were within their first 5 years of clinical practice were analyzed using the Listening Guide in conjunction with Thematic Analysis. Each counsellor’s stories revolved around a core learning theme that expressed key dilemmas that recurred in the boundaries between self and other. The guides replicated these dilemmas with them, as well as offered new ways to resolve them. Counsellors’ internal and interpersonal phenomena echoed this: they expressed the nature of their relational dilemmas, recalled moments in which guides taught them new approaches to them, and served as means to implement what they had learned. They did so through a felt presence that accompanied and/or merged with the self of the counsellors. Counsellors lost and re-established connection to themselves - their voices of knowing, feeling, action and identity, as well as their knowledges, identities, values and preferred ways of being from outside their clinical worlds - when their stories made contact with these guides. Through a root metaphor of migration, counsellor development is conceptualized as a crossing between worlds that prompts processes, both organic and pressured, of separation and reconciliation within the self.
Partners and Crime: Contemporary Unions and Desistance from Crime During the Transition to Adulthood
Keywords: Age Graded Theory
Criminology
Life Course
Sociology

The age-graded theory of informal social control, one of the most influential theories in life-course criminology, purports that marriage is a “turning point” that can discourage offending and explain desistance from crime during the transition to adulthood. However, this theory was developed using a sample of white men who came of age over half a century ago. Since that era, marriage is delayed and increasingly forgone in favour of cohabitation, yet little is known about how cohabitation influences crime. This dissertation updates and extends the theory by examining how contemporary romantic partnerships influence offending, and whether these effects generalize across the intersection of gender and race. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) and employing multilevel models with inverse probability of treatment weights, I estimate the causal effects of cohabitation and marriage on self-reported offending throughout the transition to adulthood. I find that cohabitation does not influence the offending behaviour of white, black, or Hispanic men and women. Although marriage deters offending among some subpopulations, these results suggest that future research in this area must take seriously the scope of the age-graded theory’s generalizability and attend to other scope conditions in addition to gender and race. Furthermore, marriage today is much less common and tends to occur later in the life-course than for previous cohorts. Thus, marriage, and partnering in general, may no longer be powerful explanations of desistance at the population-level or of the “age-crime curve”. The social contexts that bond young adults to society during the transition to adulthood are more heterogeneous and complex than for past cohorts, but the stability of the age-crime curve suggests that these social bonds continue to exert informal social control that promotes desistance from crime. Further research should investigate these complex social contexts to understand the contemporary desistance process.
Development of Metal Chelators and Metal Chelating Polymers for Mass Cytometry and Positron Emission Tomography
Keywords: Antibody conjugation
Mass Cytometry
Metal chelator
Polymer
Positron emission tomography
Zirconium

Metal chelators play various roles in science, technology, and in clinics. Mass cytometry is a flow technique that uses metal ions to quantify the antigens on the surface of cells. New metal-chelating polymers (MCPs) are needed to form stable complexes with multiple Zr ions to be developed into a mass cytometry reagent. Metal chelators attached to antibodies can be radiolabeled to form radioimmunoconjugates (RICs). RICs labeled with radioactive 89Zr can act as imaging probes for a medical imaging technique called positron emission tomography (PET). A new chelator is needed to improve the in vivo stability of the 89Zr-chelator complex. An antibody can be conjugated with MCPs to attach multiple chelators per antibody without over-modifying the antibody. My thesis describes three projects that describe my contribution to 1) developing a new MCP to chelate multiple Zr ions for mass cytometry, 2) synthesis and conjugation of a new chelator called DFO* and my evaluation of the chelator as a 89Zr chelator, 3) synthesis of a MCP, conjugation to a breast cancer targeting antibody and my evaluation of the MCP-antibody conjugate as a RIC. The work described in this thesis identify and address some of the challenges that arise when developing novel MCPs and adopting a novel metal chelator for biological applications.
The Persistence of Property-owning Personhood in Nineteenth-century U.S. Literature (1845-1913)
Keywords: American literature
Nineteenth century
Personhood
Possessive individualism
Property

This dissertation examines representations of property-owning personhood in crisis in nineteenth-century U.S. literature (1845–1913). I argue that, in response to what historian Charles Sellers calls “the market revolution,” nineteenth-century U.S. writers constructed a transcendental conception of property that elevated property ownership above history, politics, and the market. To preserve the property-owning individual as an ethical and political ideal, nineteenth-century writers separated property from capitalism. Yet alongside this (supposedly) clear-cut opposition is a lingering uncertainty, one that held that property is both the cure for capitalism’s ills and the root cause of the market’s violence. Drawing on political writings by John Locke and Karl Marx, I show how separating property from capitalism proves just as impossible as preventing the instrumentalization of categories such as class, gender and race for capitalist gain. I begin with a discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s opposition between “living property” and “accidental property” in “Self-Reliance.” Here, Emerson describes a form of property that is purified of history and relationality. He laments that property diminishes individual autonomy and increases reliance on the external world. Each subsequent chapter identifies a conceptual challenge to the stability of property-owning personhood: excess and debt, circulation, and racialized ideas of the human. In Chapter One, I argue that both Henry David Thoreau and Harriet Jacobs identify an unfair distribution of surplus and debt as inherent to the logic of property under capitalism. In my second chapter, I show how Edith Wharton’s novels use circulation and gender as the conceptual fields to understand the destruction of property-owning personhood. Chapter Three considers how the “tragic mulatto” genre depicts the limitations of self-ownership and property-owning personhood in two novellas by William Dean Howells and Charles Chesnutt. Both texts chart a dream property’s fabrication out of the ruins of capitalist property. My dissertation closes by extending my arguments about property to the contemporary moment through a close reading of Ramin Bahrani’s 2015 film, 99 Homes. Nineteenth-century U.S. writers’ fantasies about property are fraught with a generative ambivalence particular to property in crisis; their indecision can either threaten or reinforce property’s stronghold on political life.
Identification of Novel Structural Motifs for Mining the Conformational Space of Boron- and Peptide-based Molecules
Keywords: Aminoboronic acids
Atropisomers
Boron
Conformational analysis
Macrocycles
Peptides

Conformation describes the spatial arrangement of atoms in a molecule. While the binding energy between atoms in a molecule determines its structure, the three-dimensional geometry can have considerable flexibility. This has important ramifications for the way molecules interact with each other. This dissertation describes the conformation-derived properties of novel boron- and peptide-based structures, two emerging modalities in drug discovery and subjects of intense contemporary interest. In Chapter 1, a systematic study of boron’s interactions with a range of protein side-chain residues suggests that boron is a unique electrophile in its chameleonic ability to engage protein targets. These mechanistic and structural insights revealed that boron’s properties are nuanced and arise from its uncommon coordination preferences. In Chapter 2, a general method was developed to connect boron- and nitrogen-containing fragments based on the capacity for boryl aldehydes and acyl boronates to undergo reductive amination with various types of amines. This work highlights the untapped potential of boron-substituted iminium ions and enables access to new classes of stable α- and β-aminoboronic acids. In Chapter 3, we report that the MIDA (N-methyliminodiacetic acid) boryl group can act as a chameleon, displaying high migratory aptitude in its tetracoordinate form in one setting, yet migrate as an electrophile under other conditions. The main finding is that hemilability of the B–N bond plays the key role during migration. Based on the mechanistic results, new reactions were designed for the synthesis of hitherto inaccessible boron-based intermediates and endpoints of synthesis. In Chapter 4, the concept of dominant rotors is applied to explore complex energy landscapes of constrained chains of rotors exemplified by amino acids. The observation of unusual conformations of peptide macrocycles that are close in energy was made possible by operating away from equilibrium. These structural insights suggest the existence of unexplored conformations of ring structures and a path to generate them. In Chapter 5, the Pinc ((N-isocyanimino) triphenylphosphorane)-driven macrocyclization reaction was probed with nucleophilic kinetic traps and unveiled a novel iminophosphorane intermediate. Based on these insights, a new macrocyclization reaction was designed to deliver ring structures of various sizes with a novel bis(heteroaryl) motif.
EEG Features of Working Memory Impairment in Alzheimer’s Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment
Keywords: Alzheimer’s Dementia
Electroencephalography
Mild Cognitive Impairment
Working Memory

The presence of working memory impairments in individuals with Alzheimer’s Dementia (AD) or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is well-accepted; however, the neurophysiological mechanisms contributing to these impairments have not been fully elucidated. Research has reliably shown that oscillatory activity, driven by repetitive and synchronous activity within and between neuronal populations, plays a significant role in memory functioning and can be accurately captured using electroencephalography (EEG). While resting-state studies have identified aberrant oscillatory activity, mainly in those with AD, there is a paucity of research investigating how EEG activity behaves during cognitive processing. As such, the overall objective of this study was to assess the relationship between oscillatory activity and working memory impairments in AD and MCI, with a focus on three EEG features: theta and alpha power, theta-gamma coupling, and theta phase synchronization. We hypothesized that these EEG features would be most impaired in those with AD, while individuals with MCI would present with less significant impairments. Additionally, we hypothesized that each of these features would be associated with working memory performance. In the first study, we found that the AD group demonstrated the smallest increase in theta power following the onset of the 2-back stimulus; while compared to controls, the MCI group demonstrated a smaller increase in theta power on the most difficult 3-back condition. Similarly, in the second study, the AD group demonstrated the lowest level of theta-gamma coupling followed by MCI and HC groups. Finally in the third study, we found that the AD group demonstrated impaired theta phase synchronization between the temporal region and the rest of the brain, while no differences were found between the HC and MCI groups. Our results also demonstrated that each of the EEG features were associated with working memory performance to varying degrees. Taken together, findings from these studies revealed widespread impairments in EEG activity in AD, along with an intermediate and inconsistent level of impairment in those with MCI. Ultimately, this research advances our understanding of the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying working memory impairments in MCI and AD and may help guide the development of novel interventions in the future.
Exploring Spatiotemporal Community Assembly using Taxonomic and Functional Dimensions of Biodiversity
Keywords: Biogeography
Biological Invasions
Biotic Homogenization
Community Ecology

Determining how diversity is generated and maintained in ecological communities is a central goal of community ecology and conservation. Ecologists have long aimed to explain the processes responsible for the assembly of communities and although many hypotheses have been proposed, understanding what makes a non-native species successful continues to be the principal question in invasion ecology. Addressing these topics is inherently complex given that the mechanisms that regulate diversity are often dependent on the spatial and temporal scale at which they are quantified and are further complicated by pervasive context dependence. This thesis examines the spatiotemporal changes in, and community assembly processes governing, functional and taxonomic dimensions of biodiversity in fish communities of the Laurentian Great Lakes in response to the establishment of non-native species and extirpation of native species. I show that both taxonomic and functional dimensions of local and regional diversity are increasing over time. Between-community diversity has increased and decreased for functional and taxonomic dimensions of diversity, respectively, indicating the presence of both biotic differentiation and homogenization that is temporally dynamic. Environmental filtering selects for similar species due to a shared affinity for local conditions and explains establishment success of non-native species as well as local and regional patterns of diversity. Community assembly and composition is also highly regulated by dispersal and historical effects due to the glacial history of the region.
Mechanistic and Regulatory Insights into the Biosynthesis of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilm Exopolysaccharide Pel
Keywords: biofilm
c-di-GMP
Pel polysaccharide
Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Bacteria routinely live as multicellular communities encased in a self-produced extracellular matrix, or biofilm. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a model for biofilm formation and utilizes the Pel polysaccharide in its biofilm matrix. Biosynthesis of bacterial polysaccharides generally follows one of three mechanisms, however the mechanism utilized for Pel production remains unclear. We employed mutual stability analyses, cellular fractionation, and co-immunoprecipitation from P. aeruginosa, as well as bacterial adenylate cyclase two-hybrid assays in E. coli, to define a complex at the inner membrane composed of PelDEFG. This allowed us to propose that Pel biosynthesis proceeds via a synthase-dependent mechanism. C-di-GMP regulates biofilm formation in nearly all bacteria, however the mechanism(s) of signalling specificity is unknown. One hypothesis is that c-di-GMP metabolic proteins directly interact with effectors to achieve specificity. We performed co-IP of PelD coupled with mass spectrometry to identify interacting diguanylate cyclases or phosphodiesterases (PDEs). Among others, the PDE BifA co-purified with PelD. We showed that the transmembrane and periplasmic regions of BifA are dispensable for this interaction. Mutation of the GGDEF sequence motif exhibited varying effects on PDE activity. However, mutation of the GGDEF or EAL motifs eliminated interactions with PelD, suggesting that PDE activity, PelD interaction, and biofilm formation are not always coupled. The majority of information about biofilm production and regulation comes from Gram-negative bacteria. Much less is understood about the equivalent processes in Gram-positive organisms. A computational algorithm unexpectedly identified pel operons in many Gram-positive genera. We focused on characterization of the locus from Bacillus cereus. Deletion of any of the genes in the pelDEAFG operon completely abrogated biofilm formation. Lectin and antibody binding revealed pelF-dependent recognition of extracellular material, and B. cereus biofilms were disrupted by P. aeruginosa PelA hydrolase, an endo-a-1,4-N-acetyl-galactosaminidase. These data support the structural similarity of the B. cereus and P. aeruginosa Pel polysaccharides. Interaction between B. cereus PelD and c-di-GMP was analyzed by isothermal titration calorimetry, which revealed binding dependent on the RxxD motif of the GGDEF domain. Mutation of this motif in vivo completely abrogated biofilm formation. Collectively, this data reveals that functional pel loci are widely distributed in Gram-positive bacteria.
A Study of Highly-energetic Top Quarks Produced in Proton-proton Collisions Performed with the ATLAS Detector
Keywords: ATLAS Detector
Large Hadron Collider
top quarks

Highly-energetic pairs of top quarks produced at the LHC are studied using the ATLAS detector. The analyzed data corresponds to 36.1 fb −1 of proton-proton collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, which were collected in 2015 and 2016. Measurements are made of differential cross-sections as a function of 13 kinematic variables describing the top quark system and compared to Standard Model predictions. The study focuses on tt̄ events where both the top and anti-top quark have large transverse momentum and decay into hadrons. Events are selected by requiring two large-radius jets in the detector. Jet substructure techniques are used to separate the signal from other hadronic final states, and the background is estimated using a data-driven technique. Results are corrected for detector effects and statistical comparisons are made with Standard Model calculations performed using Monte Carlo event generators. The results show general agreement between the data and predictions.
A Conductor’s Guide to Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez
Keywords: Concierto de Aranjuez
Conductor's guide
Guitar Concerto
Guitar literature
Joaquin Rodrigo
Performer's guide

This dissertation provides an analysis of Concierto de Aranjuez (1939) by Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1995). Chapter 1 will introduce the purpose of this research, research questions, methodologies, and a brief history of the guitar. The main research question is how to resolve problematic issues of Concierto de Aranjuez in general, and the dissertation provides solutions in terms of technical and musical issues. This chapter also discusses the technological development of the classical guitar and amplification issues in the concerto context. At the end of the chapter, a short biography of Rodrigo and the historical background of Concierto de Aranjuez will be provided. Chapter 2 is a literature review of resources concerning guitar method, literature related to the guitar and orchestra, analysis of guitar concertos, and materials concerning guitar concertos. The third, fourth and fifth chapters will consist of the theoretical analysis and practical analysis of each movement of Concierto de Aranjuez. Theoretical analysis will include: structural analysis; study of the solo guitar part; orchestration; texture; folkloric elements; suggestions about errata and missing dynamics. Conductor’s guide will include: sound balance; beat patterns; bowings and bow distribution; problematic issues that concern the conductor, soloist and orchestra; conductor-soloist relationship and orchestra-soloist coordination. Chapter 6 will provide useful tips for conducting guitar concerti in general and information about the amplification and microphones. The concluding chapter will summarize the essential information for conductors and soloists presented in previous chapters. The expected outcomes will be classified into two categories, conductor’s guide to Concierto de Aranjuez and conductor’s guide to the guitar concerto in general. This chapter will also suggest a potential direction for future research concerning the guitar concerto.