VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A Moral Persuasion: The Nazi-Looted Art Recoveries of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, 2002-2013

In 1937, under Gestapo orders, the Nazis forced the Düsseldorf-born Jewish art dealer Max Stern to sell over 200 of his family’s paintings at Lempertz, a Cologne-based auction house. Stern kept this fact a secret for the rest of his life despite escaping from Europe to Montreal, Canada, where he settled and became one of the country’s leading art dealers by the mid-twentieth century. A decade after Stern’s death in 1987, his heirs (McGill University, Concordia University, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) discovered the details of what he had lost, and how in the post-war years Stern travelled to Germany in an attempt to reclaim his art. To honour the memory of Max Stern, they founded the Montreal-based Max Stern Art Restitution Project in 2002, dedicated to regaining ownership of his art and to the study of Holocaust-era plunder and recovery. This dissertation presents the histories and circumstances of the first twelve paintings claimed by the organization in the context of the broader history of Nazi-looted art between 1933-2012. Organized into thematic chapters, the dissertation documents how, by following a carefully devised approach of moral persuasion that combines practices like publicity, provenance studies, law enforcement, and legal precedents, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project set international precedents in the return of cultural property. The dissertation reveals how the Max Stern Restitution Project used a self-generated methodology to recover works of Nazi-looted art from both private and public collections in countries including Spain, the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. It addresses how in just over a decade, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project became one of the world’s leading advocates in the reclamation of Nazi-era spoliated art and an authority on the subject of a judicious approach toward cultural property.

Keywords: art-restitution
looted art
plunder
provenance
recovery
spoliation
Advisor: Legge, Elizabeth
Air Quality Impacts of Vehicle Emissions on the Urban Environment: Real-World Emission Factors and Capturing the Fleet Signal

Human exposure to vehicle emissions and traffic-related air pollution is a major concern with the increasing population living near major roadways and in urban areas. Although there has been a growing interest in near-road measurements and deployment of near-road monitoring networks, isolating and quantifying vehicle emissions from these measurements have always been a challenge. Emission factors has proven to be a method that is invaluable in targeting vehicle emissions while normalizing for the effects of local dilution and dispersion. Algorithms were developed to automatically capture and calculate emission factors from exhaust plumes from vehicles. The individual plume emission factor method utilized high time resolution measurements and provided insight on inter-fleet emission dynamics and trends, providing mean emission factors for the downtown Toronto on-road fleet, co-emitted pollutants from various emitter groups, relative contributions from heavy emitters, and compared well with real-world emission factors from past studies. Additionally, discrepancies were observed between past laboratory and the measured real-world emission factors, with differences upwards of an order of magnitude for the more dynamic pollutants such as particle number concentration. Temporal variation in emission factors were also observed diurnally, weekday vs. weekend, and seasonally, where influences were found to be from changes in fleet make-up, fuel composition, and ambient conditions. A simplified daily-integrated emission factor method was subsequently applied to nearly two years of continuous measurements made at three near-road sites with varying site and fleet characteristics, as well as different meteorological conditions. Emission factors proved to be a useful metric in normalizing the site differences, and provided insight on inter- and intra- fleet emissions characteristics.

Keywords: air quality
emission factors
traffic-related air pollutants
ultrafine particles
urban environment
vehicle emissions
Advisor: Evans, Greg J
Chaucer's French Sources â Literary and Codicological Play and the Author's Persona

This dissertation studies the ways that Chaucer and his French contemporaries, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Oton de Graunson, and Eustache Deschamps, craft poetic authority. They do so in relation to the books that convey their writing and literary reputations to their audiences. Chaucer, translating the work of these French poets, reacts to the constructions of authority he finds in medieval sources, in manuscripts, and in a scribal culture in which the transmission of texts can be unpredictable. I argue that Chaucer adapts Machaut's pseudo-autobiographical narrative voice in his own poetry. He responds to a contrast evident in manuscript culture between the single-author codex — for example, surviving books of Froissart's poetry, Paris, BNF f.fr. 830 and 831 — and the ubiquitous miscellany, a contrast that seems to operate along gendered and poetic as well as codicological lines. Chaucer adapts the poetic form of Graunson's "Cinq Ballades" to ensure that his "Complaint of Venus" circulates as a single piece, unlike some copies of his source text. Finally, I argue that Deschamps invites Chaucer to participate in a cross-Channel exchange of invective, one that is part of a bookish and literary tradition. The main argument of my dissertation is that Chaucer puts ideas about books into play in his poetry. He imagines manuscripts as forms for literature and as forms for authority, like the way the disordered aesthetic of the Canterbury Tales creates — ironically — a work of literature resembling a single-author manuscript: a collection of works by one author that circulates intact. Chaucer's investigation of bookish forms is playful, but it also has high poetic stakes: for Chaucer, as for his French contemporaries, play locates the poet in an authoritative literary tradition and secures his future renown.

Keywords: Authorship
Chaucer
Fourteenth-century French poetry
Manuscripts
Narrative persona
Advisor: Gillespie, Alexandra
Kullmann, Dorothea
The Hagiography of Nāṣir-i Khusraw and the Ismāʿīlīs of Badakhshān

This dissertation examines Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlī hagiographical texts written between approximately the late 16th and the late 20th centuries in their socio-political context. It analyses the narratives by drawing attention to how their authors expressed ideals, values, beliefs, practices, and concerns through the medium of hagiography. Unlike much previous scholarly work on the Badakhshānī hagiographical tradition, which dismisses this substantial body of valuable material as entirely “fictional,” and, therefore, useless as a source of “historical” information, the present study approaches the data in a novel manner, and analyses it for clues about the ideological, polemical, apologetic, pedagogic, moral, and didactic concerns of Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlīs. This dissertation focuses on the hagiographies of Nāṣir-i Khusraw (d. after 462/1070), the celebrated Persian Ismāʿīlī thinker, poet and missionary. Badakhshānī Ismāʿīlīs, a minority Central Asian Muslim community concentrated primarily in the Afghan Badakhshān Province and Tajik Gorno-Badakhshān Autonomous Oblast, revere Nāṣir-i Khusraw as the founder of the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī tradition, calling their religious tradition the daʿvat-i Shāh Nāṣir, or “Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s summoning.” Upon analyzing the persistent and transient elements of Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s portrayals in Badakhshānī hagiographies of the said period, this dissertation concludes that, although Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s sanctity takes an “idealized” form in the hagiographies, it was never fully solidified or standardized, but was constantly negotiated between the hagiographers and the narratives about him. What the sources say about Nāṣir-i Khusraw changes throughout the period under study. Hagiographies of the Soviet period differ from those written by the pre-Soviet Ismāʿīlīs in motives and agendas, in their selection of the material, and in their views on sanctity. In the earliest sources, produced in the 16th century, Nāṣir-i Khusraw is represented as a Muslim wrongly accused of unbelief and as a person with ambiguous sectarian affiliations. In the hagiographical works created in the early 18th century, he emerges as a great Shīʿī saint on par with the last Twelver Shīʿī Imām. In middle hagiographical works composed between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, he is presented as a foundational figure and a great saint in the service of the Ismāʿīlī Imām, whom he followed. The late sources, written in the Soviet period, present him as a saint championing the rights of ordinary people and an opponent of oppressors. The dissertation argues that this difference in the representation of Nāṣir-i Khusraw in the hagiographical sources is related to the dictates of the changing historical environments to which the writers responded.

Keywords: Badakhshan
Central Asia
Hagiography
Ismailism
Nasir-i Khusraw
Pamir
Advisor: Virani, Shafique N
Examining the Processes by Which Multiple Forms of Intergroup Contact Predict Prejudice in Daily Life

Intergroup contact theory posits that interaction with outgroup members should improve our attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole. However, contact with outgroups is rare, even in diverse communities. One form of contact that might be particularly useful for improving intergroup attitudes would be contact with outgroups through mass media. Indeed, people spend several hours a day consuming media, and mass media have become more diverse over the last few decades, offering many opportunities for people to have contact with outgroups. The goal of the present research was to examine how daily experiences of intergroup contact through social interaction (direct contact) and exposure to outgroups in mass media (media contact) relate to intergroup attitudes. In Study 1, a 1-time diary survey was used to examine whether direct social interaction with outgroup members and exposure to outgroup members in the media would predict attitudes toward these groups. Moreover, I had participants respond to several items to determine the mechanisms explaining these relationships. I found that intergroup contact did indeed occur more through media than direct social interaction. Importantly, the relationships of direct contact and media contact with attitudes toward ethnic/racial outgroups were explained by different mechanisms. Moreover, I found that these relationships were moderated by group status (minority or majority), such that many of them were only significant when considering contact with minority group members. This provides initial evidence that intergroup contact through media and direct social interaction each uniquely predict intergroup attitudes in daily life, but that the processes through which they do differs as a function of the type of contact and the status of the target group. In Study 2, I used an experience sampling design, which required participants to answer surveys throughout the day over a 5-day period. The goal of this study was to better ascertain how the quality of contact experiences moderates these relationships. Study 2 partially replicated the findings from Study 1, but found that quality played an important role in determining whether each form of contact would improve attitudes. Altogether, these studies provide important information about how we can optimize the effectiveness of multiple forms of intergroup contact.

Keywords: Attitudes
Intergroup Contact
Intergroup Relations
Media
Prejudice
Advisor: Page-Gould, Elizabeth
Overlap, Identities, and Expectations: Explaining Challenges to Cohesion in Security Communities

This dissertation asks why there are recurrent challenges to cohesion in security communities (SCs) in international relations. Each of the three papers provides a specific part of the answer to this question. Focusing on SCs and the balance of power (BOP), the first paper juxtaposes two common ways of governing security relations between actors in international relations and describes the repertoires of practices that they are based on. A process-based understanding of SC and BOP suggests that they may overlap. We explain why that is the case and identify different types of overlap (temporal, functional, spatial, and relational). Challenges to cohesion may arise in cases where SC and non-SC practices coexist. The second paper focuses on the process of identification in SCs. It does so by bringing together the literatures of ontological security, recognition, and security communities. A revised ontological security view suggests that security communities need to not only continually reinforce a sense of “we-ness” but also recognize members’ distinctiveness. This tension leads to struggles for recognition during which actors employ different strategies: adoption, reform, denial, or exit. I show how struggles for recognition can help explain challenges to cohesion in security communities, and I illustrate how my argument may help adjudicate the debate about the state of transatlantic relations after the end of the Cold War. The third paper conceptualizes security communities as governance mechanisms that include but also may go beyond the routinization of peaceful conflict resolution: Members of a security community “do things together;” they exhibit collective intentionality – which can be inward as well as outward oriented. I argue that collective intentionality gives rise to different kinds of expectations: I develop an analytical framework for understanding the interplay of predictive and prescriptive expectations among members of a security community and its effects on the cohesion of the community. Somewhat counterintuitively, I suggest that managing expectations is particularly challenging in security communities because of the problem of complacency, the likelihood of resentment, the expectation of forgiveness, and the problem of recognition needs. Taken together, my arguments imply that stable cooperative inter-state relationships can only partially rely on structural conditions for their maintenance: Supposedly stable ‘material’ and ‘ideational’ structures do not exist outside of or separate from the continuous political process of struggles for recognition and expectations management.

Keywords: cohesion
expectations
governance
ontological security
security communities
Advisor: Adler, Emanuel
Precarious Professionals: Non-Tenure-Track Faculty in Southern Ontario Universities

While precarious work is a phenomenon often associated with non-professional workers, the emerging case of non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) calls for a new framework building on scholarship on both precarious work and the professions. An in-depth case study of NTTF in southern Ontario shows how a new phenomenon of ‘precarious professionals’ is emerging. Drawing on sixty semi-structured interviews with faculty members, university administrators and union representatives across southern Ontario, I analyze workers’ experiences in temporary contract work in the academic profession, and their views on the way certain types of professional work are valued. Building off previous literature on precarious work, gender and work, and professional work, this thesis defines precarious professionals as highly skilled workers who do professional work that is valued and devalued along lines of gender. Their experiences in temporary contract work marginalize them economically and professionally in complex and compounding ways that trap them between identifying as precarious workers and as professionals. Union organizers and activists draw on a two-pronged approach that addresses both dimensions of precarious worker and professional identities. This thesis shows variation in workers’ experiences, suggesting that not all temporary contract workers become precarious professionals, and shows how that variation can be explained.

Advisor: Cranford, Cynthia
Fixing Software Vulnerabilities and Configuration Errors

With the rise of mobile devices such as smart phones and IoTs and emerging new application areas such as fitness and sport aid, smart home, and augmented reality, computer systems have become a critical part of our daily lives. Our reliance on computer systems make software security and reliability extremely important. However, software security and reliability are threatened by software vulnerabilities and configuration errors. Manually fixing software vulnerabilities and configuration errors is a tedious and time consuming task. Automating the task has gained intense interest. This dissertation addresses three challenges in automating the task: 1) mitigating software vulnerabilities rapidly and safely, 2) generating sound security patches and 3) troubleshooting complex configuration errors that involve dependent configuration settings. We make the following contributions. First, we consider mitigating software vulnerabilities. Inspired by configuration workarounds, a fast alternative of security patches, we design Security Workaround for Rapid Response (SWRR) that works similarly to configuration workaround but has substantially larger coverage than configuration workarounds. We implement a prototype Talos that automatically produces SWRRs and instruments SWRRs into applications. SWRRs generated by Talos can cover 2.1x software vulnerabilities than configuration workarounds. Second, we consider generating sound security patches. With a design specifically targeting three of the most common and severe software vulnerabilities: buffer overflow, bad offset, and integer overflow, we combine program analysis techniques to generate semantically correct security patches. Our prototype implementation called Senx successfully generates correct security patches for 76.2% of 42 real-world software vulnerabilities. Third, we compare the strengths and drawbacks of Talos and Senx qualitatively and quantitatively. On one hand, Senx has the strength in applicability. On the other hand, Talos has the strength in scalability and usability. We find that Talos and Senx have complementary applicability. Combining them, we can address 90.5% of the 42 software vulnerabilities. Finally, we consider troubleshooting and fixing configuration errors involving dependent configuration settings. We leverage unsupervised machine learning to understand the dependency among configuration settings and use automated GUI testing to enable regular users to troubleshoot and fix configuration errors with ease. We implement a prototype called Ocasta and conduct a user study on Ocasta. We find that Ocasta can correctly identify 88.6% of dependent configuration settings and significantly save user time and effort in troubleshooting and fixing configuration errors.

Keywords: automated patch generation
configuration error
error recovery
machine learning
program analysis
software vulnearbility
Advisor: Lie, David
The Lindelof class of L-functions

Meromorphic functions, called L-functions, play a vital role in number theory. In 1989, Selberg defined a class of L-functions that serves as an axiomatic model for L-functions arising from geometry and arithmetic. Even though the Selberg class successfully captures many characteristics common to most L-functions, it fails to be closed under addition. This creates obstructions, in particular, not allowing us to interpolate between L-functions. To overcome this limitation, V. K. Murty defined a general class of L-functions based on their growth rather than functional equation and Euler product. This class, which is called the Lindelof class of L-functions, is endowed with the structure of a ring. In this thesis, we study further properties of this class, specifically, its ring structure and topological structure. We also study the zero distribution and the a-value distribution of elements in this class and prove certain uniqueness results, showing that distinct elements cannot share complex values and L-functions in this class cannot share two distinct values with any other meromorphic function. We also establish the value distribution theory for this class with respect to the universality property, which states that every holomorphic function is approximated infinitely often by vertical shifts of an L-function. In this context, we precisely formulate and give some evidence towards the Linnik-Ibragimov conjecture.

Keywords: L-functions
Lindelof class
Selberg class
uniqueness theorems
universality
value distribution
Advisor: Murty, Vijaya Kumar
Identifying New Therapeutics in Experimental Subarachnoid Hemorrhage

Aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) can result in substantial neurologic injury and mortality. Drug clinical trials in SAH over the last several decades have failed to improve clinical outcomes. New therapeutic targets need to be identified and new drug therapies are needed in this patient population. In this thesis, we identified therapeutic agents in SAH by two methods. First, we serendipitously identified the anticonvulsant valproic acid (VPA) as a potential drug treatment in SAH after learning about its beneficial effects in various animal models of neurologic disease. We used VPA treatment in a mouse model of SAH. VPA treatment resulted in improved neurological outcome, decreased brain injury, decreased microthrombi burden, and decreased blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption. However, retrospective analysis of clinical trial data of SAH patients demonstrated no significant effect of VPA on clinical outcomes. Randomized clinical trials would be needed to determine safety and efficacy of VPA in patients with SAH. Secondly, we focused on one aspect of experimental SAH pathophysiology, BBB disruption, and identified that the time-point with the greatest increase in permeability was at 24 hours after experimental SAH. We subsequently developed and optimized two distinct methods of isolating brain endothelial cells from mice and performed whole-genome expression profiling of these cells. In doing so, we identified potential therapeutic targets and pathways relevant to SAH. Because ‘prostaglandin synthesis and regulation’ was one of the top pathways upregulated and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) was one of the top upregulated genes, we used the selective COX-2 inhibitor, celecoxib, as drug treatment in our SAH model. Celecoxib administration resulted in improved neurological outcome and decreased BBB disruption. Randomized clinical trials with celecoxib are needed. In summary, we have identified two potential therapeutic agents, VPA and celecoxib, that could be investigated further with clinical trials in patients with SAH. Repurposing drugs could provide an important opportunity to improve the outcomes from this devastating disease.

Keywords: Aneurysm
Blood-brain barrier
Brain injury
Endothelial
Gene expression
Subarachnoid hemorrhage
Advisor: Macdonald, Robert L