VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Identification and Analysis of the Novel Gumby Gene and its Vertebrate Specific Roles in the Mouse

Forward genetic screens in the mouse are contributing significantly to our understanding of basic mammalian development and human disease. In one such screen, our laboratory has identified the novel mouse gumby mutant, which affects the development of the neural and vascular systems. Here, I describe the characterization of the gumby mutant phenotype and the identification of its causative mutation in a novel, vertebrate-specific gene, which is one of the genes deleted in patients affected by Cri du Chat Syndrome that exhibit mental retardation and craniofacial deficits. Expression and phenotypic analyses revealed a requirement for the gumby gene in the facial nerve axon guidance and angiogenesis. Lately, it has become evident that many common mechanisms and molecules operate during neural and vascular development. My results suggest that the gumby gene is an attractive candidate for regulating both processes and its analysis in the future may help us understand how the navigational mechanisms for both systems are intertwined. My studies show that gumby is a cytoplasmic protein that is present in many embryonic and adult tissues. In yeast-two-hybrid assays gumby interacts with a member of the highly conserved Wnt pathway - Dishevelled 2 (Dvl2). In both Dvl2-/- and gumby homozygotes, the level of the cardiac neural crest cell marker Plexin2A is decreased. The three branches of the Wnt pathway have been shown to regulate a wide range of events during embryogenesis and adult homeostasis, and subsequently have been implicated in multiple human pathologies. Taken together my data suggest that gumby may be required for Wnt signaling in angiogenesis and/or facial nerve guidance. Given that Wnt signaling has been shown to play key roles in axon guidance, gumby and its roles in Wnt signaling may also contribute to the mental retardation seen in patients with Cri du Chat Syndrome. Thus, further analyses of molecular and biologic roles of gumby will provide important avenues for understanding the cell biology of human disease.

Keywords: angiogenesis
cranial nerves
Advisor: Cordes, Sabine
Cities of Refuge: Citizenship, Legality and Exception in U.S. Sanctuary Cities

In the 1980s, in support of the Sanctuary Movement for Central American refugees, cities across the United States began to withdraw information and resources from the boundary making processes of the federal state. Inspired in part by a 1971 initiative in Berkeley, California to provide sanctuary to soldiers refusing to fight in Vietnam, “Cities of Refuge” issued statements of non-cooperation with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). They passed policies that prevented police and service providers from asking the immigration status of the people they came into contact with in the course of their daily duties, and limited information sharing with the federal authorities. Drawing on archival research and interviews, this dissertation maps the shifting meaning of Sanctuary as a constellation of practices and logics which has troubled the boundaries of national citizenship. Struggles to establish Cities of Refuge reveal the complex interplay between two different political trajectories in the United States: one deeply implicated with the state’s authority over migration controls and what Agamben has understood as the sovereign exception, and the other with city sanctuary, as a form of urban citizenship. The genealogy of city sanctuary reveals the multiple and sometimes contradictory threads or genealogies that have been woven into American citizenship over time, raising questions about the ostensibly hardened relationship between sovereignty, membership, and the nation state. Exploring the interactions between the daily practices of state institutions and Sanctuary reveals the performative aspects of exception: it is produced and maintained only through the constant repetition of discourses and practices that maintain the boundaries of citizenship and reproduce the state’s authority to control the movement of people across its border. Bringing the study of sovereignty into the city, and exploring alternative assertions of sovereignty reveals the exception not as an underlying logic, but a geographically specific, ongoing struggle.

Keywords: Sanctuary
Cities of Refuge
Immigration Law Enforcement
State of Exception
Citizenship
Advisor: Ruddick, Susan M.
Daniere, Amrita
Influssi della lingua e della letteratura francesi medievali nell’Italia settentrionale e il Fondo Francese Antico della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana di Venezia

This dissertation regards the medieval French literary tradition’s presence in Northern Italy in the late Middle Ages. This phenomenon produced a corpus of texts copied or composed by Northern Italian scribes and authors in the French language. The Italian authors’ command of French verse was, in some cases, imperfect; in others, they consciously manipulated the French language for creative purposes. Whatever the case, what resulted was a body of work ostensibly written in French but with a distinctly Northern Italian flavour. Every work within this corpus presents unique linguistic features and a distinct blend of French and Northern Italian vernaculars. This cultural phenomenon, which is commonly referred to as “Franco-Italian,” was no doubt born from the linguistic proximity of the Northern Italian vernaculars to the languages of France in the late Middle Ages: absent an autochthonous Italian literary tradition, Northern Italian literati adapted the languages of France, which had already developed vernacular literary traditions, as a means for their own literary expression. Northern Italy constituted, in this sense, a peripheral region of a medieval “Francophonie.” This dissertation first surveys the nature and function of the Franco-Italian “language” and then presents a critical historiography of the scholarship surrounding the most important manuscript collection of French and Franco-Italian works in Italy, that of the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. This includes a discussion of all known catalogues and inventories of the corpus dating back to 1407 and an analysis of two others, until now largely unstudied, that shed new light on the history of the collection. What follows is an investigation into one little-known manuscript in the collection, Codex XIV, which recounts the adventures of Beuve de Hanstone. Codex XIV is unique in the collection insofar as it was not written in the hybrid Franco-Italian idiom, rather a pure Old French; consequently, it has received little attention from scholars. This dissertation revisits the text and its importance in the study of the influence of French literature in medieval Italy. The dissertation concludes with a series of appendices that display and compare unpublished inventories of the collection that support the arguments advanced herein.

Keywords: Beuve de Hanstone
Biblioteca nazionale marciana
Buovo d'Antona
Franco-Italian
Fondo Francese Antico
Zanetti
Franco-Venetian
Old French
Advisor: Franceschetti, Antonio
Genesis of a Discourse: The Tempest and the Emergence of Postcoloniality

This dissertation contends that The Tempest by William Shakespeare plays a seminal role in the development of postcolonial literature and criticism because it was created in a moment when the colonial system that was now falling apart was just beginning to come into being. Creative writers and critics from the Third World, particularly Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and the First found that the moment reflected in The Tempest had something very specific to say to a generation coming of age in the postcolonial world of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. I establish that a significant discourse that begins in the Nineteenth Century and intensifies in the Twentieth depends on The Tempest to explore the nature of colonialism and to develop an understanding of the postcolonial world. I then examine the role theories of adaptation play in understanding why The Tempest assumes such a crucial role and determine that the most useful model of adaptation resembles the method developed by biblical typologists which “sets two successive historical events [or periods] into a reciprocal relation of anticipation and fulfillment” (Brumm 27). I ague that postcolonial writers and critics found in The Tempest evidence of a history of colonial oppression and resistance often obscured by established historical narratives and a venue to explore their relationship to their past, present, and future. Because my argument rests on the contention that The Tempest was created in a world where colonialism was coming into being, I explore the historical context surrounding the moment of the play’s creation and determine, in spite of the contention of many historians and some literary critics to the contrary, the forces bringing colonialism into being were already at play and were having a profound effect. After briefly illustrating the historical roots of several popular themes in The Tempest that postcolonial writers have embraced, I turn to the work of writers and critics from the Third World and the First to show how The Tempest plays a significant role in postcolonial studies.

Keywords: Shakespeare
Tempest
postcolonial
adaptation
Caliban
Miranda
George Lamming
Aimé Césaire
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Michelle Cliff
Margaret Laurence
Sarah Murphry
Marina Warner
Sycorax
Advisor: Kanaganayakam, Chelva
The Country And The Village: Representations of the Rural in Twentieth-century South Asian Literatures

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.

Keywords: Postcolonial
Rural
South Asia
Sri Lanka
Martin Wickramasinghe
Leonard Woolf
India
Literature
O. V. Vijayan
Raja Rao
Punyekante Wijenaike
Nationalism
Utopia
Heterotopia
Advisor: Kanaganayakam, Chelva
Regulation of Plant Patterning by Polar Auxin Transport

During embryogenesis and post-embryonic patterning, active transport of the phytohormone auxin, reflected in the expression of the Arabidopsis PIN family of auxin efflux mediators, generates local auxin distributions that are crucial for correct organ and tissue specification. Polar auxin transport routes have also long been postulated to regulate vein formation in the leaf. The molecular identification of PIN proteins has made it possible to investigate this hypothesis further by visualizing auxin transport routes in developing leaves. In Arabidopsis leaf primordia, PIN1 is expressed before the earliest known markers of vascular identity, in domains that are gradually restricted to sites of vein formation. PIN1 polarity indicates that auxin is directed towards distinct “convergence points” (CPs) in the marginal epidermis, from which it defines the sites of major vein formation. Within incipient veins, PIN1 polarity indicates drainage of auxin into preexisting veins, such that veins connected at both ends display two divergent polarities. Local auxin application triggers the formation of ectopic CPs and new veins, demonstrating the sufficiency of auxin as a vein-specifying signal. However, not all PIN1-labeled auxin transport routes differentiate as veins: Minor veins are initially unstable, suggesting local competition for auxin transport. Expression of ATHB8, a marker of vascular cell selection, correlates with enhanced PIN1 expression domain (PED) stability and vascular differentiation. Auxin application and auxin transport inhibition reveal that both CP formation in the epidermis and subepidermal PED dynamics are auxin-dependent and self-organizing. Furthermore, normal auxin perception through the ARF-Aux/IAA signaling pathway is required for the restriction of PIN1-mediated auxin transport to narrow subepidermal domains. ARF-Aux/IAA signaling is known to control auxin transport through the regulation of PIN1 dynamics, but the mechanism of this regulation is unclear. It is here shown that two redundantly acting AUXIN RESPONSE FACTOR (ARF) transcription factors, ARF5/MONOPTEROS (MP) and ARF7/NPH4, jointly regulate both PIN1 expression and localization during lateral root patterning in Arabidopsis, in part through the direct transcriptional activation of PIN1 by MP. Taken together, these results indicate that feedback between PIN-mediated auxin transport and ARF-Aux/IAA signaling regulates the patterning of root and shoot organs.

Keywords: leaf development
root development
leaf patterning
root patterning
auxin
PIN1
vein patterning
vascular development
procambium
live imaging
founder cell
NPA
PCIB
ARF
MONOPTEROS
MP
IAA3
shy2-2
NONPHOTOTROPIC HYPOCOTYL 4
NPH4
PIN FORMED 1
auxin transport
auxin signaling
plant patterning
laser cell ablation
confocal microscopy
Advisor: Berleth, Thomas
Metaphor and Gender in Conflict: Discourse, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars

This study considers the ontological value of metaphor as a site of ceaseless interaction among multiple (gendered) subjects, drawing on the theoretical work of Max Black, Victor Turner, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. Its focus is on the particular function of metaphor, locally and internationally, in three of the “new wars” of the twentieth century. The first chapter examines how the bridge metaphor, undergirded by cultural discourses on Mostar’s Old Bridge and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, shaped knowledge of gendered experiences in the Bosnian War. The second chapter historicizes the cockroach metaphor, which features in many representations of the Rwandan Genocide, and identifies how “the cockroach” is gendered by metaleptic reference to ubuhake, or pastoral clientship—which gained metaphoric significance through populist movements in the 1950s, when Saverio Naigiziki published The Optimist. The third chapter explores depictions of female civilians, combatants, and suicide-bombers as “prisoners,” considering this metaphor’s gendered variations from Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus” to discourses on the Chechen Wars. These three metaphors are of central importance to the production of knowledge about how and in what ways post-cold-war conflicts are gendered. Frequently, the international community objectifies “distant conflicts” through the same metaphors that, for local agents, articulate political self-identifications and enact gendered violence. Locally-initiated metaphors, thusly circulating among multiple discourses, produce interactive sites of semantic investment and imaginary exchange. Global and regional representations in metaphor of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars enter into common if asymmetrical networks of geopolitical and temporal interactions structured in part by human rights norms in the 1990s. By tracing the historical, cultural, and modal transformations of bridge, cockroach, and prisoner metaphors, this study investigates how fiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, testimony, film, and performance gender knowledge of the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Chechen Wars.

Keywords: Metaphor
Gender
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Rwanda
Russia
Chechnya
Bosnian War
Rwandan Genocide
First Chechen War
Second Chechen War
Advisor: Hutcheon, Linda
Understanding Physical Activity from the Perspectives of Children with Complex Heart Defects, their Parents and their Cardiologists

Children with complex heart defects lead sedentary lives that limit involvement in peer activities, impact their growth and development, and jeopardize their long-term health. The goal of this research was to better understand the factors that influence daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), which is associated with physical and psychological health. The physical activity levels of 64 children (25 female, 5 to 11 years of age) with a single pumping chamber in the heart were measured by accelerometry. Fitness and gross motor skill measures and medical history information were analyzed to identify factors associated with MVPA participation. Increased activity was related to the use of antithrombotic medication, spring season of the year, better motor skill and male sex. Group and individual discussions further explored psychosocial influences on the children’s level of MVPA. The children indicated physical activity was primarily motivated by having fun and being with their friends, while other children being more skilled discouraged participation. Parents of children with complex heart defects had dramatically different perceptions. They believe their child’s activity is primarily influenced by the heart condition and report often feeling uncertain about which activities are appropriate for their child. Finally, sources of parental uncertainty were examined by comparing the physical activity advice provided by the cardiologist to parent reports of the child’s activity restrictions, a content analysis of published activity guidelines and interviews with paediatric cardiologists. Parent uncertainty about activity was supported by the lack of agreement between parent and cardiologist reports of medically necessary activity restrictions. Parent reports of vague or variable activity advice were reflected in the published literature and cardiologist perspectives on activity counselling. These results suggest enabling children with complex heart defects to achieve an active lifestyle may rest on ensuring that the child and parents have appropriate physical activity beliefs and expectations.

Keywords: fontan
physical activity
children
Advisor: McCrindle, Brian W.
The Effect of Face-to-face Interactions on Chocie: The Role of Expressiveness

This thesis examines the role of face-to-face interactions on individual choice. In particular, I explore the effect of face-to-face requests (compared to other forms of requests) on compliance. I propose that individuals expect facial feedback from their interactive partner in response to their decisions and behaviors in face-to-face interactions. In an effort to avoid anticipated negative feedback, people comply with the request. Drawing from literature on compliance, the face, face-to-face interactions, empathy, and anticipation, I develop and test this proposed theoretical account in five experiments. 1) Experiment 1 demonstrates the effect of face-to-face interactions on compliance with requests relative to other forms of making the requests and rules out some alternative explanations. 2) Experiment 2 replicates the effect in a real world setting, and shows that the effect can be moderated by sensitizing individuals to the face. 3) Experiment 3 shows that the effect can be moderated by facial expressiveness and sensitivity to face. Experiment 3 also shows that anticipation of feedback (rather than actual feedback) drives the effect. 4) Experiment 4 shows that the effect can be moderated by the expressiveness, timeliness, and consistency of facial feedback. It provides further evidence for the role of anticipated facial feedback. 5) Experiment 5 shows that individuals strategically choose different modes of interaction (i.e., face-to-face or impersonal) as a function of the feedback they expect to receive. Theoretically, this thesis provides a new understanding of how face-to-face interactions and facial expressiveness impact individual choice. In contrast to previous research, I examine the feedback mechanism that such interactions create, and the role of facial expressiveness. By providing an account in which the anticipation of feedback plays a role, this research provides a way of extending the effect of face-to-face interactions on individual compliance to faceless transactions. Moreover, I identify and test the effect of three dimensions of facial expressiveness on individual choice, thereby adding to marketing literature, compliance literature, and communication literature. The current research has managerial implications in personal selling, customer service, employee training, and online transactions.

Keywords: Face-to-Face Interactions
Expressiveness
Compliance
Judgement and Decision Making
Consumer Research
Advisor: Soman, Dilip