VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Impressions of Innovation: Early Netherlandish Printmaking, 1520-1540

Printed images played an active role in the local visual and material culture of the sixteenth-century Low Countries. In the first half of the century, printmakers were not restricted by guild systems and patronage structures, and thus they had considerable freedom to adopt and innovate styles, subjects, techniques, and pictorial effects. In the Netherlands, Lucas van Leyden, Dirck Vellert, Frans Crabbe, Nicolas Hogenberg, Master AC, and Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen produced printed images that engaged with and responded to contemporary areas of interest and anxiety, including antiquity, vernacular identity, ideal beauty, and local nobility. Their etchings, engravings, and woodcuts were not just important to the development of printmaking in northern Europe; the prints were also on the forefront of important artistic and stylistic developments, and they were in dialogue with art production in the region across media. Despite their local significance, early Netherlandish prints are viewed as derivative of developments in German-speaking lands, and Albrecht DĂźrerâ s residence in Antwerp in 1520-21 continues to be cited as the impetus for Netherlandish artists to take up printmaking. This study argues that Netherlandish printmaking in the first half of the sixteenth century arose from collaborative engagements with artistic traditions both local and foreign. Lucas van Leyden and his contemporaries drew on German and Italian prints that were circulating in the region, yet they adapted these models to suit local tastes and contexts. I view such changes and adaptations as innovations that held particular significance to the local visual milieu. All printmakers from the first half of the sixteenth century were active in other media (including panel paintings and stained glass), and I examine how their diverse artistic backgrounds informed their artistic and commercial strategies. Etchings, engravings, and woodcuts are examined separately in this study, for these print techniques originated from diverse artistic traditions, and therefore held distinct material, social, and cultural resonances. I examine emerging discourses of artistic identity and authority in the formation of the Netherlandish printmaker, and I argue that many of the artistic, commercial, and stylistic innovations introduced in the early sixteenth-century anticipated the expansion of the printmaking industry at mid-century.

Keywords: etching
Low Countries
Lucas van Leyden
Netherlands
printmaking
visual culture
Advisor: Kavaler, Ethan Matt
Sex Crimes: Queer Engagements with the Criminal Law from the Street to the Prison

Over the past three decades, debates in Canada surrounding the introduction of human rights protections, benefits for same-sex couples, and relationship recognition have tended to invoke a new legal subject, one draped in the garb of respectability. When members of queer communities have sought access to legal protections, they have tended to predicate their claims on respectable familial arrangements. Largely absent from this turn to respectability, however, is engagement with the criminal law, particularly in cases where queer people cannot be easily read as the victims of crime. Sex Crimes: Queer Engagements with the Criminal Law from the Street to the Prison returns to the criminal law to examine its continued use as a tool that disciplines â and, at times, fails to discipline â those who cannot be read in terms of respectability. The project weaves together the practices of policing on the street, stories about HIV non-disclosure from the courtroom, and the experiences of queer people in prison. This project argues that when queer people become ensnared in the repressive aspects of criminal justice, the contemporary legal system stops addressing the hardships they face due to their sexual and gender identities. While norms of substantive equality are now well entrenched in the fields of human rights law, family law, and constitutional law, these standards are cast aside when it comes to the administration of punishment. The project concludes by developing a theory of the law and order queer movement, arguing that when queer people code themselves as respectable victims of crime seeking protection from the punitive apparatuses of the carceral state, they run the risk of instantiating law and order agendas. As a result, they may inadvertently breathe new life into systems that continue to be used to discipline the most vulnerable members of queer communities.

Keywords: criminal law
HIV non-disclosure
LGBTQ studies
policing
queer theory
trans studies
Advisor: Cossman, Brenda
Valverde, Mariana
The Effects of Diminished Pulsatility in Long-Term Continuous-Flow Left Ventricular Assist Device Recipients

Continuous flow left ventricular assist devices (CF-LVADs) are used as mechanical support to improve or replace the functions of the failing heart. However, little is known of the long-term effects of the non-physiological, low-pulsatile blood flow of CF-LVADs. To address some of the potential effects that CF-LVADs have on the cardiovascular system, we conducted a set of studies to examine the levels of inflammation in CF-LVAD recipients and compare them to those of healthy controls and to heart failure patients who were candidates for CF-LVAD support. We found that inflammatory markers were generally elevated in CF-LVAD recipients. Importantly, several of these inflammatory markers were significantly higher in the CF-LVAD group compared to both the heart failure and healthy control groups. In another study we conducted, we found that despite elevated levels of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein (CRP), which tends to inhibit cGMP production, the levels of cGMP were significantly elevated in CF-LVAD recipients. We found that cGMP levels were significantly associated with gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding but not bleeding in general. This increase in cGMP may be related to a higher incidence of GI bleeding in CF-LVAD recipients as cGMP impairs platelet aggregation. Additionally, we observed that following CF-LVAD implantation, both exercise capacity and chronotropic responses continued to be impaired. The novel finding of the study is that high levels of inflammation were significantly associated with impaired exercise capacity. The mechanisms by which inflammation contributes to impaired exercise capacity in patients supported with CF-LVADs should be further investigated. In a longitudinal study, we documented increased levels of chemokines and cytokines at 3, 6, and 9 months post-CF-LVAD implantation compared to those of healthy controls, suggesting that the high levels of inflammation in CF-LVAD recipients may be the result of both the heart failure condition prior to implantation and the long-term device support. We conclude that since elevated levels of inflammation may be detrimental to CF-LVAD recipients, further studies should investigate the source of inflammation and the clinical outcomes of anti-inflammatory treatment in these patients.

Keywords: left ventricular assist device
heart failure
Advisor: Jacobs, Ira
Rao, Vivek
Prisoner Society in the Terezin Ghetto, 1941-1945

This dissertation explores the prisoner society in Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto, a transit ghetto in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Nazis deported here over 140,000 Czech, German, Austrian, Dutch, Danish, Slovak, and Hungarian Jews. It was the only ghetto to last until the end of the Second World War. A microhistorical approach reveals the dynamics of the inmate community, shedding light on broader issues of ethnicity, stratification, gender, and the political dimension of the “little people” shortly before they were killed. Rather than relegating Terezín to a footnote in narratives of the Holocaust or the Second World War, my work connects it to Central European, gender, and modern Jewish histories. A history of victims but also a study of an enforced Central European society in extremis, instead of defining them by the view of the perpetrators, this dissertation studies Terezín as an inmate society. This approach is possible because the SS largely kept out of the ghetto. Terezín represents the largest sustained transnational encounter in the history of Central Europe, albeit an enforced one. Although the Nazis deported all the inmates on the basis of their alleged Jewishness, Terezín did not produce a common sense of Jewishness: the inmates were shaped by the countries they had considered home. Ethnicity defined culturally was a particularly salient means of differentiation. The dynamics connected to ethnic categorization and class formation allow a deeper understanding of cultural and national processes in Central and Western Europe in the twentieth century. The society in Terezín was simultaneously interconnected and stratified. There were no stark contradictions between the wealthy and the majority of extremely poor prisoners. Rather, this dissertation shows a nexus of ethnicity, linked to culture and habitus, and power and class -- we can view the ghetto as a social space. Thanks to a dominant master narrative, the Terezín community was inclusive and coherent, even if various groups had very different access to resources. Therefore, we should view society in ghettos and concentration camps, as a society in its own right, rather than a deviant version of our own with atomizing social ties.

Keywords: Holocaust
Central Europe
Jewish history
nationalism
Advisor: Bergen, Doris
An Investigation of Bifocal Display Design Parameters for Improving Performance in Minimally Invasive Surgery

In minimally invasive surgical procedures, limited access to the surgical site, in combination with high magnification and a narrow field of view, create a challenging operating environment for the surgeons. In particular, it has been observed that surgical instruments are not in the surgeons’ field of view at all times, forcing them to manoeuvre the instruments without direct view of the instruments’ tip position and trajectory, which poses a risk of inadvertently causing injury to internal tissues or organs. This thesis investigates the effectiveness of Bifocal displays for addressing this problem, by displaying a wide field of view to facilitate instrument manoeuvring while concurrently providing the high magnification necessary for performing detailed surgical manipulation tasks. Furthermore, the two design parameters that define the nature of the Bifocal transformation function were explicitly defined and their impact on task performance was systematically investigated. These parameters are the maximum magnification level and the detail-to-total ratio – the latter being the proportion of the screen allocated to the magnified view. An experimental platform was developed to evaluate operator performance in both instrument insertion and detailed manipulation type tasks while using the Bifocal display in an environment analogous to minimally invasive surgery. The results show that the Bifocal display significantly improves performance for instrument insertion. Furthermore, it was found that varying the display detail-to-total ratio significantly impacts performance in both instrument insertion and detailed manipulation tasks, regardless of the magnification level, with performance improving in each task in an asymptotic manner. More importantly, it was confirmed that there exists a performance trade-off between these two types of task as a function of varying the detail-to-total ratio. These findings have important design implications for not only minimally invasive surgery but also analogous applications such as microsurgery or remotely operated space or underwater vehicles.

Keywords: Human Factors Engineering
Minimally Invasive Surgery
Information Visualization
Distortion Oriented Display
Bifocal Display
Keyhole
Augmented Reality
Focus plus Context
Advisor: Milgram, Paul
Calligraphers, Illuminators and Patrons: Mamluk Qur'an Manuscripts from 1341-1412 AD in light of the collection of the National Library of Egypt

The Mamluks of Egypt and Syria excelled in most arts, especially architecture and Qur’an manuscript production. While their architecture is heavily studied, very little in depth research has been done on their Qur’an manuscripts, especially the collection kept at the National Library of Egypt (Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya). This dissertation examines and analyzes the illumination and calligraphy of the Mamluk Qur’an manuscripts produced after the death of the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun (d. 741/1341) until the death of the second Circassian Mamluk sultan Faraj ibn Barquq (d. 815/1412), that are kept in Dar al-Kutub. This period in Mamluk history was a turbulent one with socio-political calamities, yet Qur’an manuscript production was not affected. Illumination and calligraphy workshops have been identified using stylistic similarities in conjunction with the information found in the rich chronicles and biographical dictionaries of the Mamluk period. Biographies of artists, mostly calligraphers, were reconstructed and their modes of learning were investigated to shed light on their training process depending primarily on the calligraphy treatises of the period. Patrons, especially in their capacity as supporters of workshops, were also studied in light of the primary sources and to a lesser extent through their architecture.

Keywords: calligraphy
Egypt
illumination
Mamluk
Medieval
Advisor: Ruehrdanz, Karin
Regulation of Cyclic Nucleotide-Gated Channels and Plant Calcium Signaling

Plants must coordinate developmental processes and responses to environmental stimuli via signaling at the cellular level. Ca2+ serves a common second messenger in many signal transduction pathways, wherein increases in cellular Ca2+ levels are interpreted by a suite of downstream Ca2+-binding sensor proteins, such as calmodulin (CaM). While Ca2+ is known to mediate responses to diverse stimuli in plants, including biotic stress, less is known regarding the channels involved in Ca2+ signaling or their regulation. Cyclic nucleotide-gated channels (CNGCs) represent one of the major classes of Ca2+-permeable channels thought to mediate Ca2+ flux in plants, and several isoforms of the 20-member Arabidopsis CNGC family, including CNGC12 and CNGC2, have been implicated in immune responses. In this thesis, I present a thorough analysis of the regulation of Arabidopsis CNGCs by CaM, and demonstrate that CNGC12 function is both positively and negatively regulated by CaM-binding to multiple, distinct sites at the cytosolic termini of the channel. My results with CNGC12 indicate that plant CNGCs are likely subject to complex regulation by Ca2+, suggesting that CaM is required for both channel function and feedback inhibition. My findings with CNGC12 are expanded to the entire 20-member CNGC family, and I have shown that Arabidopsis CNGCs possess diverse CaM-binding sites, both in terms of number and mode of CaM-binding. In particular, the IQ motif appears to be broadly conserved across the CNGC family, and in most members, mediates permanent association with CaM via Ca2+-independent interaction with the CaM C-lobe. These data indicate that CaM functions as a Ca2+-sensing subunit of CNGC complexes in plants. Finally, I developed transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana and Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco) lines expressing the fluorescent Ca2+ indicator, GCaMP3, which can be used to visualize and measure Ca2+ signals in response to diverse abiotic or biotic stimuli. I examined the dynamics of Ca2+ signaling in response to stimuli including cold-shock, mechanical wounding, and pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs). These plants represent an excellent tool to dissect the molecular components of Ca2+ signaling via gain- or loss-of-function studies.

Keywords: calcium
calmodulin
CNGC
immunity
signaling
Advisor: Yoshioka, Keiko
“In Unknown Languages”: Investigating the Phenomenon of Multilingual Acting

Despite the growing presence of multilingual theatre in large multicultural cities like Toronto, research on stage multilingualism remains at the nascent stage, particularly in English Canada. Using the Practice as Research methodology, as proposed by Robin Nelson (2013) and the principle of interdisciplinarity (Repko 2012) this dissertation investigates stage multilingualism that does not use translation. Specifically, it focuses on multilingual actors, multilingual dramaturgy, and multilingual audiences. The artistic practice at the centre of the study involved 25 professional and amateur performers, both mono- and multilingual, who were engaged in a six-week creation period of devising scenes in their dominant, non-dominant, and unfamiliar languages. The devised scenes were later compiled into a multilingual show entitled “In Sundry Languages” and performed twice to a multilingual audience. This study first offers an analysis of the actors’ phenomenology of performing in various languages, as captured in the actors’ journals, the researcher journals, and the researcher’s post-performance interviews with the actors. Second, it reveals the specifics of the dramaturgical devices of “In Sundry Languages” through the show’s script and video recording. Finally, through a qualitative analysis of 182 post-performance audience surveys, the study shows a vast diversity of audience responses to the presence of multiple languages on stage. Using Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology (2006) as its theoretical framework, the study conceptualizes untranslated stage multilingualism as a queer object which has the potential to cause re-orientation (or queering) of the subject, especially a monolingual subject. It also investigates how and why certain multilingual subjects (both actors and audiences) may challenge dominant monolingual frameworks, relying on a clear distinction between one single mother tongue and additional languages. Finally, the study proposes multilingual dramaturgy as “diversity work” (Ahmed 2014), confronting the monolingual paradigms of Toronto’s mainstream theatre.

Keywords: acting
Canadian theatre
multilingualism
phenomenology
practice as research
second language
Advisor: Gallagher, Kathleen
Emerging Logics of Citizenship: Activism in Response to Precarious Migration and Gendered Violence in an Era of Securitization

Postnationalism is a theory of citizenship that emerged in the 1990s, which rejected national membership as an exclusionary or limited way of organizing rights and belonging, and sought instead to re-imagine citizenship beyond the nation-state. The approach was largely discredited at the time for underestimating the persistent influence of nationalism and for lacking empirical evidence. In this project, I join a small group of scholars who argue for a reconsideration of postnationalism, particularly for scholarship examining the production of illegality and securitization of borders across countries in the global north. I add to this scholarship by offering an extended case analysis of postnational activism in Toronto, in response to major restructuring of Canada’s refugee and immigration system and expanded deportation regime between 2006 to 2015. Using ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and discourse analysis, I show how some activists used postnational human rights frames to restrict immigration authorities from entering schools, women’s shelters, and other city spaces for the purposes of investigating and deporting non-status migrants. Theorized as postnational acts of citizenship, such approaches were useful for exposing the structural violence produced through state regulation of borders and citizenship, leading to the articulation of a ‘no borders’ politics. However, as a social movement strategy, postnational claims were also limited in their capacity to imagine alternatives to state protection, particularly for non-status women in situations of gender-based violence. My findings also point to the erosion of citizenship for a group of activists working as service providers within state-funded institutions, where processes of securitization altered their working conditions and produced feelings of fear, despair, and even terror in how they interpreted the actions of the Conservative party in power at the time. Overall, this research draws attention to the increased salience of postnationalism for studies of social inequality in the contemporary immigration context.

Keywords: Citizenship
Gender
Immigration
Postnationalism
Social Movements
Violence Against Women
Advisor: Korteweg, Anna C.
Evaluation and Validation of Novel Methods for the Diagnosis of Invasive Aspergillosis

Aspergillus is a ubiquitous soil-dwelling fungus known to cause significant infection in immunocompromised patients. The incidence of invasive aspergillosis (IA) has dramatically increased during the past two decades due to widespread use of chemotherapy and immunosuppressive agents involved with the management of malignancy, organ transplantation, and autoimmune and inflammatory conditions. Individuals at high-risk of IA include chemotherapy and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) recipients, solid organ transplant (SOT) recipients, and those with advanced human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS, hyperimmunoglobulin E (Jobâ s) syndrome, and chronic granulomatous disease. Early diagnosis and treatment of infection are crucial; however, definitive diagnosis is not straightforward as symptoms are nonspecific and require invasive procedures that are often difficult or impossible to complete. Due to the difficulties in diagnosing IA, the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) Invasive Fungal Infections Cooperative Group and the Mycoses Study Group (MSG) of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have established consensus definitions for defining opportunistic invasive fungal infections. While the EORTC/MSG criteria are important in the standardization of definitions used for IA in clinical research studies, much work still remains to be completed. Many established improvements have been made in the field of diagnosis (galactomannan antigen, beta-glucan antigen, PCR, computed tomography); however, they still lack sensitivity and are often only detectable later in the course of infection. Early detection of IA would be greatly enhanced if accurate, practical, and cost-effective diagnostic biomarkers for this infection were available. Whereas much of the research and available diagnostic tests focus on fungal-derived biomarkers, the aim of some of the work described in this thesis is to identify novel host-derived biomarkers (Chapter 4) that differentiate IA from non-infection, as well as validate novel noninvasive sampling methods for IA diagnosis using droplet digital PCR and ELISA techniques (Chapters 2 and 3).

Keywords: Biomarkers
Diagnostics
Droplet digital PCR
Fungal immunology
Infectious diseases
Invasive aspergillosis
Advisor: Mazzulli, Tony