VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Detection and Identification of Active Serine Proteases in the Lower Female Reproductive Tract: A Functional Approach

Proteases irreversibly modify proteins by hydrolyzing the bonds between amino acids and are implicated in virtually every significant biological process. Many proteases have previously been identified in cervical-vaginal fluid (CVF), the fluid covering the tissues of the lower female reproductive tract, and have been linked to a myriad of processes including the susceptibility to sexually transmitted diseases, pain sensitivity during sexual intercourse, extracellular matrix remodeling and vaginal epithelial desquamation. Interestingly, human CVF differs from other mammals in that it is uniquely acidic with levels of 4.5 or less which poses a substantial challenge for proteolytic activity in this environment. An integrated proteomic and peptidomic analysis of CVF confirmed that approximately 8% of the CVF proteome consists of proteases, predominantly serine proteases. Detailed proteomic analysis of CVF samples collected throughout the follicular and luteal phases of the menstrual cycle demonstrated that the CVF proteome remains consistent throughout the menstrual cycle. Functional proteomics using an activity-based probe (ABP) has emerged as a powerful tool to study active proteases within complex proteomes. In the current study, ABP profiling of CVF resulted in the identification of transmembrane protein serine 11D (TMPRSS11D) and kallikrein-related peptidase 13 (KLK13) as active trypsin-like serine proteases. Immunoassays showed that KLK13 is highly abundant in CVF and the expression of a panel of KLKs is not affected by the menstrual cycle phase. The finding that multiple KLKs are present at high abundance levels in CVF strengthens the hypothesis that the reproductive tissues and associated fluids are an important site for proteolytic functioning. We also observed a near complete cessation of trypsin-like proteolytic activity at physiological pH levels in CVF. Therefore, we propose a novel mechanism in which conditions characterized by an elevated pH in CVF, such as male ejaculation, postmenopausal status and bacterial infection, provide a window of opportunity for proteolytic activity in the lower female reproductive tract. Considering the fact that the proteases are involved in virtually every significant biological process, understanding the protease activity and functioning in CVF can provide important insights in their mechanism of action and ultimately lead to novel protease-targeted therapeutics.

Advisor: Diamandis, Eleftherios P.
Roads to Resources: Uneven Development, Mobile Work, and the Extractive Imaginary in Canada

In recent years it has become common for workers to commute from high unemployment areas of eastern Canada to work in the Alberta oil sands and related industries. Through a genealogical investigation that moves from the post-war decades to the present, this dissertation asks how, and to what end, mobile extractive work has become normal for east coast communities. Drawing on participant observation and action research, in-depth interviews, and archival research in provincial and federal state archives, I illustrate that welfare state policy, rural restructuring, and targeted recruitment have driven workers into long-distance work, but that a narrow set of stories about work and the economy have normalized these extreme labour relations. In the decades after World War Two, as the Canadian state set its sights on modernization and national economic expansion, it formulated the Maritime region as a national problem. Framing the region’s seasonal economies, low productivity, and “underdevelopment” as barriers to national growth, planners and policy-makers worked to remake Maritime economies and people to fit with a vision of the national economy rooted in industrialization, urbanization, and expanded industrial resource extraction. Welfare state programs focused on rural development, modernization, and labour re-organized local material life in powerful ways, but they also broadcast narrow ideas about what types of work, livelihoods, and economies could be part of the future. These enduring stories about economic viability, I argue, have naturalized decline, mobility, and market volatility, rendering the region’s remarkable reliance on long-distance resource employment ordinary. By obscuring workers’ experiences of volatility and the underdevelopment that shapes extractive labour markets, this normalization has been a linchpin in Canadian extraction. This research highlights the central role of welfare state policy in producing relations and geographies of extraction in Canada. But the state’s intensive investment in managing peripheral workers and regions also underscores the persistence of economies, lives, and forms of valuation that break from the logic of unending accumulation.

Keywords: Labour markets
Mobility
Resource extraction
Uneven Development
Welfare state
Work
Advisor: Cowen, Deborah
The Limits of Legality: The Rule of Law Principles Governing the Common Law Public Policy Exception in Private International Law

The public policy exception is a well-established part of common law choice of law doctrine. But to use the exception, judges must identify the forum’s fundamental values that cannot be violated by foreign law. Scholars have argued that it is impossible to provide a general account these values and have criticized the exception for introducing indeterminacy into choice of law doctrine. As result, scholars argue, the exception represents a threat to the rule of law. This standard scholarly critique is rooted in a formal account of the rule of law. But in the common law tradition, there is a well-established alternative theory: under the common law constitutionalist account of the rule of law, judges must do much more than simply ensure that the law is consistent, predictable, and determinate. Judges must also ensure that the law’s content does not violate the fundamental rule of law values of the unwritten ‘common law constitution.’ This project offers a novel common law constitutionalist account of the relationship between the rule of law and the public policy exception. Instead of undermining the rule of law, this account sees the public policy exception as a means through which courts uphold the rule of law. The exception allows courts to ensure that the content of foreign private law selected by the forum’s choice of law rules does not violate the forum’s substantive rule of law values. This account also offers guidance as to which values cannot be violated by foreign law: the rule of law norms of the ‘common law constitution.’ In addition, this account helps make sense of English and Canadian public policy jurisprudence, offering a compelling account of the leading cases and the reasons that judges have used to invoke public policy. Ultimately, common law constitutionalism would not see the public policy exception as a ‘unruly horse,’ but as a necessary aspect of the rule of law; and as a unique doctrine offering important insight into the fundamental values of the common law tradition and the success of common law constitutionalism qua theory of the rule of law.

Keywords: Common Law Constitutionalism
Conflict of Laws
Private International Law
Public Policy Exception
Advisor: Ripstein, Arthur
Knop, Karen
Optimization of Origami Inspired Static and Active Mechanical Metamaterial

Origami-inspired materials provide effective solutions to control the mechanical properties of sandwich core structures, due to their outstanding structural features and due to the unique capacity of elastic deformation of its elements that are able to fold and unfold at different scales during the loading process. Both the geometrical features and the properties of the parent material that used to produce the origami structures are the most important factors required for tailoring the designed origami core with the target application. To eliminate the fracture and the abrupt stress change in the designed origami core elements, it is important to consider the parent material properties and behavior. There are two important challenges that should be considered in designing origami cores, the geometrical features of the origami tessellation and the material used to produce the origami unit cells and cores. Three dimensional origami cores can be fabricated by folding two dimensional flat sheets into three dimensional cores, or by pre-folding the origami features using a molding process. This research is devoted to investigate pre-folded origami cores made of polymeric materials for damping applications. Both passive and active properties of the designed unit cells were investigated in this research. Two different origami patterns were considered in the research, Miura and Ron-Resch-like origami structures. Different material blends were used to fabricate pre-folded origami features and correlate with the mechanical properties of the fabricated cores. Another way of preparing pre-folded origami cores is by using fused deposition modeling, in which different Ron-Resch-like cores with different geometrical parameters were designed and characterized for compression and impact load absorption. The designed origami cores were numerically simulated and compared with the experimental results. This motivated to include the viscoelastic behavior of the polymeric parent material at elevated temperature and simulate the cores’ unit cell using periodic boundary condition; the actual skeleton of the origami unit cell structure was represented in order to capture the mechanical behavior.

Advisor: Naguib, Hani E.
Vital Movements: Feminist Aesthetics and Popular Culture 1920–1945

Vital Movements argues for the crucial importance of women’s physical movement to the aesthetics of American popular culture between 1920 and 1945. Tracking female bodies as they run up and down stairs, enter and exit rooms, and strut across spaces and places, my dissertation reveals an array of self-determining women, defiant in their mobility and their right to choose and take pleasure in a life outside the accepted roles of wife and mother. Aesthetic modernism’s institutionalization as the critical high-water mark of the period has largely rendered works that circulated in the commercial realms of Broadway, Hollywood, and Book-of-the-Month Clubs devoid of substance. Further, critical emphasis on language and discourse, according to dance critics, has caused us to ignore the expressive capacities of the body in motion. I argue that sustained attention to embodied movement forces a reconsideration of popular realist texts by revealing other ways they tell their stories, ways that are complex and layered in their own right. This method of engagement restores agency to the texts, lost, as Rita Felski has argued, in the emphasis on historical context, by rendering their capacity to solicit our “affective attachments.” Combining insights from middlebrow studies, “physical cultures” of the period, philosophies of movement, dance studies, and spatial theory, each chapter applies them to a different genre. Chapter one uses Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s play Stage Door to establish women’s movement as the dissertation’s overall subject and to introduce the essential role played by work in the freedom and autonomy expressed by it. Chapter two focuses on resistance to norms of feminine embodiment and their relation to social and economic mobility in Dorothy Arzner’s film Dance, Girl, Dance. Stage directions and the inherent visuality of film attune readers to moving bodies before encountering the narrative forms of chapters three and four, which, respectively, connect moving bodies to unarticulated thoughts and desires in Zona Gale’s novel Miss Lulu Bett, and to personal growth and fulfillment in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s autobiography, Intimate Memories. Throughout bodies “speak” through movement, generating a realism richly attuned to the textures of women’s everyday lives.

Keywords: feminism
movement
popular culture
vitality
women
Advisor: Most, Andrea
A Dominican Master of Theology in Context: John of Naples and Intellectual Life Beyond Paris, ca. 1300-1350

This dissertation provides the first comprehensive biography of the Dominican scholar John of Naples (Giovanni Regina di Napoli), who flourished during the first half of the fourteenth century. John studied and taught at the Dominican schools in Naples and Bologna, and at the University of Paris, where he was made a master of theology in 1315. He spent most of the rest of his life in Naples, where he was closely associated with the Angevin court. Chapter 1 surveys John’s life and works, setting his career in its Neapolitan context. Chapters 2-4 deal with different aspects of his teaching. Chapter 2 contrasts his contributions to debates about the nature of theology at Paris with the way he introduced this subject to his Dominican students in Naples. Chapter 3 examines the role of medicine in his theological teaching, where it served as a tool for interpreting core texts as well as a source of material for preaching. Chapter 4 analyzes the symbiotic relationship between his quodlibets and the literature of pastoral care. Chapter 5 looks at John as a Dominican friar and preacher, turning to his sermon collection as a source of information about Dominican life in southern Italy, and Chapter 6 investigates his relationship with the Angevin rulers of Naples and the role of politics and political theory in his works. Appendices to chapters 2-6 provide transcriptions of unpublished quodlibetal questions, sermons, and other texts used as the basis for this study. Two additional appendices provide descriptions of the main manuscripts and discuss the dating and placing of John’s works. This study considers John from a variety of angles – teacher, preacher, friar, courtier, Neapolitan – and suggests that these overlapping identities cannot be productively separated from one another. It highlights the vibrancy of intellectual life in early-fourteenth-century Naples, and the strong cultural ties between Naples, Paris, and Avignon, as well as other regions such as the Kingdom of Hungary. Furthermore, it illustrates how mendicant convents could help to disseminate theological teachings from the University of Paris to the provinces, while also serving as sites of innovation in their own right.

Keywords: Dominicans
History of Education
Intellectual History
Naples
Pastoral Care
Theology
Advisor: Pickavé, Martin
Armstrong, Lawrin
Freedom Dues: Negotiating Race, Servitude, and Freedom in Early American Law and Literature

Freedom dues were typically payments of money, land, or clothing that masters gave to servants upon completion of servitude. Using case studies, this thesis captures the arc of a historic transformation in how freedom dues were perceived between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries; it illuminates how these dues became a humanitarian symbol and the narrative of self-actualization that arose about them. The narrative focus on freedom dues was generated through tracts advocating immigration to colonial America and was integral to early understandings of the promise of New World prosperity. The texts I address use this narrative to critique a society failing to live up to its implied ideal: enfranchisement through hard work. My thesis reveals that often relations of servitude morph into something that looks dangerously akin to chattel slavery. In Chapter One, I contrast the Lawes and Libertyes (1648), where servants were to be prevented from “be[ing] sent away emptie,” to the revisioning of this framework in the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), which enshrined slaves’ perpetual indebtedness. In Chapter Two, I use the Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (1692-93) to examine how Tituba’s claim that the devil offered her an indenture followed by many “fine things” came to influence other testimonies. I argue that the narrative Tituba and others craft regarding the Devil's promise of servitude properly rewarded but not supplied by Massachusetts’s governors would have been shocking in New England at the time. Chapter Three analyses The Scarlet Letter (1850) and reveals that, by presenting Hester Prynne as a branded, lifelong indentured servant, Hawthorne effectively portrays a variety of servitude that appears similar to black slavery. Hester and Pearl have their customary white privileges undermined, I argue, and Hawthorne’s novel reveals abolitionist leanings. In Chapter Four, I consider Harriet Wilson’s autobiographical text, Our Nig (1859). The Bellmonts’ refusal to provide proper freedom dues to the novel’s protagonist highlights the degree to which her servitude has been slavish, and Wilson’s plea for support to remedy this wrong provides a final critique of "free" New England.

Keywords: American literature
freedom dues
law and literature
Nineteenth Century
Race
Servitude
Advisor: Nyquist, Mary
Improving the Reading Achievement of Language Minority and Disadvantaged Youth At Risk of Academic Failure

BACKGROUND: Variability in individuals' response to intervention can contribute to smaller intervention effects. Integration of quantitative and qualitative findings can be instrumental in elucidating person-level and broader contextual issues related to differential intervention efficacy and inform overall intervention utility. In order to assess ecological factors implicated in differential response to intervention, three studies were conducted that together comprised a comprehensive program evaluation of the Vocabulary Learning Project, a manualized reading intervention targeting the vocabulary and reading comprehension skills of academically at-risk language-minority and economically disadvantaged high-school aged youth. METHODS: A sequential embedded quasi-experimental mixed methods research design consisting of three distinct yet interrelated phases was used. Across the three research phases, mixed analyses of variance, hierarchical linear regression and multi-case study analyses were conducted to assess intervention effects, factors predictive of outcome gains and contextual factors differentiating outcomes, respectively. RESULTS: Findings from the first two studies indicated that the intervention was differentially effective based on multiple factors at various contextual levels. At the person-level context, pre-intervention language comprehension skills, pre-intervention motivation to read, achievement orientation, academic self-concept and sense of future aspirations were implicated factors. At the intervention program level, investment in positive program outcomes, tutoring group climate and participant resourcefulness were identified factors. Within the peer and family social context, reliance on peers and nature of parental support were differentiating factors. At the broader school, community and cultural context, school perceptions, school and community engagement, as well as youths’ sense of cultural identity were factors that differentiated program effects. Findings from the third, integrative study resulted in the identification of a unifying meta-theme of motivation as a key factor underlying the differential responses to the VLP intervention. CONCLUSIONS: Consideration of the multiple contexts navigated by culturally and linguistically diverse youth is critical for maximizing intervention effects. IMPACT: This study provides multiple insights about opportunities worthy of consideration in optimally designing instructional interventions targeting marginalized youth populations in the Canadian context, and suggests a useful methodological approach for evaluating such programs.

Keywords: at risk
immigrant
intervention
mixed methods
reading comprehension
reading in a second language
Advisor: Geva, Esther
Romances of Modern Enchantment at the British Fin de Siècle

This thesis examines the relationship between romance and Max Weber’s narrative of the disenchantment of modern life in which scientific calculation has mastered mystery. I argue that specific British novels at the fin de siècle deploy romance to resist the rationalization of experience and create new forms of enchantment. I re-read texts by major authors that include tropes of romance when the mode was synonymous with the Romance Revival of authors like Rider Haggard and R.L. Stevenson, but disavowed by proponents of realism and emerging modernism. Unless it appears to deconstruct itself, romance from this period continues to be viewed by critics as nostalgic. The novels I call “romances of modern enchantment” employ metafictional elements to subvert narrow understandings of romance as a conservative mode, instead drawing on areas of uncertainty in modern life as sources for romance. In Chapter One I examine discourses of play in Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean (1881). Hardy challenges romance’s association of play with childishness by exploring the gothic castle, the theatre, the telegraph, and the casino, demonstrating how these sites become material for romance. Chapter Two reads G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) as a metaphysical detective novel that combines Edwardian detection with the medieval dream vision to show how mystery might be sustained within modern romance. Chapter Three contends that Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s collaborative novel, Romance (1903), re-works the “boy’s adventure” story to challenge ideologies of imperial masculinity by drawing on Catholicism and literary impressionism as subversive discourses. Finally, Chapter Four attends to romance in Ford’s post-war tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-28), arguing that these novels challenge collective efforts to memorialize the dead and contain trauma by employing hagiographical tropes to depict the inconveniently returned soldier. My project demonstrates that both fin-de-siècle and current critical perceptions of romance ignore possibilities for the mode as an experimental literary strategy that explores uncertainty without rationalizing, controlling, or regulating it. Re-reading romance in these novels broadens our understanding of the connection between literary form and the disenchantment narrative, and reveals ways in which romance might enchant modern life.

Keywords: Enchantment
Fin de Siècle
Modernism
Novel
Romance
Victorian
Advisor: Bolus-Reichert, Christine