VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Relational Speculation: Rereading Inheritance in Victorian Fiction

My dissertation offers a new entry point into Victorian fiction’s well-documented concern with the credit economy by calling attention to inheritance as a mode of capitalist exchange and subject formation that, although pervasive, has been under-examined. I argue that Victorian novels interrogate the assumption that intergenerational succession is a timeless, natural institution that remains aloof from the psychic and moral dangers commonly associated with financial speculation. My detailed readings of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), Collins’s Armadale (1866), and Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2) demonstrate how their juxtapositions of stockjobbers and gamblers with expectant heirs and testators not only figure inheritance’s alliances with finance but also uncover its intrinsically speculative logic. Through this recurring comparison, which I call “relational speculation,” these novels imbricate the abstracting logics of credit, risk, and contract with the morally and affectively imbued structures of family, marriage, and property. In focusing on relational speculation, I complicate critical tendencies to view the persistence of inheritance plots in nineteenth-century novels as mere “convention” or as a kind of infrastructural holdover. Instead, I illuminate this persistence by tracing tensions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular, legal, and political accounts of succession and bequest, showing how they struggle to redefine these models of intergenerational transmission both through and against the precepts of capitalism, contractual individualism, and corporate personhood. I suggest that Dickens, Collins, and Eliot foreground the paradoxes implicit in these efforts via the trope of relational speculation, which pervades their plots, figures, and modes of narration. Their novels question the speculative and corporate-like relationship these models of inheritance construct between testators and would-be heirs by depicting identity mistakes and impersonations, fantasies of posthumous ownership, fears of inherited liability, and constraining dead hands. Relational speculation thus reveals the substitutive and proleptic structures of identity, ownership, and responsibility latent to speculation and inheritance alike. Insofar as it prompts these novels both to ironize some of inheritance’s key narrative conventions and to seek ways of controlling their own implicitly speculative dynamics, relational speculation ultimately plays an important role in shaping their formal as well as thematic concerns.

Keywords: Inheritance
Novel
Speculation
Victorian
Advisor: Jaffe, Audrey
Pirandello's Dramaturgy of Time

Luigi Pirandello’s drama, at its heart, deals with the problems of being and becoming, identity, and creativity. His works are centered upon the nature of personal experience and the ways in which we perceive and interact with the world and its inhabitants. But often overlooked is the role that time plays in those dramas’ already complicated and divisive subject matter. While concepts and themes related to time—e.g., memory and narrative—are often at the core of Pirandello’s drama, a cohesive approach to the topic of time and temporality in his work is lacking. This thesis, using three of Pirandello’s majors plays as case studies, will offer an analysis of the playwright’s dramaturgical management of time as a textual theme, as the basis of dramatic narrative, and—in the guise of memory and anticipation—as the ontological foundation of the concept of dramatic character. These plays, written in the midst of the general discourse on time and temporality at work in the early part of the 20th-century, lend themselves to be read in dialogue with 1) the philosophical exploration of the concept of time, memory, and duration developed by Bergson, 2) the phenomenology of internal time consciousness advanced by Husserl, 3) Heidegger’s idea of temporality as the underlying structure of both being and meaning, and 4) Einstein’s consideration of the relativity of mankind’s perception of events in the space-time continuum. In this thesis, I will demonstrate that Pirandello was working at the intersection of trends deriving from each of these philosophical premises, creating a theory of dramatic form that is structured by the very concept it illustrates thematically, namely the relativity of time in man’s experience of the world and the notion of temporality as the foundation of all consciousness.

Keywords: Bergson
Einstein
Heidegger
Husserl
Pirandello
Luigi
Time
Advisor: Pietropaolo, Domenico
Paratextual Reading in the Romantic Period

Paratextual Reading in the Romantic Period demonstrates that Maria Edgeworth, Robert Southey, and Walter Scott used paratext as a formal strategy to disrupt established relationships among readers, texts, and an increasingly global sense of context. Referring to this interrupted reading process as “paratextual reading,” this study shifts its attention towards paratext’s use as a tool to discipline the public’s reading habits for a new information age. As British imperial expansion brought distant cultural and geographical spaces closer to metropolitan readers, Romantic writers developed new genres – such as the “footnote novel” and the annotated long poem – to make representations of these spaces accessible to the British reading public. By grafting the knowledge produced by antiquarian and Orientalist scholarship onto popular narrative forms, these annotated texts reframe pleasure reading as an opportunity to gather information about the expanding world beyond the book. Alongside their newly referential paratexts, however, Edgeworth, Southey, and Scott also adapt eighteenth-century traditions of metafictional annotation, calling deliberate attention to their notes’ disruption of readers’ progress through their fictional narratives. Beginning with Edgeworth’s use of paratext to improve her “lazy” English readers’ capacity for intellectual labour in time for Ireland’s imminent Union with Britain, Paratextual Reading then turns its attention to Southey’s and Samuel Henley’s various efforts to use Orientalist annotation to discipline the perversities of readerly desire. Finally, focusing on Scott’s paratextual incorporation of his anecdotal source materials into his Magnum Opus edition of the wildly popular Waverley novels, this thesis concludes by considering the commercial impact of paratextual strategies of rereading. By documenting paratext’s participation in efforts to reform lazy, curious, or otherwise unauthorized readers, Paratextual Reading shows how Romantic writers worked to cultivate a reading public fit to cope with information overload in a new age of British imperial expansion.

Keywords: annotation
British Romanticism
Maria Edgeworth
paratext
Robert Southey
Walter Scott
Advisor: Lynch, Deidre S
Les Figures de Parias et de Marginaux dans la transcréation québécoise

Cette thèse explore l’aspect protéiforme des parias et marginaux à travers deux médias, la littérature et le cinéma. Notre étude s’éloigne des questionnements généraux sur l’altérité et des théories sociologiques et anthropologiques qui ne distinguent pas ces différentes formes d’exclusion. À travers des micro-analyses instituées par les champs de l’éthique et de l’histoire, nous proposons de distinguer les termes, de rendre compte du rapport qu’ils entretiennent avec la société et d’examiner leur évolution, à travers les siècles et les formes d’expression artistique. Après une réflexion visant à dégager les complexités critiques du champ de l’adaptation cinématographique, nous proposons le terme de « transcréation » et définissons un cadre d’analyse précis, basé sur la narratologie du film qui permet d’appréhender efficacement les figures concernées. Cette thèse interroge une grande variété de récits, datant de la première moitié du XXe siècle (Un Homme et son péché, Grignon (1933) ; Gury (1949) et Binamé (2002)) jusqu’au tournant du XXIe siècle (Littoral, Mouawad (1999) adapté par l’auteur en 2004), et de genres variés : roman fantastique (Sur le seuil de Senécal (1998) ; Tessier (2004)), autofiction (Borderline et La Brèche de Labrèche (2000 ; 2002) ; Charlebois (2008)), nouvelle (Le Torrent d’Hébert (1950) ; Lavoie (2012)) et théâtre (Matroni et moi de Martin (1998) ; Duval (1999) ; et Les Feluettes de Bouchard (1987) ; Greyson (1996)), afin d’exploiter de manière efficace et convaincante les formes que prennent les parias et les marginaux et de proposer une typologie des esthétiques associées au thème de l’exclusion. Plusieurs études comparées d’un vaste corpus québécois laissent, dans un deuxième temps, place à des analyses détaillées, construisant au cours des chapitres une critique du sujet. Nous réfléchissons d’abord à la violence intrinsèque à la société et aux diverses manières de stigmatiser et punir, pour ensuite nous tourner vers des thématiques morales (le Mal), esthétiques (la mort et l’animalité) et philosophiques (l’abjection). Progressivement, nous verrons que, loin d’être essentiellement négatives, ces figures développent une part de positivité, que ce soit par une caractéristique exceptionnelle du protagoniste ou par un traitement particulier des récits appréhendés.

Keywords: Hétérochronotopie
Marginal
Paria
Transcréation
Advisor: Riendeau, Pascal
Metabolomics analysis reveals novel aspects of 2-hydroxyglutarate homeostasis and links citramalate to branched chain amino acid metabolism

Cells produce a wide variety of metabolic products. Many of these metabolites have annotated functions in supporting the life of a cell or organism, but many others whose functions are unknown or unclear are considered errors in metabolism. It is well established that cell metabolism changes based on the type and quantity of the nutrients available. The work presented herein explores how growth on different nutrient types affects the metabolism of two compounds with incompletely defined roles: citramalate and 2-hydroxyglutarate (2-HG). I leverage the genetic and metabolic tools available for the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to examine the metabolism of these two isomeric compounds. I demonstrate that citramalate is a product of pyruvate and acetyl-CoA whose synthesis is catalyzed by leucine biosynthesis enzyme Leu4. I show that citramalate is produced when cells adapt to mitochondrial dysfunction and propose that citramalate synthesis is an alternate, energetically conservative path to isoleucine biosynthesis. The findings described here expand our understanding of branched chain amino acid biosynthesis. The oncometabolite D-2-HG is believed to be the product of metabolic error because it is produced from the readily available compound α-ketoglutarate by a variety of enzymes with other, already well established functions. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae D-2-HG is produced by the first enzyme in serine biosynthesis, phosphoglycerate dehydrogenase. I show that D-2-HG metabolism may contribute to mitochondrial electron transport and is also regulated by mitochondrial health. I show there are two metabolic pathways in yeast for the turnover of D-2-HG that occur in different sub-cellular compartments. The work presented in this thesis shows that "off-target" catalysis by metabolic enzymes can be means for cells to adapt to changing nutrient availability.

Keywords: Branched Chain Amino Acids
Cancer
Genetics
Metabolomics
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Advisor: Caudy, Amy A
Body Size Evolution and Diversity of Fishes using the Neotropical Cichlids (Cichlinae) as a Model System

The influence of body size on an organism’s physiology, morphology, ecology, and life history has been considered one of the most fundamental relationships in ecology and evolution. The ray-finned fishes are a highly diverse group of vertebrates. Yet, our understanding of diversification in this group is incomplete, and the role of body size in creating this diversity is largely unknown. I examined body size in Neotropical cichlids (Cichlinae) to elucidate the large- and small-scale factors affecting body size diversity and distribution, and how body size shapes species, morphological, and ecological diversity in fishes. Characterization of body size distributions across the phylogeny of Neotropical cichlids revealed considerable overlap in body size, particularly in intermediate-sized fishes, with few, species-poor lineages exhibiting extreme body size. Three potential peaks of adaptive evolution in body size were identified within Cichlinae. I found freshwater fishes globally tend to be smaller and their distributions more diverse and right-skewed than marine counterparts, irrespective of taxonomy and clade age, with a strengthening of these trends in riverine systems. Comparisons of Neotropical cichlid body size diversity and distribution to this broader context shows that body size patterns are largely abnormal compared to most freshwater fishes, particularly those of the Neotropics. This implies that small body size is rarer in Cichlinae, despite several independent cases of body size decrease in this lineage. I found that these small-bodied lineages are miniaturized cichlids, exhibiting strong reduction in body size, as well as paedomorphic characters and ontogenetic truncation compared to their sister taxa. Further examination of ontogenies across Neotropical cichlids found considerable shape conservatism over ontogeny and phylogeny, with cichlids following similar ontogenetic trajectories. Therefore, ontogenetic pathways do not contribute considerably to morphological divergence seen in adults, with divergence likely occurring in the larval stage or perhaps during embryology. The evolution of ontogeny, body size, and shape did not correspond to a unique adaptive peak in miniatures, or three body size optima predicted from the distribution of size across the phylogeny. Rather, it is complex and, like early trait divergence previously seen, diversifies early in the phylogeny across the major lineages of Neotropical cichlids.

Keywords: Allometry
Cichlids
Geometric Morphometrics
Ontogeny
Advisor: López-Fernández, Hernán
Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus on Self-Agency and Self-Motion: An Inquiry into the Medieval Metaphysics of Causal Powers

In the Physics, Aristotle argues that everything that moves is moved by something else, and thus that things cannot move themselves, in the sense of self-motion that refers not just to changing location, but also more generally to causing a change in oneself. This dissertation focuses on how, working within the framework of Aristotle’s philosophy, Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus defend the possibility of self-motion and self-agency (in contrast to self-motion, in self-agency a thing causes a feature in itself, but there is no temporal moment to which we can assign this causal fact). To understand Henry’s and Scotus’s defences of self-motion and self-agency, I consider their views about causal powers: in any case of causation, including self-motion and self-agency, things do what they do by exercising their causal powers. I argue that Henry and Scotus think very differently about the nature of powers and their causal contribution. Henry takes powers to be without causal efficacy, a view that pushes him to assign to them only an explanatory role, and to argue that in causation, what causes the change and what undergoes the change is the whole thing that has a power. In contrast, Scotus understands powers as forms, that is, as entities that can have direct causal efficacy, and thinks that in causation, what causes the change and what undergoes the change are these forms, which are parts of things. I further explain how Henry’s and Scotus’s views about causal powers are responsible for their different understandings of self-change. Because he focuses on how the whole thing is affected in a causal interaction, Henry is forced to conclude that in created beings, no perfect self-change is possible, for what starts the change and what ends it are not strictly the same. By focusing on the causal contribution of the parts of a thing, Scotus manages to bypass Henry’s conundrum, and develops an account according to which things can change themselves in virtue of having active and passive principles by whose mutual manifestation a feature is produced by the self-agent in itself.

Keywords: causal powers and causation
Henry of Ghent
John Duns Scotus
medieval metaphysics
self-motion
Thomas Aquinas
Advisor: King, Peter
Robust Egomotion Estimation for Automatic and Crowdsourcing-Based Indoor Localization and Tracking

Indoor localization has been an active research in recent years. Among many different algorithms proposed, fingerprinting-based methods have found a great popularity due to ease of deployment and high accuracy. A major disadvantage to fingerprinting-based methods, is the burden of the training phase in which fingerprints of a certain type of a signal are recorded in many known locations inside the indoor environment. The collected dataset of fingerprints and corresponding locations is then used to model the relationship between fingerprints and locations in order to use that model to localize future queried fingerprints. This process is usually time consuming and requires considerable human effort and expertise. To overcome the burden of the training phase, in this thesis, we discuss two different perspectives towards solving these problems. We refer to these perspectives as: automatic fingerprinting and, crowdsourcing-based fingerprint-location dataset generation. The former, aims to reduce the time and effort put by an expert to generate the fingerprint dataset by automatically estimating the location of the collected fingerprints while the expert walks in the environment, hence reducing the training time from typically several hours to a few minutes needed to walk in the target indoor area. The latter method, aims to approach the problem by leveraging the shared data from the users in an indoor environment, hence eliminating the need for an expert to repeat the training process to update the dataset of fingerprints. Both perspectives above can expedite the widespread use of fingerprinting-based methods of localization for indoors by alleviating the burden of the training phase which currently seems to be the major drawback for this popular category of indoor localization systems. We will propose, design and validate algorithms for each of these methods.

Keywords: Crowdsourcing
Egomotion
Fingerprinting
Indoor Localization
Indoor Tracking
Stereo Vision
Advisor: Valaee, Shahrokh
The Mathematical Minister: John Wallis (1616-1703) at the Intersection of Science, Mathematics, and Religion

John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, is primarily known for his contributions to seventeenth-century mathematics. However, as a founder member of the Royal Society and an Anglican minister, Wallis also had a productive career in both natural philosophy and theology. This thesis considers Wallis as a “clerical practitioner” of science—a member of the clergy who studied natural philosophy as well as divinity—and seeks to articulate his unique perspective on the relationship between God and nature. This account of Wallis serves as a case study in the history of science and religion, establishing several novel connections between secular and sacred studies in seventeenth-century England. In particular, Wallis blends elements of experimental philosophy, Calvinist theology, and Scholastic philosophy in creative ways to make connections between the natural and the divine. This thesis has three main goals. First, it traces Wallis’s unique and idiosyncratic role in the history of science and religion. Second, it complicates two common narratives about Wallis: first, that he is historically significant mostly because his mathematics served as a precursor to Isaac Newton’s development of calculus, and second, that his successful career is the result of his ambition and political savvy rather than his original contributions to mathematics, natural philosophy, theology, and other fields. Third, it emphasizes how Wallis interacted with the ideas of the major intellectual figures of his time, including Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Newton, and Leibniz, in order to suggest how the interaction between the natural and the divine in his works might impact our understanding of the broader history of science and religion in the seventeenth century. Each of the five chapters in this thesis contributes to these goals by identifying and analyzing connections—methodological, epistemological, and rhetorical—between Wallis’s natural philosophy and theology.

Keywords: John Wallis
mathematics
natural philosophy
Scholastic philosophy
science and religion
theology
Advisor: Fehige, Yiftach
Genetic Analysis of Gata4 and RhoC, Modifiers of Her2/Neu Expression and Signaling, in a Mammary Tumor Context

Molecular heterogeneity amongst breast tumors is a major confounding factor in developing effective therapies for patients. Although key oncogenic drivers of breast cancer (BC), like HER2 amplification and PIK3CA mutations, have been well studied, less is known about mutations/alterations involved in tumor progression. Copy number aberration is very common in human BC. For example, approximately 50% of cases show loss of one copy of chromosome 8p, and patients with these tumors show poor survival. The GATA4 gene, which codes for a transcription factor thought to inhibit HER2/Neu expression maps within this region (8p23.1). To test for haploinsufficient tumor suppressor gene (hTSG) function for GATA4 in this context, I deleted one copy of this gene in mouse models of Her2/Neu and Pik3caH1047R –induced BC. Although mammary-tumor formation was unaffected in both backgrounds, tumor histology was significantly altered on a Pik3ca mutant background. In contrast to GATA4, genomic alterations to RHOC (a Rho-family GTPase) are rarely observed. Instead, RHOC protein expression is upregulated in aggressive forms of breast cancer. Indeed, in vitro overexpression of RhoC in mammary epithelial cells enhances invasion and motility. Despite this, little is known about function consequences of RhoC overexpression in BC. To this end, I generated a RhoC overexpression transgenic to determine how it affects tumor development in Her2/Neu and Pik3caH1047R models. Strikingly, RhoC overexpression decreased tumor latency in both contexts, and enhanced tumor penetrance in the model for Her2-amplified BC. Moreover, RhoC overexpression altered tumor histology on both backgrounds. In conclusion, I report that RhoC overexpression plays a role in tumor progression in cooperation with multiple oncogenic drivers.

Advisor: Egan, Sean E
Rethinking Membership: Statelessness, Domination, and the Limits of Contemporary Citizenship

This dissertation examines the politics and ethics of forced migration from both a conceptual and normative perspective. The dissertation does so by focusing on the phenomenon of what Hannah Arendt referred to as ‘statelessness’—a term which is deployed in this project in an extended sense that includes all persons who might be in need of international protection because their own state is unable or unwilling to effectively secure their human rights. In approaching statelessness from the perspective of political theory, the primary task of my dissertation is to offer a novel conceptual account of the harm that is done by statelessness or the de facto loss of membership within a political community and what this entails for how we ought to respond to the global reality of forced displacement. In doing so, this project challenges conventional approaches and intuitions regarding our ethical responsibilities to refugees and others categories of displaced persons. The goal of this critical reconstruction is to recast the nature of our responsibilities as obligations of justice, as opposed to those of humanitarian assistance. At the same time, this account also foregrounds the importance of constructing fair and effective responses to these forms of exclusion that attend to the role of agency in remedying the loss of membership.

Keywords: Forced Migration
Global Justice
International Ethics
Political Theory
Refugees
Statelessness
Advisor: Carens, Joseph
Bertoldi, Nancy