VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A Play without a Stage: English Renaissance Drama, 1642-1660

A Play Without a Stage: English Renaissance Drama, 1642 to 1660, focuses on the production of early modern drama during the English Civil War and Interregnum, when commercial playing was outlawed. Despite the prominence of book history as a methodology over the last three decades, the era of the theatre ban – when performance declined but dramatic publication flourished – remains understudied. It is in this era, I argue, that the genre, indeed even the critical field, of early modern drama as we know it was created. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English Renaissance stage – the theatres were closed, demolished, converted into tenements, and once famous actors and playwrights, now unemployed, died in poverty – the professional drama of 1576-1642 not only lived on, but thrived, in print. In the absence of contemporary performances, stationers presented pre-war plays as relics of an absent, idealized theatrical culture. The theatre ban prematurely aged the genre of English drama, but at the same time, sta- tioners began publishing previously unprinted Tudor and Stuart plays. These plays, at once new and old, were marketed in terms of novelty and finitude: they represented the latest offerings of a tradition that had drawn to a close. The era’s playbook publishers capitalized on theatrical nostalgia, but also looked ahead to the moment when the store of previously unprinted professional drama would run out. At that point, stationers turned to the project of anatomizing the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first dramatic anthologies and comprehensive dramatic catalogues in the 1650s. With chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia and anthologies, the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period and the critical conceptions of the theatre ban since the Restoration, A Play Without a Stage argues that the death of contemporary English theatre gave birth to English Renaissance drama. The seeds of this field – that is, of the modern canon, the editorial and performance traditions, and Shakespeare’s supremacy in all – were planted not in the eighteenth century, but in the mid-seventeenth century.

Keywords: Renaissance drama
Shakespeare
Theatre ban
Advisor: Lopez, Jeremy
Gender, Race and Reading: Relationality in Alice Munro, Joan Riviere, Jane Campion and Alice Walker

This thesis considers the question of femininity in psychoanalysis and cultural life, through an analysis of how short stories by Alice Munro and Alice Walker and film by Jane Campion stage and engage with it. In chapters one and two, I argue that Munro’s stories in Open Secrets assemble myths of feminine survival that take on a truth value as plausible alternative descriptions of culture to those stories which psychoanalysis describes as ultimate. As such, “The Jack Randa Hotel” and “Open Secrets” provide a complex commentary on gender and its relationship to questions of knowledge. My contention is not so much that Munro’s stories “resist” or parody psychoanalytic understandings of gender, as that they disclose latent possibilities in the original that are not fully available to distanced, linear/discursive thought. Correspondingly, my work considers psychoanalysis not as a closed or discrete set of textual practices, but as a cultural text open to continual signification and resignification by successive generations of writers – and thus, to ameliorative reinterpretations. This approach offers a way of moving beyond the false dualism of a “psychoanalytic” perspective which disregards the claims of history and an historical one which reifies a transparently self-available subject – by embracing, in order to qualify, the validity of each. Chapters three and four consider the normativity of “whiteness” in the construction of gender in the West, as it bears on a specific psychoanalytic text and concept (chapter three) and shows up in the grammar of Jane Campion’s film (chapter four). Chapter three reads Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929) in terms of how it encodes this norm. Chapter four considers the implications of my reading of feminine masquerade in chapter three for film theory. I analyze how Campion’s In the Cut deploys signifiers of racial difference to foreground its white female lead’s crisis of subjectivization. In a final chapter, I conclude the thesis with a reading of Alice Walker’s “Advancing Luna—and Ida B. Wells,” which speaks to the possibilities for (or limitations on) solidarity between white and black women, and to the omissions of white feminist theory with which Campion’s film contends.

Keywords: Alice Munro
Alice Walker
feminism
Jane Campion
Joan Riviere
psychoanalysis
Advisor: Nyquist, Mary
Circadian Hallmarks of the Aging Epigenome

Circadian rhythmicity governs a remarkable array of fundamental biological functions in eukaryotes which is mediated by cyclical metabolomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic activities. Histone modifications and other epigenetic factors are also involved in the circadian machinery; however, despite significant efforts detection of circadian DNA (cytosine) modification has remained elusive. In this study, we aimed to document and explore the features of circadian oscillations of cytosine modifications. We discovered that a substantial number of cytosines show a circadian pattern in their modification status in mouse liver and lung, as well as human neutrophils. Furthermore, we found that circadian oscillations of cytosine modification are linked to circadian transcription. Our findings also indicate that circadian oscillations explain a portion of the epigenetic variation which traditionally has been called random or stochastic. There are numerous clinical and molecular studies showing strong associations between declining circadian rhythmicity and aging, but the molecular underpinnings of this association are not clear. Since epigenetic alterations accompany aging, we aimed to investigate the relationship between daily cytosine modification oscillations and the aging epigenome. We discovered that cytosines which exhibited circadian epigenetic oscillations significantly overlapped with the cytosines exhibiting age-related modification changes. Furthermore, the amplitude of these oscillations strongly correlated with the degree of age-dependent changes. Finally, the day or night timing of circadian peaks were accurate predictors of whether a specific cytosine will lose or gain modification in the aging tissue. Epigenetic changes, circadian dysregulation, and age have all been implicated in a number of complex diseases. Consequently, our third aim was to examine the contributions of DNA modification oscillations to the epigenetic changes identified in epigenome-wide association studies of complex disease. We tested leukemia, Alzheimerâ s disease, and schizophrenia, and in all cases, we found a significant overlap between cytosines exhibiting daily oscillations and those identified in disease studies. We therefore propose that circadian epigenetic oscillations may contribute not only to aging but also to disease. Based on our findings, further studies are warranted for a more complete understanding of how evolutionary advantageous processes like circadian rhythmicity can also mediate an organismâ s demise.

Keywords: Aging
Circadian Rhythmicity
Complex Disease
DNA Methylation
Epigenetics
Advisor: Petronis, Art
India On the Line: Globalized labour in postmillennial Indo-Anglian literature

In this dissertation I look at the eruption of new subjectivities in postmillennial Indo-Anglian literature in an era of globalization and neoliberalism, and, concurrently, the seeming disappearance of old myths and identities – at how, for example, the telephone of the call centre, in joining one person to another, is shown to create fissures in identity, family, and what is described as “traditional” Indian culture. I also examine the ways in which technology, particularly in the form of machines like the tape recorder, industrial factory equipment, and the Internet, is depicted as mapping the formation of cyborg subjectivities in an era of rapidly changing and ever-broadening and improving modes of communication. These technologies seem at once to bring us closer together and further apart, fostering a greater sense of global solidarity and “connectivity” in previously isolated communities, in John Tomlinson’s terms (1999, 30), but also setting out battle lines for revolutionary new Indian movements: between the international rich and poor, and more frequently the US and India. In the “pulp fiction” books addressed in this dissertation, written by such authors as Chetan Bhagat, Neelesh Misra, and Brinda S. Narayan, globalization is depicted as oppressing and poisoning Indians but also freeing them from the chains of Western capitalism and even providing routes for nationalist innovation, creativity, and solidarity. Meanwhile, the more “highbrow” cosmopolitan texts, written by Aravind Adiga, Bharati Mukherjee, Indra Sinha, and Altaf Tyrewala, tend to evince a greater suspicion of nationalism and the utopian promises of neoliberalism. Each dissertation chapter addresses a different type of depressed and alienated protagonist – from the call-centre worker to the entrepreneur, to the cyborg-sahiborg and the exorcist-hacker – whose various triumphs of upward mobility and community-building are often, ultimately, oddly unconvincing and unmoving. Indian neoliberalism leads to a sense of anomie among these characters; even when they find community or professional and economic success, it never seems to be entirely or effectively dispelled. The unhappiness of these globalized literary avatars serves as warning – in some cases, probably involuntary – of the dark side of the glamour and glitz of globalized labour in India.

Keywords: Chetan Bhagat
globalization
India
outsourcing
postcolonial
pulp
Advisor: ten Kortenaar, Neil
A Bumpy Landing: Airports and the Making of Jet Age Canada

This dissertation examines changes at and around Canadaâ s major airports in the early jet age. It traces how airports in major Canadian cities evolved into mass transport hubs between the 1950s and 1980s and also materialized as complex technical systems that connected aviation to wider contemporary issues. During this period these airports assumed a dual role, operating in the background to help move people and planes and emerging at key times to occupy public consciousness. Historical changes there can thus help explain how airports grew increasingly visible as fixed, but active, modern infrastructure that both facilitated jet age mobility and were deeply embedded in the postwar order. This dissertation links the transformation of major airports to the rise of mass air travel, postwar change, and federal stewardship. Aviationâ s rapid growth and technological advances beginning in the 1950s invariably transformed how these airports looked, worked, and were experienced by different groups of people. Various central developments in postwar Canada beyond aviation also migrated to these airports and made them more visible as public infrastructure that were both imagined in the national sphere and part of globalization. Moreover, airports were federally operated until the early 1990s and thus a state infrastructure project. The federal government and its partners used a combination of anticipatory and reactive strategies to manage airports that emphasized national interests, but also cared about cities and capital. This approach blended multiple scales and dynamics and constantly shifted as conditions changed, generating problems and tensions along the way that shaped the particular trajectory of airport development between the 1950s and 1980s. Taken together, this dissertation strengthens and advances historical knowledge about airports and aviation in Canada. It also contributes to the history of technology and mobility and its relationship to social and cultural change. Lastly, it contributes to the political, social, and cultural history of postwar Canada by bringing air travel into the narrative. In so doing, it shows how airports helped to make jet age Canada, a process that encompassed the local, national, and global arena and stretched well into the late twentieth century.

Keywords: Airports - Canada
Air Travel
Infrastructure
Mobility
Postwar Canada
Advisor: Penfold, Steve
Teaching the Tradition: Twelfth-Century Scholastic Commentaries on Paul's Letter to the Romans

This thesis provides the first study of the relationship between three of the most important commentaries on Paul’s Letter to the Romans produced in the cathedral schools of northern France during the twelfth century, a period usually defined as “early scholasticism.” Studies of this period normally focus on the theological works of the teachers in these schools, leaving to one side their biblical exegesis. This thesis argues for the central importance of biblical exposition to the study of theology in early scholasticism by emphasizing two related aspects of these commentaries: first, that they are the result of classroom teaching rather than written treatises, and second, that the primary goal of this teaching was the handing on of a tradition of reflection on the Bible. The first chapter studies the so-called Glossa ‘ordinaria’ on Romans. The Glossa was the most important exposition of Romans in the twelfth century, existing in hundreds of manuscripts and forming the basis for teaching. The first chapter traces the sources and methodology of the Glossa, arguing that it is better understood as a classroom text than as a reference work. The second chapter turns to the Glossa’s most influential user, Peter Lombard (d. 1160), whose Magna glosatura on Romans also exists in hundreds of manuscripts. Chapter two analyzes Lombard’s use of the Glossa and how he uses it as the gateway to his own teaching of Romans. The third chapter studies the Postille in Apostolum of Stephen Langton (c.1150-1228), tracing Langton’s use of Lombard’s Magna in his own teaching of Romans and arguing for the unity of Langton’s biblical lectures and his theological works. This study therefore establishes a trajectory of teaching the tradition of reflection on the Pauline Epistles, from the Glossa, through Lombard’s Magna, to Langton’s Postille.

Keywords: exegesis
Glossa
Pauline epistles
Peter Lombard
Stephen Langton
theology
Advisor: Andree, Alexander
Architecture as Idea in France 1500-1550

In early sixteenth-century France, architecture was more an idea than a set of buildings. Architecture was drawn upon as a rhetorical authority around 1500, where sculptors, painters, goldsmiths, printers, masons, and other skilled craftsmen strived to act as architects in the media in which they were skilled. Rhétoriqueurs used the architectural idiom increasingly to flatter patrons and receive commissions. Perhaps due to the fact that “architecture” was not circumscribed by guild membership, it was often conceptually elided with other notions like sculpture, the antique, and ornament. This thesis reconsiders the relationships between the artistic categories of architecture, sculpture, and painting. It also analyses the word “ornament”, and suggests that the term assumed ambiguous designations in the early modern period that rarely reflected the definitions it inherited from eighteenth-century contexts. Four chapters establish how architecture as an idea is given presence in the early decades of the sixteenth century. The first chapter shows how ceramicists, painters, and sculptors practiced “architecture” when they migrated to France to furnish the royal chateaux. The chapter further argues that concepts of order and license were derived from these various craft contexts, and related less to concepts of harmony and proportion that has been conventionally attributed to “classical” architecture. The second chapter is an exploration of architecture’s corpus as a collection of objects. With this in mind, the chapter investigates the relationship between the culture of collecting, the naming of objects, and the appeal of the fragment. Chapter three shows how architecture was commonly presented as a frame, particularly in royal entries and as title pages. The final chapter shows how some of the most enduring architectural types, particularly the temple, were most effectively expressed in miniature and as what we conventionally think of as ornament.

Advisor: Kavaler, Ethan M
Politicization in Practice: Learning the Politics of Racialization, Patriarchy, and Settler Colonialism in the Youth Climate Movement

As anti-pipeline struggles have become a central focus of the North American environmental movement, the Whiteness, masculinity, and settler-coloniality of the mainstream movement has come under more scrutiny than ever. Though the mainstream environmental movement has long been acknowledged as a White default space, committed to strategies and tactics rooted in settler-colonial logics, and managed by White men at the highest levels, there is a broad conversation emerging right now arguing that the movement needs to unsettle those norms, and urgently. This study looks at one climate campaign as a case study with the potential to reveal both how mainstream environmental spaces become default spaces of Whiteness, masculinity, and settler-coloniality, as well as how these activist groups can become politicized, resisting social relations of dominance and centring reconciliation in their approach to climate justice. Using sociocultural theory as the lens for theorizing learning within the climate movement, this dissertation brings learning within social movements into focus, examining cognition, participation, ways of knowing and being, and identity development across a two-year activist campaign. This dissertation examines Fossil Free UofT, the University of Toronto campaign for fossil fuel divestment. I ask how participants learned to understand and disrupt social relations of racialization, settler colonialism, and patriarchy. I examine what participants in the campaign learned and how they mobilized their learning collectively to reproduce and resist racialized, gendered, and colonial power relations. I also question how sociocultural theories of learning enable theorizations of politicization, as well as how they can be strengthened through sustained attention to the ways that social relations shape opportunities to learn in movements. This dissertation contributes to an emergent field in the learning sciences, where social movements and community organizations are increasingly analyzed for their ability to foment unique learning opportunities. I theorize politicization within this context, providing a framework for sociocultural learning theorists to bring together disparate conversations about learning, civic engagement, sociopolitical development, and critical social analysis.

Advisor: Esmonde, Indigo
Sawchuk, Peter
Probing cosmic inflation with the Spider experiment

Spider is a balloon-borne cosmic microwave polarimeter designed to operate for up to two weeks on a Long Duration Balloon platform. From above 99.5% of the atmosphere, Spider flew over Antarctica for 16 days observing the sky with over two thousand detectors housed inside a 1300 L liquid helium cryostat, distributed amongst 6 telescopes that span two frequency channels: 95 GHz and 150 GHz. By focusing its observing time over a 10% patch of the sky at high galactic latitude, Spider targets the degree-scale BB spectrum in search of the pattern that would have been imprinted by gravitational waves propagating in the early universe, a key prediction of inflation. In order to probe the physics of the very early universe the experiment needs to operate in the harsh environment of the upper atmosphere for multiple days. This work discusses at length the detailed thermal modeling and analysis leading up to the 2015 flight which ensured the correct thermal operation of every component while at 36 km of altitude. The flight is followed by a data analysis that will ultimately produce a constraint on the amplitude of the primordial gravitational wave background from bandpowers of the BB spectrum of the CMB. In order to measure the CMB itself, contamination to the BB spectrum by polarized galactic foreground emission needs to be quantified. To improve its ability to characterize polarized foregrounds, Spider will have a second flight in 2018-2019 which will add a 285 GHz frequency channel. In this work, we explore a component separation technique involving Planck HFI data. A power spectrum estimator used to produce bandpower estimates from maps is also discussed.

Keywords: Balloon-borne
Cosmic Microwave Background
Cosmology
Inflation
Instrumentation
Polarization
Advisor: Netterfield, Calvin B
Exit the King: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the English Baroque

This dissertation argues for a conception of the English 17th century as participating in a common aesthetic of dissonance – an aesthetic which it calls the “Baroque.” More than just a term for the ornate or profuse, its revival of the Baroque designation (and its contentious application to English literature) is a means of describing the period’s fascination with staging artistic figurations in which radically contradictory religious, social, and political paradigms cannot possibly be made to cohere yet must nevertheless coexist. Through readings of Marlowe’s Faustus, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, it traces the period’s apprehension of, and neurotic fixation upon, the incompatibility of these proliferating new epistemologies: Lucretian atomism, the geo-political vistas of the “New World,” the schisms of Reformation, the Copernican revolution, the waning of Church power, and the rise of the Absolutist state. These destabilizing elements are worked asymmetrically into these texts’ designs and suspended in unreconciled dynamic tension, each work culminating in a moment when a figure – Faustus, Prospero, Donne’s speaker, even the Miltonic God – considers the inconsistent logics in which they are now enclosed and imagines a self-annihilation that would afford an escape from an unstable and collapsing system. The Baroque has not been a popular name for English poetry. 20th century scholarship deemed it inapt for British literature, invoking it only for the overt, fussy Catholicism of Crashaw or Southwell or to taxonomize heavily brocaded stylistic moments in Marvell or Cowley. My analysis instead uses the concept of the Baroque to diagram this period’s unresolved secularizing pressures, not just in its margins but in texts at the heart of the traditional canon. These disparate works amount to a systemic, self-coherent cultural revolution: a networked era of artistic production that is congruent (but not identical) with the continent’s own counter-reformational renovations, that is distinct from the Renaissance that precedes it, and that anticipates its neo-classical and transatlantic successors. Anatomizing this Baroque therefore troubles a long-standing neo-liberalist narrative of a self-evidently progressive democratic secular age and names the 17th century’s own apprehension of this new era’s tensions at its source.

Keywords: Baroque
Donne
Milton
Political Theology
Renaissance
Shakespeare
Advisor: Warley, Christopher