VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The creation of literary character in the fiction of Theodor Fontane

This thesis examines the creation of character in the work of Theodor Fontane. Although he is repeatedly praised as a great writer of human character, there is no comprehensive analysis of how Fontane's characters work. This thesis is intended to fill this surprising gap in Fontane research. Its analyses do not focus on the author-text interaction as many traditional critical approaches do, but instead look at what takes place between the text and the reader.
The first section, entitled 'Character in Theory', has two chapters presenting my concept of literary character. It draws on the findings of cognitive studies, including formerly neglected aspects such as affective reading and empathy. The second section, 'Character in Practice', contains four chapters. Chapter three demonstrates how our emotions can contribute to our understanding and what role is played by empathy. Chapter four shows the active role readers are required to play when putting together information about characters in Fontane's polyphonous novels. Chapter five focuses on character speech, and chapter six asks to what extent Fontane's characters can be seen to develop. The third section, ‘Character in Context’, takes a less hermeneutic approach. Chapter seven asks what our expectations of Realist characters are and how these influence our reading of Fontane. Chapter eight examines how our access to these characters has changed compared to the author's contemporary readership. Chapter nine presents an excursus, looking at the author’s development from renditions of 'real' people to fictional characters.
The last section compares this author's creations to the tentatively Modernist characters of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. My findings show that Fontane's characters demand and support a more active reading than Realism is usually given credit for. They suggest that the concept of Realist characters as largely descriptive creations needs to be examined critically.

Keywords: Der Stechlin
Thomas Mann
Unwiederbringlich
literary theory
Vor dem Sturm
Effi Briest
empathy
Frau Jenny Treibel
Mathilde Möhring
reader
figure
Buddenbrooks
Adultera
affective reading
Fontane
character
Irrungen, Wirrungen
Cecile
Advisor: Robertson, R
Primary intestinal epithelial cell response to Helicobacter hepaticus in an ex vivo setting

Epithelial cells lining the intestinal mucosa play a critical role in mucosal immune homeostasis. The inability to culture primary intestinal epithelial cells (IEC) in vitro, limited their use in ex vivo IEC functional studies. Recently, a method for developing primary intestinal crypt-like 3D structures termed organoids was described. The aim of this project was to establish 2D primary IEC monolayers that could be used to dissect the innate immune response of primary IEC ex vivo to bacterial pathogen Helicobacter hepaticus (Hh) as well as PRR ligands (PAMPs). Using the 3D organoid culture system to grow primary IEC ex vivo we managed to develop polarized 2D-monolayers that express appropriately distributed epithelial markers. Following infection with Hh we found that the bacteria exhibited good attachment to primary IEC monolayers and were internalized into IEC. Furthermore, a rapid MAPK and Nf-kB activation as well as cxcl2 chemokine expression and secretion was seen following Hh infection. However, primary IEC monolayers were largely unresponsive to common microbial PAMPs with the exception of TLR4 ligand E.coli LPS, which elicited a modest response. Therefore, this study implicates that isolated ex vivo IEC retain their immune function and can be used as a model to mimic natural Hh infection of primary IEC, in the absence of any effects from other immune and mucosal cells.

Advisor: Maloy, K
Active tectonics of the Ordos Plateau, China

This thesis is concerned with the active tectonics of the Ordos Plateau in northern China, an apparently non-deforming portion of continental lithosphere that sits at the northeastern edge of the India-Eurasia collision zone. Numerous, large-magnitude, historical earthquakes have occurred at the margins of the plateau, including some of the deadliest earthquakes in recorded human history. Furthermore, the adjacent North China Plain is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet, meaning that reliable seismic hazard assessments are of paramount importance.
We investigate the 1739 Yinchuan earthquake, on the western side of the Ordos Plateau, using 14C dating and a new high-resolution Pleiades DEM of the entire rupture. We find that the event took place on the East Helanshan Fault and had a magnitude in the range Mw 7.1 to Mw 7.6, smaller than previously suggested. We then use IRSL and 10Be dating, along with high-resolution Pleiades DEMs, to determine a right-lateral slip rate on the Luoshan Fault of 4.3±0.4 mm/a and a throw rate on the East Helanshan Fault of &LT; 0.8±0.1 mm/a, indicating that north-south right-lateral shearing is the predominant tectonic motion on the western side of the Ordos Plateau. In the northern Shanxi Grabens, at the northeastern corner of the plateau, we observe good agreement between Quaternary, seismic and geodetic rates of strain, and we find that the region is extending at around 1 to 2 mm/a at an azimuth of approximately 151°. However, there is a notable seismic strain rate deficit since 1750, which could indicate that we are quite late in the earthquake cycle with the potential for large earthquakes in the relatively near future. Finally, we combine our results with information from the literature to propose a kinematic model for the whole Ordos Plateau. We suggest that the plateau behaves as a pinned block, rotating anticlockwise within a large-scale WNW-ESE left-lateral shear zone. The previously enigmatic normal faulting at the margins of the Ordos block can then be explained as wedge-shaped grabens that develop during widening of the overall zone, or en echelon features that accommodate principally right-lateral motion.

Advisor: Walker, R
Parsons, B
The role of CD1a-restricted T cells and phospholipase in allergic disease

The skin is an important barrier against a range of different environmental challenges. The skin associated immune system is able to detect breaks in the barrier to initiate a protective immune response. Langerhans cells express a high density of CD1a, which presents lipid antigens to T-cells. However little is known about CD1a-restricted lipid antigens and the role of CD1a-restricted T-cells in inflammatory skin disease.
In order to investigate the role of T-cells that react to CD1a presenting lipid in skin disease, wasp and bee venom were studied as an antigen source. Venoms are able to cause allergic hypersensitivity reactions, associated with skin T-cell infiltration, a venom protein-specific T-cell response in allergic individuals and are independent of filaggrin. Using primary antigen presenting cells and target cells lacking surface MHC expression (K562 cells) transfected with CD1a, allowed investigation of polyclonal T-cells responses from unrelated donors.
Bee and wasp venoms were shown to induce CD1a-restricted T-cell responses in both peripheral blood and skin. Surprisingly this activity was not contained within the lipid fraction of the venoms, but instead was mediated through the generation of a lipid ligand by venom phospholipase. Furthermore, wasp venom delivery results in the production of phospholipase products in the skin of humans. A significantly increased frequency of IFN-, GM-CSF- and IL-13-producing venom specific CD1a-restricted T-cells was observed in allergic individuals compared to healthy controls. During subcutaneous immunotherapy, frequencies of CD1a-reactive T cells were initially induced, peaking by weeks 5, but then reduced despite escalation of antigen dose. CD1a-reactive T cells were further investigated to characterise their physiological role by generating T cell lines which produced a range of different cytokines, including IL-22 on stimulation with phospholipase and other phospholipase containing allergens.
In summary, we identified a novel pathway of skin inflammation where lipids generated by allergen-derived phospholipase can be recognised by CD1a-restricted T cells which produce type 1 and type 2 cytokines and associate with allergic reactivity. These findings have implications for novel therapeutic strategies for allergic disease.

Keywords: Skin
T-cells
Lipids
Immunology
Advisor: Off, G
Clinically relevant MRE11 variants in bladder cancer

Personalised medicine aims to empower patients and clinicians to make informed choices in order to enhance treatment outcomes. Currently, muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) is treated with cystectomy or radiotherapy/chemoradiation with no clear survival advantage for either option. Identification of predictive biomarkers could facilitate choice between treatments and potentially improve overall survival rates. MRE11 is a damage signaling protein whose function is crucial for in the DNA damage response. Intriguingly, expression of MRE11 by immunohistochemistry (IHC) is a promising predictive biomarker of radiotherapy response in MIBC patients. Paradoxically in terms of DNA repair, patients with low expression of MRE11, have a significantly worse survival rate following radiotherapy than those expressing high levels of MRE11 (Choudhury et al. 2010; Laurberg et al. 2012). The aim of the project was to investigate the underlying mechanisms of MRE11 expression in bladder cancer.
A novel C-terminally truncated MRE11 variant was detected in bladder cancer cell lines and patient samples. The variant was the result of a post-translational cleavage of wild type MRE11 by caspase activity. Although caspases were responsible for the cleavage of MRE11, expression of the variant did not increase following the induction of apoptosis, implying that non-apoptotic caspases were involved. The variant was found to be less stable than wild type MRE11 and degraded by the proteasome.
Functional aspects of the variant were investigated and it was found that the variant was located in the nucleus, can complex with NBS1 and RAD50 and co-localised with yH2AX at double-strand break sites. However, expression of the truncated variant led to a reduction in the efficiency of homologous recombination. The truncated variant is therefore likely to have a functional impact on DNA repair, potentially in a dominant negative manner.
This might explain why high MRE11 expression was associated with increased survival following radiotherapy in bladder cancer patients. The high expression of MRE11 could include detection of high levels of the variant, associated with defective DNA repair and hence increased radiosensitivity. An underlying mechanistic explanation further supports the use of MRE11 immunohistochemistry as a predictive biomarker. These findings could also contribute towards the development of novel treatment strategies for patients with bladder cancer.

Advisor: Kiltie, A
McGrowder, E
A social history of domestic service in post-colonial Zambia, c. 1964-2014.

This thesis examines the history of domestic service in Zambia from the 1960s to the present day. Domestic service was one of the largest sectors of urban employment throughout this period and involved large numbers of men, women and children selling and buying labour in a variety of working arrangements. The sector has, however, received little scholarly or official attention, reflecting a broader historiographical neglect of informal sector employment and the female workers who predominate in this area of the economy. The lack of attention paid to domestic service by academics and policy-makers has considerably limited the questions that have been asked about who workers are and how processes of reproduction and production have been organized at a household and societal level in Zambia, both historically and in the present. Most immediately, in order to work outside of the home, earn money and access crucial resources, thousands of Zambians needed to find someone else to take care of their homes and children.
Drawing on a wide range of source material, this study demonstrates the importance of domestic service to social and economic relations in post-colonial Zambia. The study centres on domestic service arrangements in black households in the capital city of Lusaka. It examines how and why men, women and children found work in service, how and why employers sought help with domestic and care labour, and the relationships that developed between these parties. The study illustrates the diversity of the sector, with working arrangements varying from seemingly-informal kinship-based labour relations at one end of the spectrum to formalised, contractual employment at the other. The study also explains the gendered and generational shifts that have reshaped domestic service over the last fifty years, drawing attention to the increased significance of women and female children’s labour. Overall this thesis provides new insights into class formation, rural-urban dependencies, gender relations, and the nature of inequality in a post-colonial African city.

Keywords: Gender
Domestic service
African history
Zambia
Advisor: Larmer, M
Frontiers of urban survival

The vast corpus of works on corruption in Africa focuses almost exclusively on ‘grand corruption’ and political elites (so-called ‘Big Men’), and hardly on ‘everyday corruption’ and ordinary actors. When everyday corruption appears in the literature, it is frequently explained away as petty and/or normal – something expected and accepted. In this study, I take issue with this predominant narrative, couched in an equally dominant but narrow Weberian notion of corruption. Grounding corruption in the micro-politics of urban public transport in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s largest city, I argue that ordinary actors detest the corruption that they encounter daily. At the same time, their power(lessness) in the face of its banality compels them to constantly devise tactics to find a way around it or to make it productive for their ends. Structured into six chapters, the study begins by probing the popular imagination, discourse, and spatiality of corruption. It then shows how corruption is embedded in routine socio-economic relations, how it conditions ordinary lives and social livelihoods, and how everyday actors encounter it, exploit it, resist it, or become its victims each day. The study required eight months of ethnographic fieldwork grounded on the routine experiences and lifeworlds of road transport workers in Lagos, Nigeria. My direct experience of the ‘surrounds’ of these urban actors, the ‘junctions’ that constitute the spatial hinge of violent extortion and complicity, and routine participation in the omnipresent 'danfos' (commercial minibus-taxis) enabled access to a sense of how this complex system works.

Advisor: Mustapha, AR
Aleksandr A. Semenov (1873-1958): Colonial Power, Orientalism and Soviet Nation-building

This study explores the life of the prominent Russian Orientalist and colonial administrator Aleksandr Semenov (1873-1958). In the course of his long and versatile career in Central Asia – where he came to in 1901 as a low-ranking member of Turkestan’s colonial administration, and where he died in 1958 as the first director of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of Tajikistan’s Academy of Sciences – Semenov participated in the transformation of the region from a Tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an “Empire of Nations.” His influence on national historiography and notions of national identity was especially marked in the case of the Soviet Union’s only Persian-speaking republic, Tajikistan, with which Semenov was connected through his interest and expertise in Persianate Central Asia. This thesis even goes so far as to argue that Semenov’s scholarship and his work as an advisor to the Soviet government facilitated the very establishment of Tajikistan, which Paul Bergne has described as a nation initially promoted by Russian Orientalists. Further research in Russian archives is required, however, to better substantiate this claim. Rather than focussing on the (early) Soviet period and on so-called national territorial delimitation of Central Asia, as scholars such as Hirsch and Arne Haugen have done, the present study, in the vein of scholars like Vera Tolz and Vladimir Genis, highlights the ways in which both Bolshevik nationalities policy and Soviet Oriental Studies grew out of the studying and ruling of Central Asia in the late imperial period. It does so through an examination of Semenov’s career, scholarship and personal networks, and on the basis of his personal archive in Tajikistan’s Academy of Sciences, which has not been researched in any systematic way since the early 1970s, and in which no scholar from outside the former Soviet Union has ever worked.

Keywords: Tajikistan
Early Soviet Union
Soviet Nationalities Policy
Colonial Knowledge
Russian Orientalism
Central Asian History
Late Imperial Russia
Advisor: Morrison, A
Andreyev, C
Development and applications of rhodium-catalysed reactions to explore the synthesis of heterocycles

This thesis, submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Organic Chemistry, documents new methodologies towards the synthesis of saturated heterocycles. These methods utilise a variety of novel S- and N-chelating alkenyl aldehyde substrates, and exploit a Rh(I)-catalytic system for the coupling of these aldehydes with alkynes, alkenes and boronic acids.
Chapter 1 presents a literature review surveying the development of both intramolecular and intermolecular rhodium-catalysed hydroacylation, paying particular attention to the use of chelating substrates to promote hydroacylation and suppress the decarbonylation process. The importance of N-heterocycles in pharmaceutical and natural products is also documented.
Chapter 2 demonstrates the use of heterocycle-derived β-S-enals as bifunctional substrates in a rhodium-catalysed hydroacylation / Suzuki coupling sequence, resulting in the threecomponent assembly of heterocyclic product. An intensive study of the derivatization of the substituted heterocyclic products is also described.


Chapter 3 presents a kinetic resolution study on tropane derivatives using the rhodiumcatalysed alkyne hydroacylation reaction. A wide range of chiral phosphine ligands and a variation of reaction conditions and chelating groups have been explored.


Chapter 4 documents an investigation of the rhodium-catalysed hydroacylation reaction using N-chelating alkenyl aldehyde substrates. A variety of β-aminoenal precursors were obtained using the Buchwald-Hartwig amination. The optimisation of the reaction conditions using various bis-phosphine ligands with different chelating groups has been documented. A brief alkyne and alkene component scope is also included.


Chapter 5 documents the experimental data.
Appendix presents 1H, 13C and 19F NMR spectra of novel compounds and chiral HPLC data.

Advisor: Willis, M
The role of DNA damage response proteins in innate immune signalling: a new role for BRCA1

Pattern Recognition Receptors (PRRs), which have evolved to detect a diverse array of pathogenic features known as Pathogen Associated Molecular Patterns (PAMPs), are localised optimally for interaction with their cognate ligands. Upon Receptor activation, signal transduction pathways are induced which converge at different points to direct a specific inflammatory response. TBK1 is activated and recruited to multiple PRRs, where it in turn recruits and phosphorylates IRF3 which then translocates to the nucleus and induces the expression of type I IFN. In this study, the major breast cancer susceptibility protein BRCA1, known for its functional role in maintaining genomic stability, is found to be phosphorylated following PRR triggering. This event is demonstrated to be DNA Damage, DNA Damage Response (DDR) signalling, and oxidative stress-independent. Further to this, phosphorylated BRCA1 localises to Golgi-related microsomes in perinuclear zones where TBK1 and the adaptor STING can be found. Here, BRCA1 interacts biochemically with and facilitates full activation of TBK1. BRCA1-deficient cells show abrogated IRF3 phosphorylation, type I IFN production and ISG induction in response to a diverse array of PRR agonists as well as both HSV1 and Sendaï virus (SeV). Subsequently, BRCA1 deficiency impairs antiviral responses to pathogens such as HSV1.

Advisor: Simmons, A
Mechanical deformation of polycrystalline silicon for solar cell production

This thesis presents a feasibility study for producing silicon sheet for photovoltaic applications via traditional hot deformation in clean conditions using high purity materials.
A special deformation rig has been designed and constructed for the compression tests. The cleanliness of the deformation conditions has been characterized and determined to be at a satisfactory level.
Deformation of Czochralski, dislocation-free, single crystalline silicon along the < 100 > axis has been conducted to determine a suitable and achievable deformation condition. It has been found that single crystalline silicon can be uniaxially compressed by 30 % without severe cracking at temperatures above 1050 ˚C using a low average strain rate of ~10-5 s-1, the most uniform deformed microstructure has been obtained using an average stain rate of 1.67 x ~10-5 s-1. A dislocation density of order 1013 m-2 has been revealed by etch pit counting in an SEM. Dislocations with ½ < 110 > screw characters have been found using the TEM diffraction contrast technique. The most favourable post-annealing temperature has been determined to be 1400 ˚C.
High purity polycrystalline, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) grown silicon has been successfully deformed at 1150 °C by 10 % at an average strain rate of 6.94 x 10-6 s-1. The as-received material has been found to have a strong < 110 > fiber texture as revealed by EBSD. Recrystallization occurs during pre-annealing at 1400 °C for 30minutes. Approximately 90 % of the material recrystallizes with a complete disappearance of the fiber texture. Stacking faults have been mainly observed in the recrystallized material by TEM. It has been observed that the deformed polycrystalline material develops a second recrystallization texture when subjected to post-annealing at 1400 °C for 15 min, resulting in large grains up to several hundred microns in size and a low dislocation concentration of 5 x 1010 m-2.
The HR-EBSD cross-correlation method has been employed to quantitatively investigate the GND density distribution in polycrystalline silicon. It has been found that the as-received material has a GND concentration up to 1015 m-2 and recrystallization during pre-annealing reduces the value to 1013 m-2.
The minority carrier lifetime of the polycrystalline sample deformed at 1150 °C by 10 % followed by subsequent annealing at 1400 °C for 120 min has been measured using the QSS-PC method. A value of 1.9 µs at an injection level of 1 x 1012 cm-3 has been obtained, which corresponds to a minority carrier diffusion length of approximately 100 µm for electrons and 50 µm for holes. H-passivation has been found to be effective in improving the measured minority carrier lifetime.
The results presented in this thesis suggest that producing silicon sheets for photovoltaic applications by conventional hot-deformation may be possible and should be a topic for further investigation.

Advisor: P.R.Wilshaw
J.D.Murphy