VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The regional law of refugee protection in Africa

This work offers an analysis of the legal regime for refugee protection in Africa, broadly construed as including both refugee law and human rights elements. The regime is addressed in two parts.
Part One analyses the treaty regime, principally comprised of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, the 1969 Organization of African Unity Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. The latter two regional instruments are examined in depth. This includes the first fulsome account of the 1969 Convention’s drafting, and original analysis of the relationships of interpretation and the relationships of conflict that arise between the various treaties comprising the regional refugee protection framework. Significant attention in this regard is devoted to various aspects of the relationship between the international and the regional refugee treaties, and to the relationships between African refugee law on the one hand and African human rights law on the other.
Part Two focuses on the institutional architecture supportive of the treaty framework addressed in Part One. The Organization of African Unity is addressed in a historical sense, and the contemporary roles of the African Union, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the various African human rights courts are canvassed.
This account of the treaty framework, and the institutional architecture, for refugee protection on the continent is the first broad analytical account of the regional law of refugee protection in Africa.

Keywords: African Union
International refugee law
Organization of African Unity Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa
Human rights
African refugee law
Refugee law
Advisor: Goodwin-Gill, GS
Unlikely readers: Negotiating the book in colonial South Asia, c. 1857–1914

This thesis constructs a history of reading for South Asia (1857–1914) through an examination of the eccentric relationships that marginal colonial agents and subjects—soldiers, peasants, office clerks and women—developed with everyday forms of writing. Drawing on the methodologies of the history of the book, and literary and cultural histories, it creates a counterpoint to the dominant view of imperial self-fashioning as built on reading intensively and at length. Instead, it contends that the formation of identities in colonial South Asia, whether compliant or dissenting, was predicated on superficial forms of textual engagement, leaving the documents of empire most likely misread, unread, or simply read in part.
I illustrate this argument through four chapters, each of which brings together extensive archival material and nonliterary texts, as well as both canonical and little-known literary works. The first two discuss the circulation of unread texts in colonial institutions: the army and the government office. I study Garnet Wolseley's pioneering war manual, The Soldier's Pocket-book for Field Service, a book that soldiers refused to read. This is juxtaposed, in the second study, with an examination of the reception of the bureaucratic document in illiterate peasant communities, explored through the colonial archive and ethnographic novels. In the third and fourth chapters, I focus on texts consumed in part. I turn to the Bengali Hindu almanac, a form that made the transition from manuscript to print in this period, and examine how it trained its new-found readership of English-educated office clerks to oscillate smoothly between British-bureaucratic and local forms of time, as well as to read quickly and selectively. I end with a study of The Indian Ladies' Magazine, and suggest that the cosmopolitan form of the periodical and editorial practices of extracting and summarising gave women unprecedented access to a network of global print.

Keywords: South Asia
History of the Book
Colonialism
History of Reading
Advisor: Boehmer, E
Structural and computational studies of fibroblast growth factor receptor signalling complex formation

Fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) signalling plays a crucial role in embryogenesis, adult tissue development and tissue repair. It has been implicated in a wide range of human pathologies such as cancers and skeletal disorders which is the reason for a particular interest over recent years. Concerted efforts in academia and industry are targeting the FGFR signalling networks at different stages. The intracellular canonical downstream signalling pathways in healthy and pathogenic cells are relatively well understood. A definition of the precise mechanism for ligand induced FGFR dimerisation remains elusive. Structure biological efforts of the past 20 years have yielded a range of insightful but contradictory structures of FGFRs in complex with their ligands. It is key to solve uncertainties about the mode of extracellular and transmembrane receptor dimerisation in order to promote our abilities of targeted therapeutic manipulation of FGFR signalling in human physiology. The present study uses multiple methods from structural biology to shed more light on the effect of mutant FGFR transmembrane domains (TMDs) on signalling (Chapter 3) and on the architecture of the extracellular FGFR1 signalling complex (Chapter 4-6).
Coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations of FGFR3 and FGFR4 TMDs have confirmed inherent propensity to form symmetric dimers mediated by Gx3G motifs. Interestingly, disease related mutations do not map on the primary TMD dimer interfaces. Simulations of selected mutant TMDs show no significant effect on receptor dimerisation propensity. Atomistic simulations of the transmembrane FGFR3 Achondroplasia mutant reveal a significant shift of the dimer relative to the bilayer to allow interactions of the mutant Arg380 side chain with lipid head group phosphates. This finding supports mechanisms of signal transduction by conformational coupling across the membrane.
Biophysical characterisation of the FGFR signalling complex was performed to work out a co-crystallisation strategy using receptors expressed in mammalian cells. Crystallographic experiments yielded a FGFR1 structure bound to its ligands, revealing a full signalling complex with an architecture that contradicts two well-established, crystal structure-derived models. The presented structure features a central, decasaccharide-mediated Fibroblast Growth Factor dimer, which recruits a receptor on each end to form a quasi-symmetric pentameric signalling complex. Further biophysical validation makes the newly presented structure the first model that is supported by structural data from the complex in solution.

Advisor: Jones, Y
Sansom, M
Nuclear quantum effects in aqueous systems

This thesis is concerned with the influence of nuclear quantum effects (NQEs) on the properties of aqueous systems. Although such systems have been studied ever since methods to account for NQEs within atomistic simulations were first developed, it has been shown in recent years that a full accounting for the flexibility of O–H bonds leads to a cancellation between intermolecular and intramolecular quantum effects, meaning that the total effect is often much smaller than was originally believed to be the case. Several examples of systems are studied in which NQEs give rise to a small, though detectable, effect.
Path integral molecular dynamics simulations are used to explain the results of sum-frequency generation spectroscopy experiments that observe a small preference for hydrogen over deuterium atoms in the dangling O–H bonds at the surface of isotopically substituted liquid water. These simulations are able to give a free energy of isotope fractionation that agrees quite well with that obtained from experiments.
The effect of quantum mechanics on dynamical properties is studied by using ring polymer molecular dynamics to look at two types of process: the exchange of water around monatomic, monovalent ions and the reorientation of hydrogen bonds in the pure liquid. In both cases, NQEs speed up the process by a small degree, but leave the mechanism of the process unchanged. This suggests that a classical treatment of these processes will give an excellent qualitative description, and will give a quantitatively reasonable result.
The results of second-harmonic generation scattering experiments on aqueous solutions of ions are also considered: the ions are shown to give rise to long-ranged orientational correlations between solvent molecules. Replacement of light water with heavy water causes a significant change in the scattered signal intensity, a hallmark of NQEs. A preliminary, classical study is performed using both Debye-Hückel theory and molecular dynamics simulations to explain the microscopic origin of these effects.

Advisor: Manolopoulos, D
Two million years of environmental change: a case study from Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape, South Africa

The arid interior of South Africa lacks long, continuous and well-dated climate and environmental proxy records that can be compared with cultural sequences and with broader global climate records. This thesis develops the first substantial terrestrial environmental sequence for the interior of southern Africa at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, spanning two million years of prehistory. Changes in vegetation and humidity over time were investigated by means of carbon and oxygen stable isotope analysis on fossil herbivore enamel and ostrich eggshell, creating two independent proxy datasets. The Holocene record was used as a baseline for comparing the Pleistocene sequence, but required chronological tightening. Therefore, nine new radiocarbon dates were obtained, and calibrated and modelled with existing dates to provide a firmer chronology.
The ostrich eggshell isotope record suggests arid but variable conditions, with distinct phases of increased humidity in the Early Pleistocene and mid-Holocene. Enamel stable isotope results show clear differences in local resource availability between the Early and Mid-Pleistocene, and then between the Pleistocene and Holocene, with an overall trend of increasing aridity. In particular, the onset of dietary specialisation in grazers at 0.8Ma is linked to expanding C4 grasslands. Aridity was not the driver behind the increase in C4 grasses, but changing pCO2 levels at the Mid Pleistocene transition were identified as a possible key factor. The presence of C3 and C4 grasses in the Early Pleistocene, when compared to the domination of C4 grasses today, was fostered by reduced rainfall seasonality. Regional independent developments have to be considered, as other regions in South and East Africa show C4 dominated diets in herbivores at earlier times than at Wonderwerk Cave. In the Holocene, higher temporal resolution indicates phases of environmental change coinciding with changes in the cultural record.

Keywords: Stable isotopes
quaternary
Wonderwerk Cave
South Africa
Advisor: Lee-Thorp, J
Epigenetic regulation of postnatal subventricular zone development

The postnatal/adult subventricular zone (SVZ) harbours neural stem cells (NSC), which produce neurons that migrate to the olfactory bulbs. SVZ NSC share several biological features with glia, especially reactive astrocytes. However, it is not clear how SVZ NSC simultaneously maintain self-renewal stem cell properties and the potential for generating daughter cells that differentiate into neurons.
Multiple cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors (CDKIs), including p16, p19 and p21 have been identified as indispensable for maintaining stem cell potential, in both cyclin dependent and independent manners. However, how these CDKIs are coordinated remains poorly defined. One possible regulator of CDKIs is the canonical Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) that consists of Eed, Suz12, and Ezh2. Ezh2 functions to methylate lysine 27 of histone 3 (H3K27me3) and consequently suppresses target gene expression. Whereas PRC2 serves to balance self-renewal versus differentiation and neuron versus glial fate choices in early and late embryogenesis, respectively, our understanding of its role in the neonatal and adult SVZ is incomplete. In this thesis, I discovered that the PRC2 core subunit Eed, but not Ezh2, was expressed in SVZ NSC. Eed directly repressed p16 and p19, but indirectly fine-tuned p21 expression in SVZ NSC. Conditional deletion or knockdown of Eed in vivo led to loss of constitutive SVZ stemness and blocked NSC activation. This was partly due to selective activation of the PRC2 targets, Cdkn2a and Gata6; in contrast Ezh2 loss of function only activated Cdkn2a but not Gata6. In the SVZ, Gata6 overexpression was sufficient to limit the neurogenic ability of NSC and also inhibited p21 post-transcriptional expression. I also showed that although reactive astrocytes in the cerebral cortex can acquire stem cell properties in response to brain injury, Eed was not involved in this process. Taken together, I identified novel and divergent regulation of SVZ CDKIs by separate subcomponents of PRC2, and showed that these are essential for SVZ NSC maintenance. Whilst this regulatory pathway was specific in the neurogenic niche it had little influence on parenchymal astrocytes.
In a relatively small side project, I screened and identified several long non- coding RNAs (lncRNA) that were highly expressed in the adult rodent SVZ. The lncRNA Paupar, which is transcribed upstream from the Pax6 antisense strand, was enriched in the postnatal SVZ and regulated Pax6 and Ezh2 expression. In vivo, Paupar knockdown showed it is necessary for stem cell maintenance and thus regulates postnatal neurogenesis.
To conclude, I discovered two interacting epigenetic regulators that control postnatal SVZ NSC and neurogenesis.

Advisor: Szele, F
The design and implementation of a 3D-bioprinter

3D bioprinting is the additive manufacture of biological materials, such as cells, and has been implemented over the last two decades to print 3D constructs which can mature into functional tissues. Although there are many bioprinting techniques, there are few that are capable of simultaneously printing two or more cell types at high resolutions, high cell densities and high initial cell viabilities. These printing characteristics are required to pattern cells in tissue-like micro-architectures and to quickly mature physiologically relevant tissue. We developed a novel 3D bioprinter and bioprinting methodology, designed to pattern cells without compromising these printing characteristics. Initially a droplet-in-oil 3D printer was created, which assembled mm-scale aqueous droplet networks composed of thousands of picolitre volume micro-compartments. These networks were programmed to show emergent tissue-like properties, mimicking nervous tissue's rapid electrical communication or self-folding in a manner similar to muscle contractions. This printing process was then adapted to pattern HEK-293T cells within droplet networks at high droplet resolution (&Tilde;50-150 μm), high initial cell viability (90±4%) and high droplet cell density (&Tilde;30×106 cells/mL). Capillary-like and layered sheet cell architectures were formed with two printed fluorescent cell populations. These 3D printed constructs were transferred to culture medium with minimal loss in pattern fidelity using a novel phase transfer approach. Patterned HEK-293T cells developed into dense cell organisations which showed, high cell viabilities, high cell numbers (up to &Tilde;18,000) and mitotically active cells, when cultured over 7 days. Specialised tissues were also developed, here, patterned ovine mesenchymal stem cells were differentiated, after printing, into chondrogenic progenitor cells as affirmed by Sox9 expression.

Keywords: 3D Cellular Constructs
Bioprinting
Droplet Interface Bilayers
Cell Patterning
Droplet Networks
The letters of Catherine the Great and the rhetoric of enlightenment

This thesis offers the first reading of the letters of Catherine the Great as a unified epistolary corpus with literary merit as well as historical value. It explores how the empress employed a key eighteenth-century literary form—the letter—not only to make tactical interventions in political and cultural life, but also to shape her persona. The often contrastive style of her letters balances a charming epistolary voice, suited to the letter as a practice of sociability, with exhibitions of the empress's power and stature as a great individual on the historical stage. The interplay between these two facets, sociability and grandeur, defines her unique approach to the letter form as well as the image of the enlightened monarch as she created it. She displayed her mastery, both literary and political, by creatively manipulating all aspects of the letter, from language choice through etiquette and materiality. Both her lively and seductive personal style and her regal character as an Enlightenment great man derived from and reappropriated available literary models. Seeking to ensure that this image reached receptive audiences, Catherine also carefully controlled the circulation of her letters: in keeping with the semi-privacy of the eighteenth-century letter, she wrote first and foremost to win a reputation with cultural and social elites who exchanged letters out of print. At the same time, she manipulated indirectly through her correspondents the image received by a broader public of her contemporaries and of future generations. The French Revolution challenged all her values, troubling also her elite mode of sociable correspondence and her eighteenth-century version of glory. Yet, to the end of her days Catherine employed her dual style as the best means of writing herself into history.

Advisor: Kahn, A
The Church of England and Britain's Cold War, 1937-1948

The thesis deals with Britain’s early Cold War history and the political history of the Church of England. It mainly uses primary sources, and contributes to our growing understanding of the early Cold War, especially in its cultural/religious elements.
It explores how the Church of England dealt with the development of the early Cold War in Britain. It argues that in order to understand better the Church of England’s role, an account of its perspective on issues of state modernisation dating back to at least the 1930s is necessary. It was then, during a decade of authoritarianism, and especially at the Oxford Conference of 1937, that the Church' standpoint towards secularisation was established, while the transnational agenda of the ecumenical movement was also adopted and internalized by Church of England. The thesis also examines the agencies which it built and worked with: in particular the British Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. As the Church is the Established Church, its relationship with specific government agencies, especially the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information also became increasingly important.
The thesis reveals the Church of England's lack of autonomy in time of crisis and the importance of key individuals for the institutional leadership of the Church. Its ecumenical agenda had played an important role, but this was under pressure after the War, as a Europe-wide Christian community was increasingly challenged by 'Western Union' plans for a Cold War Western, Christian community and bloc. By 1948 the Church had been enrolled in the Cold War between East and West which was apparent in its alignment with British government policies and its withdrawn role in the ecumenical community.
The thesis adds to our understanding of the Church of England's relationship to the state in these years, and contributes to the cultural dimension of the early Cold War in Britain.

Keywords: UK-US religious relations
European Politics
Transnational History
Institutionalism
Cold War
Ecumenical Movement
Transnational networks
Church of England
World War (1939-1945)
The role of the periaqueductal gray in respiratory control and breathlessness

Understanding respiratory control is crucial for improving the management of respiratory disease, and the accompanying breathlessness endured by its sufferers. A body of animal evidence supports the role of the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) in modulating ascending and descending respiratory information, with the PAG subdivisions acting within a network that may contribute to the threatening perception of breathlessness.
In this Thesis we used ultra high field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 7 Tesla to firstly identify activity within the columns of the PAG during the simple respiratory task of breath holding in humans, matching those previously reported in animals for slowed ventilatory responses. Extending this investigation to the perception of breathlessness, we then used a classical fear-conditioning paradigm to investigate anticipation and response to an aversive inspiratory resistive loading stimulus. We found activity in the lateral PAG (lPAG) during slowed breathing against an inspiratory resistance, and activity in the ventrolateral PAG (vlPAG) during anticipation of resistive loading. These results align with the proposed threat perception model in animals; with the vlPAG involved in passive responses to inescapable stress, while the lPAG is involved in active responses to threat.
Lastly, we investigated the role and connections of the PAG columns within the wider cortical breathlessness network, and any plastic changes evoked by exercise. Functional and connectivity results suggest the PAG column activities in breathlessness are influenced by top-down cortical networks, with the vlPAG involved in the affective emotional dimension of breathlessness, while the lPAG is involved in the sensory component. In a comparison between athlete and sedentary subjects, athletes displayed increased functional activity in the vlPAG and prefrontal cortex during anticipation of breathlessness, indicating possible affective changes in perception rather than a global 'de-sensitisation' to breathlessness.
Therefore, in this Thesis we have identified the columns of the PAG to be intricately involved with respiratory control and perception of breathlessness. It appears the PAG may be a critical point of distinction between aspects of breathlessness perception, with the vlPAG a possible area of adaptation of affective breathlessness in athletes, or conversely (mal)adaptation and a target for treatment in patients with chronic respiratory disease.

Keywords: Breathlessness
Periaqueductal gray
Respiratory control
Advisor: Pattinson, K