VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The financial statecraft of debtors: the political economy of external finance in Africa

How do countries' borrowing choices affect their foreign relations? More specifically, can access to new sources of external finance enhance countries' leverage when negotiating with their existing donors? This thesis investigates whether, and how, the greater diversity in African countries' portfolios of external finance in the 21st century has affected their negotiations with traditional donors and lenders. I focus specifically on the effects of Chinese lending and bond market finance, which have become the most important alternative to the development finance provided by traditional donor countries and development banks. I argue that alternative lenders act as an outside option that reduces borrowing governments' dependence on any one source of external finance, which ought to give them greater leverage in negotiations with their traditional donors. In this way, countries' borrowing choices become a basis for shaping their foreign relations, a phenomenon I refer to as the financial statecraft of debtors. However, not all countries are equally effective in translating their access to alternative finance into preferred negotiation outcomes. Both domestic political contestation in the recipient country and the significance of the recipient to donors shape variation in the success of debt-based financial statecraft. I adopt a mixed methods approach to support my argument. I use data on the terms of World Bank and US development finance to show that, across sub-Saharan African governments, access to alternative financing sources is associated with terms on traditional aid that are more aligned with government preferences. Three case studies based on extensive interview evidence --- Ethiopia, Kenya, and Ghana --- allow me to trace the mechanisms by which alternative finance affects negotiations with traditional donors and provide a comparison that demonstrates the conditioning effects of government and donor constraints. By explaining the potential benefits borrowing governments can derive from their portfolio of external finance, the thesis contributes to a better understanding of the international political economy of financial interdependence.

Keywords: Finance
Advisor: Ansell, B
de Oliveira, R
Mechanisms of induction of type I/III interferons in cancer cells by ionizing radiation and the role of tumour cell-derived type I IFN and type I IFN signalling in anti-tumour immune response

Interferons (IFNs) are a group of cytokines that have been shown to play an important role in both radiotherapy and the anti-tumour immune response. How ionizing radiation (IR) induces IFNs in the tumour is still not fully understood. We found that IR directly induced dose- and time-dependent upregulation of I/III IFNs in cancer cells. This induction occurs via cytosolic DNA sensors-STING-TBK1-IRFs signalling axis and to less extent, the NF-κB pathway in colorectal cancer cells. Furthermore, Type I/III acts as a feedback loop to further enhance IFNs expression via upregulating key factors in the signalling axis.
In vivo, cancer cells not the immune cells actually have the greatest contribution to overall intratumoural production of type I IFN in the MC38 tumours. By using a variety of animal models, we demonstrated that tumour-derived type I IFN has critical contribution to the anti-tumour immune response at local site. Strikingly and unexpectedly, abrogation of type I IFN signalling via IFNAR1 KO in cancer cells led to remarkable improvement of tumour response to IR. This phenomenon is mainly driven by significantly enhanced susceptibility of cancer cells to CD8+ T cellmediated killing via PD-L1/Galectin-9-independent mechanisms. Overall, these findings add another layer of complexity to the understanding of irradiation-induced anti-tumour immunity and cancer immune evasion, and may provide novel insights into combinational therapy of radiotherapy and immunotherapy.

Advisor: Muschel, R
MeKenna, G
Reverse intergenerational influence between the world wars: E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and their networks

Influence studies and life-writing research are overwhelmingly centred on the influence of the old upon the young, overlooking the potential impact younger generations can have on the development of contemporaries born decades before them. This thesis brings to the foreground this reverse influence by focusing on the intergenerational relationships forged within the intellectual, social, publishing, familial and friendship networks of E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf during the interwar years. This period of heightened social and political change amplified an awareness of generational identity, compelling those who established connections outside their age group to negotiate the implications of their different ages.
Across three chapters, I show how these major twentieth-century writers were affected by their relationships with their younger peers. Forster’s towering position as a key liberal spokesman from the 1930s until his death in 1970 was made possible in large part through a supportive young group of friends that formed a safe homosocial environment in which Forster’s confidence could develop and where he was able to anchor his public rhetoric. Eliot’s young mentees served as key reference-points for his sense of modernity in the 1930s, and as he began to articulate publicly his views on Christian power structures, their left-leaning and often communist political views were key counterpoints for his positioning as a Christian public intellectual and as a dramatist. The younger generation of male writers Woolf associated with the 1930s embodied a gendered challenge to her cultural status as a writer. Tracing her responses to them reveals how they stimulated and incited her exploration of gender and forms of action, her thinking on didacticism and literature and her pacifist rhetoric in the build up to the Second World War.
My work on Forster, Eliot and Woolf illustrates how intergenerational relationships are a productive focus for academic inquiry, particularly in considering the experience of aging on a writer’s evolution and the impact of generational shifts on intellectual history. This thesis contributes to theories of influence by restoring the significance of affect in intellectual development and by questioning the generational hierarchies underlying our understanding of influence exchange. Moreover, in underscoring the cross-generational dialogue at work in the period between the world wars, this project enriches our knowledge of the cultural topography of the 1930s.

Advisor: McLoughlin, K
'Acting a part' in Jane Austen's fiction

Building on the recent studies on the influence of the theatre on Jane Austen’s fiction and the recent reappraisal of the links between the novel and drama in the eighteenth century, this thesis develops a specific aspect of drama in which Austen was invested throughout her life and which informs her understanding of character: the question of acting. By recovering the ways in which Austen weaves acting techniques from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into her novels, the modern reader is able to understand how acting shapes Austen’s conception of social behaviour and communication. Acting in the eighteenth century was understood as the representation of human passions on stage. Actors used a system of theatrical gestures that visually translated the character’s internal feelings. Austen adapts these techniques in her novels in sequences where characters’ feelings are perceived as articulated through the body, placing them in a framework of theatricality. By exposing the theatrical dynamics that surround characters’ actions, Austen’s fiction problematizes the neat dichotomy between literal and metaphorical acting, blurring the distinctions between sincerity and duplicity. Most controversially, Austen’s novels demonstrate that even the truth must be acted. This thesis examines the question of acting in Austen from the Juvenilia to Emma by contextualising her novels within the contemporary theatrical culture of her time, through an analysis of contemporary acting manuals, theatrical reviews, and theatrical prints and portraiture.

Keywords: Theatre in literature
Acting theory
Jane Austen
Advisor: Stafford, F
Evaluation of the immunogenicity of a promising vaccine regimen to identify immune correlates of protection

A vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), a disease resulting after infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), is urgently needed to prevent more than a million deaths per year. Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) is the only available vaccine against TB but its efficacy is variable throughout the world. A promising vaccination regimen composed of BCG prime, followed by vaccination with a chimpanzee adenoviral vector (ChAdOx1) and a modified vaccinia Ankara virus (MVA), both expressing Ag85A, was identified in our laboratory. This regimen significantly improved BCG efficacy in animal studies. Antibody, effector and memory T cell responses induced by BCG-ChAdOx1.85A-MVA85A (B-C-M), were evaluated, to identify immune correlates of protection. This regimen induced Ag85A-specific IgG and IgA responses as well as cytokine responses in CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, both in the systemic and pulmonary system. To discriminate lymphocytes in the vasculature from lymphocytes in the lung parenchyma, a fluorochrome-conjugated antibody was injected intravascularly before harvesting the lungs. Lung parenchymal Ag85A-specific memory CD4+ T cells that were CXCR3+ KLRG1-, significantly increased in B-C-M immunised mice compared to BCG alone at 4, 8 and 20 weeks post vaccination but the cell number decreased at the latter time point. These memory cells associated with protection against M.tb challenge, which was observed at 4 and 8 weeks but not when mice were challenged 20 weeks post vaccination. These putative T cells may have an important role against M.tb infection and could be a target for designing a protective vaccine. In parallel, six novel M.tb antigens were selected and expressed individually in a ChAdOx1 vector. The immunogenicity and protective efficacy of these vaccines were evaluated. Three antigens were not immunogenic when expressed in viral vectors and DNA. The immunogenic antigens induced cytokine production but failed to confer protection when delivered alone or with B-C-M regimen.

Keywords: TB vaccines
TB
T cells
Advisor: McShane, H
Stylianou, E
Smyrna in your pocket: memory of Asia Minor in contemporary Greek culture

This thesis turns to a watershed in the history of modern Greece – its defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and the population exchange that followed – as remembered in present-day Greece. On the one hand, it describes how family memories find their way into cultural representations and provide a language as well as a form for other reminiscences. On the other hand, it aims to show how those cultural representations participate in wider transformations that occur in the public sphere. Methodological tools developed in the field of cultural memory studies are coupled with insights drawn from history, psychology and anthropology. Within this interdisciplinary framework, the memory of Asia Minor emerges as reflective of present-day ideologies and responsive to contemporary concerns.
The introduction sets the discussion in a wider context, providing historical background of the Greco-Turkish War and outlining the ways in which its memory has been reworked in history and culture from 1922 until the present day. Different mnemonic communities that have assembled around the memory of Asia Minor are discussed in Chapter 2, by drawing on the controversy over a history textbook that ensued in 2006-2007. Chapter 3 uses an example of a graphic novel in order to foreground the aesthetic and memory practices that Asia Minor sets in motion when the relay of remembrance reaches the third generation. Chapter 4 discusses the memory of the cosmopolitan Ottoman port of Smyrna on theatre stage and proposes memory as a portable toolkit for bearing witness in the future. Chapter 5 puts this premise to the test in the context of the refugee crisis as it unfolded in Greece in 2015.

Keywords: Turkey
Asia Minor Disaster
1922
refugees
Greece
1923
Lausanne convention
Aivali
Greco-Turkish War
memory
Smyrna
population exchange
Izmir
Asia Minor Catastrophe
Advisor: Papanikolaou, D
Probing nuclear effects in neutrino induced pion production

The discovery of neutrino oscillations has opened the door to searches for matter- antimatter asymmetries in the lepton sector. Current accelerator-based long- baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, like T2K and NOνA, probing this phenomenon are moving into the realm of high statistics but systematically limited measurements. As a result work in reducing the dominant uncertainties in neutrino oscillations has become crucial in developing our understanding of leptonic CP Violation.
One of the dominant uncertainties lies in our understanding of neutrino- nucleus interactions. These affect our ability to determine the selection efficiencies for the respective signal and backgrounds, and the reconstruction of the neutrino energy spectra. This is due to our limited knowledge of nuclear effects and has renewed interest in neutrino-nucleus scattering measurements.
This thesis presents work on a novel method of isolating nuclear effects which can be applied to isolate interactions on hydrogen. Using Double Transverse Momentum — a kinematic imbalance of the final state hadronic system transverse to the neutrino direction and muon momentum plane, phenomenological studies are performed into its ability to probe nuclear effects.
We assess the feasibility of isolating neutrino-interactions on hydrogen in composite nuclear targets using the T2K near detector, ND280. This work is extended on to the MINERνA Experiment where work is undertaken in order to understand the heavy nuclear background. The first differential δpTT cross section measurement for final states containing at least one proton and π0 using the MINERνA detector is reported.

Advisor: Barr, G
Mechanistic modelling to determine the limits of clinical and pre-clinical cancer immunotherapies

Immune-mediated clearance of a tumour is predicated on successful activation, migration and engagement of cytotoxic CD8+ T-cells. There are numerous factors that may impede these processes and that vary considerably between patients. In this thesis, I describe the use of mechanistic models to quantify and identify mechanisms that limit immune responses and immunotherapeutics against tumours. I describe the use of a model of T-cell activation in the lymph node to quantify the impact of patient and vaccine-specific variables on short peptide vaccination success. The model is used to simulate a virtual clinical trial, with predicted patient responses consistent with IMA901, a clinical trial of a short peptide vaccination in renal cell carcinoma patients. This leads to the conclusion that the limited efficacy of IMA901 could be due to the short peptide off-rates, and to suggestions that could have improved IMA901's results.
I then describe an ODE model of T-cell trafficking through the bloodstream to quantify the maximum delivery rate of bioengineered T-cells to healthy tissue and tumours in different organs and species, and how these rates scale between species. Predicted absolute delivery rates of T-cells in mice are found to be much larger than equivalent rates in humans. This could explain why pre-clinical success of bioengineered T-cells in solid tumours has not translated to the clinic as it has for haematological cancers. Finally, this model is extended with PDEs to quantify the persistence of T-cells within organs and fit to lymphocyte localisation data in the rat. The advantages over the use of ODEs for describing T-cell localisation are discussed along with potential and planned future work.
I close by discussing results in an immuno-oncological context, and the extent to which mouse, mathematical and mechanistic models are representative or useful in human medicine.

Keywords: CAR
T-cell
Clinical trial
Trafficking
Advisor: Gaffney, E
Coles, M
C-infinity algebraic geometry with corners

C∞-schemes are a generalisation of manifolds that have nice properties such as the existence of fibre products. C∞-schemes have been used as a model for synthetic differential geometry, as in Dubuc, Kock, and Moerdijk and Reyes, and for defining derived differential geometry as in Lurie, and Spivak.
Manifolds with corners are a generalisation of manifolds locally modelled on [0,∞)k × Rn-k, and their smooth maps behave well with respect to the corners as in Melrose. In particular, Joyce describes a corner functor from the category of manifolds with corners to the category of 'interior' manifolds with corners with mixed dimension.
C∞-algebraic geometry with corners is the study of C∞-rings and C∞-schemes with corners, which we define in this thesis. We define (local/interior/firm) C∞-rings with corners, and study categorical properties such as the existence of limits and colimits using various adjoint functors. We describe a spectrum functor from C∞-rings with corners to local C∞-ringed spaces with corners, and show this a right adjoint to a global sections functor. We define C∞-schemes with corners using this spectrum functor.
We show there is a full and faithful embedding of the category of manifolds with corners into the category of firm C∞-schemes with corners, and that fibre products of firm C∞-schemes with corners exist. We show that manifolds with corners are affine under geometric conditions. We define (b-)cotangent sheaves of C∞-schemes with corners and show they correspond to the (b-)cotangent bundles of manifolds with corners of Joyce.
We describe the categories of interior local C∞-ringed spaces with corners and interior firm C∞-schemes with corners. We construct corner functors for both of these categories, which are right adjoint to the inclusion of these interior spaces/schemes into the non-interior ones. We show that these corner functors correspond to the corner functor for manifolds with corners.
We expect applications of this work in defining derived spaces with corners in derived differential geometry, and we explore the connections of this work to log geometry and the positive log differentiable spaces of Gillam and Molcho.

Keywords: Derived Geometry
Schemes
Manifolds with corners
Manifolds
Advisor: Joyce, D
Characterising the relationship between mobility, cognition and brain structure in healthy older adults

With a rapidly growing older population, understanding factors that contribute to healthy ageing is a public health priority – and one such factor is mobility. Using cognitive assessments and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), this thesis aimed to characterise the associations between mobility and the ageing brain.
First, a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature was conducted to examine the relationship between different domains of cognition (memory, executive function and processing speed) and mobility (gait, balance and lower-extremity function). The reviewed evidence suggested that reduced mobility was correlated with lower cognitive function in older adults, although notable variability was observed between studies.
To address the gaps identified by the review, I examined mobility-cognition associations in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Ageing. Findings supported the hypothesis that poor mobility is associated with poor cognition, and indicated that this relationship is not domain-specific. In addition, I found that controlling for a variety of age-related confounders did not nullify the mobility-cognition association.
Less is known about the neural correlates of poor mobility. To examine which brain structures are associated with mobility, voxel-based-morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging outcomes were correlated with mobility measures in a sample of older adults from the Whitehall II cohort. Our findings indicated that older adults with poor mobility tend to have lower grey matter volume and reduced white matter microstructure.
Since mobility relates to brain structure and function, it is plausible that improving mobility may lead to cognitive and structural benefits. To test this, I examined the effects of a physical activity intervention in a sub-sample recruited from the Retirement in Action study. In a between-group comparison of change over 6-months, we did not find evidence that physical activity modified cognitive or MRI outcomes.
The evidence presented in this thesis supports the hypothesis that mobility is positively associated with cognition and brain structure in healthy older adults. Contrary to predictions, however, we did not observe exercise-induced effects in brain structure or function.

Advisor: Ebmeier, K
Sexton, C
Johansen-Berg, H
The markers ka, ha and zero-marking in oral colloquial Burmese

This thesis investigates the morphological phenomenon of subject topic marking in Burmese – ka, ha and zero-marking (with some comparison to kou and zero-marked objects) in oral Colloquial Burmese. I give a qualitative as well as quantitative analysis of the markers’ functions based on the works of Givón (1983, 1995) and Chafe (1987).
The first chapter equips the reader with some important features of the Burmese language and introduces the data and methodology used in my work.
The second chapter provides discussion of previous work on the markers mainly presented by Kasevich (1976, 2005), Thurgood (1978), Wheatley (1982), Sawada (1995), Soe (1999), Okell and Allott (2001), and Kato (2004). Characterizations of the markers in the previous research will be compared to the findings from my research in Chapter 3.
The third chapter makes several observations. First, statistical testing of Burmese data shows a significant correlation between ka-appearance on subjects and the presence of some elements between the subject and the verb. Second, analysis of topic continuity reveals the multi-functionality of the markers with some interesting tendencies: e.g. ka’s function of maintaining continuity, ha’s tendency not to appear with inactive referents, kou’s tendency to introduce new referents. Third, my replaceability experiment, which tests the capacity of a marker to be substituted with a different marking option, shows that ka is almost non-replaceable by other markers while ha is highly replaceable by the marker ka. I also explore to some extent the contrastive function of ka and discuss ka-marking of contrastive focus and contrastive topic, which leads me to an interesting observation about obligatoriness of ka-marking of the second NP in constructions consisting of two clauses with two focus or topic NPs contrasted with each other.

Advisor: Dalrymple, M
Barber, P