VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Chalcogen and halogen bonding host systems for anion and ion-pair recognition

This thesis describes the synthesis of acyclic and macrocyclic incorporating sigma-hole interactions including halogen and chalcogen bonding for anion and ion-pair recognition.
Chapter 1 introduces the general aspects in the field of supramolecular host-guest chemistry with particular emphasis on themes relevant to the topic of this DPhil research project, specifically anion and ion-pair recognition followed by a review of non-covalent interactions.
Chapter 2 describes the preparation of a series of chalcogen, halogen and hydrogen bonding acyclic anion receptors wherein structural and electronic factors that influence anion recognition potency and selectivity of σ-hole interactions are explored through anion binding studies and linear free energy relationship analysis.
Chapter 3 presents the synthesis of two chalcogen bonding heteroditopic receptor systems followed by extensive characterisation of their anion and ion-pair recognition properties. The most potent system is capable of selective KCl recognition, facilitating its solid-liquid, liquid-liquid extraction and liquid membrane transport.
Chapter 4 details the synthesis of a series of tetraphenylethene derivatives functionalised with highly potent electron-deficient perfluoroaryl iodo-triazole halogen bond donors. A suite of techniques reveal that the tetra-substituted halogen bonding receptor forms luminescent nanoscale aggregates, the formation of which is driven by XB-mediated anion coordination. Furthermore, the doubly substituted geometric isomers act as unprecedented photoswitchable XB donor anion receptors, where the composition of the photostationary state can be modulated by the presence of a coordinating halide anion.
Chapter 5 presents a series of novel heteroditopic halogen bonding receptor functionalised silica based materials, which are investigated for the cooperative binding and extraction of sodium halide ion-pair species from aqueous solution.

Advisor: Beer, P
Intertextuality in exile: the fusion of French and Russian language and literature in the works of Gaito Gazdanov

This thesis considers the works of Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) and analyses his engagement with a transnational range of predecessors and contemporaries. In foregrounding Gazdanov’s intertextual practice as a crucial element of his creative process, it demonstrates his deliberate cultivation of a (primarily, but not exclusively) Franco-Russian canon as a means of fashioning an identity as an exilic writer. The method draws flexibly on different theories of intertextuality (Kristeva, Barthes, Culler, Taranovskii) and aligns them with Russian Formalist theories of the literary process as unfolding through imitation, struggle and parody. Gazdanov’s influences are situated according to four distinct axes: a Russian nineteenth-century tradition, European (principally French) modernism, early Soviet writing, and the works of émigré contemporaries of the younger generation. Each of the four cases articulates a different iteration of intertextuality: typological transpositions of Russian classical novels, the impact of Proust as a cultural institution in interwar Paris, an interest in Babel’ as a Russian author mediating the non-Russian influence of Maupassant, and a mutual dialogue with Nabokov as a fellow émigré playing with canonical Russian influences. Intertextuality serves as a means of understanding how Gazdanov and other émigré writers aligned themselves with established literary canons, and simultaneously struggled against them in search of their own voice. What emerges from this enquiry is literature representing a multilingual, heterotopic form of identity that resists rigidly national canons.

Keywords: modernism
literary influence
exile
émigré writing
intertextuality
Gazdanov
Social networks in transition: investigating relationship developments & their impact during the transition to university

Supportive relationships are key to a healthy, long, and fulfilled life (Umberson & Karas Montez, 2010). While much is known about the general structure of our personal relationships (i.e., ego networks; Sutcliffe et al., 2012) and self-bounded communities (i.e., complete or cohort networks; Zhou et al., 2005), we still know relatively little about how these social networks adapt to critical life events, such as the transition of entering university (Wrzus et al., 2013). This thesis investigates the effects of this first major transition on young adults’ personal relationships, social integration, and mental health. In Chapter 1, I introduce the theoretical and empirical background underlying my research and present my unique prospective, longitudinal social network design in which students of two consecutive cohorts at a College of Oxford University participated (five assessments, across 2.5 years in Study 1, N = 90; and seven, across 1.5 years in Study 2, N = 81). In Chapter 2, I examine how these students manage their personal relationships and find that ego networks are overall remarkably robust and grow uniformly within just the first two months at university. In Chapter 3, I investigate how students socially integrate into their new social environment and find that cohort networks driven by homophily factors form rapidly and stabilise just as quickly. In Chapter 4, I study the mental health trajectories of these young adults and find uncommonly high levels of anxiety and depression that temporarily or gradually worsen during the transition. Finally, in Chapter 5, I discuss the main findings and outline their theoretical, methodological, and practical implications. Overall, this thesis shows that the impact of the transition to university on students’ social relationships and mental health occurs rapidly. Future research might focus on the first few weeks of this transition in more detail and differentiate students’ individual experiences further.

Advisor: Dunbar, R
Wölfer, R
Hewstone, M
Bowes, L
Advertising as orchestration: papers on attuning cognition and history in the study of persuasion

The understanding of the brain that has emerged in the past two decades of research posits cognition as the orchestration of multiple processes that are shaped through the accumulation of material experience. Key cognitive skills such as theory of mind and conceptual blending can now illuminate how the processing of advertising is the result of the consumer’s material knowledge. This dissertation explores how these advances can be incorporated in the study of persuasion, and in particular in historical contexts. To demonstrate, I revisit the iconic 1949-1969 “I dreamed I … in my Maidenform bra” campaign. This proposal is developed over three papers.
In Paper I, I detail how Maidenform orchestrated its efforts to keep abreast of developments in the advertising industry, in the fashion and undergarment sector, and in the media and cultural landscapes. Recovering this historical backdrop is crucial to the study of cognition in the wild, because it formed the material environment that the campaign thrived in.
In Paper II, I introduce cognitive cultural theory and argue that it has the potential to revive empirical work that pulls together consumer cognition and the rhetorical intent of the text. I exemplify this by analysing the mental processes that underpin the interpretation of a LEGO ad, focusing in particular on conceptual blending and theory of mind.
In Paper III, I take a cognitive cultural perspective to humoristic consumer responses to the Maidenform campaign. I delineate how humour enables audiences to mentally elaborate on the implications of novel ideas, and show how a set of artefacts articulated, unravelled, mimicked, materialised, bowdlerised, and hijacked the original premises of the campaign.
Together, these papers demonstrate how advertising texts should not only to be understood as a vehicle for symbolic thought in consumer culture, but also as its instrument.

Keywords: persuasion
1960s
lego
maidenform
cultural cognition
advertising history
1950s
The present taxidermied: Soviet 'common unsaids' in Russian krayevedcheskiy museums

This dissertation analyses the current state of the krayevedcheskiy museums network in Russia against the backdrop of the historical development of a (post-) Soviet knowledge production system known as krayevedeniye. These museums constitute one of the largest cultural networks in the post-Soviet space, and their aim is to create a representation of the place in which they are located. In the dissertation I explore the principles underpinning the structure of their departments and uncover the common principles on which they are based, including those inherited from the period of Soviet governance. The research I present draws on two types of data: the archival documents of Soviet institutions supervising krayevedeniye which constructed the central ideology informing the curation of kraevedcheskiy museums’ expositions, and field data collected from 2014 to 2017 in seven regions and twenty-five regional and local museums, which allowed the common patterns of museum expositions and underlying theoretical principles to be excavated.
The main theoretical challenge of the thesis was to bring together relevant debates in geography and cognate sciences concerning wilderness and nature, post-colonial approaches to issues of domination and submissson and memory, including trauma, silences, erasing narratives and forgetting. I present a critical theory of krayevedeniye and place krayevedcheskiy museums in the context of museum studies. In order to bring these concepts together this study, I develop the concept of ‘common unsaids’, based on the Barthes’ myth-creation techniques, which have further been developed by Svetlana Boym. With the aim to contribute to debates around Soviet knowledge production, museum studies, representation of nature, and area studies, I analyse one of the largest museum network in the post-Soviet space. My intention is to broaden our knowledge of post-Soviet institutional development and to add new and important detail to our understanding of regional identity production in present-day Russia.

Keywords: kraevedenie
Russia
museums
Advisor: Pallot, J
Klinke, I
Searches for new physics with leptons and invisible particles at the ATLAS experiment at the LHC

The Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM), while successful at describing almost all subatomic phenomena observed to date, has some glaring open questions: the Higgs boson mass is unstable at high energies, there is no dark matter candidate, and the prediction and measurement of (g-2)_mu are in tension. Supersymmetric (SUSY) extensions to the Standard Model could provide possible answers to all these problems, and some SUSY particles could be produced at the Large Hadron Collider. This thesis describes three areas of work aimed at finding evidence for SUSY at the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider. First, the performance and development of the ATLAS ETmiss trigger is discussed. Many theorised SUSY process are predicted to produce events with ETmiss, a large imbalance in the momentum sum of detectable particles, as SUSY particles could escape detection. The ETmiss trigger aims to select such events during data-taking to be saved to disk for analysis. Next, a search for new physics in events with four or more leptons is described. This search is optimised for certain SUSY models, but is also sensitive to a wide range of beyond-the-Standard-Model (BSM) processes. No significant deviation from the SM is observed. From this observation, limits are set on general gauge-mediated SUSY models, R-parity violating SUSY models, and BSM contributions. Finally, a machine-learning-based strategy is proposed to probe an experimentally challenging but phenomenologically favoured range of SUSY parameters in events with two leptons and ETmiss. The strategy is found to not only be competitive with a more traditional cuts-based strategy, but it also provides the event yields necessary for the measurement of SUSY particle properties.

Keywords: artificial intelligence
leptons
physics
SM
particle physics
trigger
standard model of particle physics
Large Hadron Collider
CERN
supersymmetry
missing transverse energy
g-2
missing energy
ETmiss
ATLAS
machine learning
standard model
SUSY
search
R-parity
Advisor: Barr, A
Vernacular culture and musical life in suburban Vienna, 1870-1914

This thesis argues for a recentring of musicological narratives on the subject of ‘Vienna 1900’ and offers four case studies that examine the transformation of vernacular culture alongside the expansion of the city from 1870 to the outbreak of the First World War. I propose an alternative set of paradigms for understanding Vienna during this period by exploring musical life in the suburbs and the impact of urban planning on street music and noise. The main themes covered in my four chapters are: a study of sound and noise abatement campaigns in relation to political theatre and social crisis, moving from the voices of working-class communities to the musical experimentation of suburban enclaves; an extended biography of the Schrammelmusik phenomenon, its position on the threshold of two musical worlds, and its urban-rural networks that contributed to a blurring of boundaries between mythology and reality; an analysis of Wienerlied texts which provide sharply etched commentaries on metropolitan life at the edge of liberal bourgeois experience and their role in tracing the shifting subjectivities of suburban dwellers; and a portrait of clocks and barrel organs that channels the familiar image of the organ grinder through the idea of fractured temporalities, as revealed in different approaches to time synchronisation and urban rhythms.
Throughout my four chapters, I emphasise the materiality of music-making at street level and the social fabric of suburban musical establishments. I aim to reposition narratives that stress fin-de-siècle Vienna as a place apart by adopting an expanded conception of centre and periphery relationships which reaches beyond the city and borderlands of neighbouring empires. I argue that by offering a more pluralistic notion of the vernacular, refracted through a study of acoustic and temporal environments, one can begin to understand more fully how the changing identities of Vienna’s population were intimately connected with the accelerated reconfiguration of the city towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Keywords: sound
Vienna
music
modernity
Advisor: Grimley, D
Brain mechanisms in clinical apathy

Clinical apathy is a debilitating disorder of motivation that is increasingly recognised across neurological and psychiatric disorders. Current challenges remain in understanding the underlying mechanisms of the syndrome, and the lack of licensed treatment. Some evidence has associated apathy with reduced incentivisation by reward, possibly secondary to distinct brain changes in a well defined fronto-striatal network. However, it remains unclear exactly whether the behavioural and anatomical correlates of apathy are consistent across brain disorders.
This thesis attempts to clarify these questions by considering apathy as a behavioural disorder, which can be examined using effort-based decision making tasks. Behavioural and anatomical studies were performed across several conditions, including cerebrovascular small vessel disease, schizophrenia, stroke, and healthy people. Two decision making paradigms were used, one which probes how people evaluate costs and benefits of actions, and another which characterises how motivated behaviour dynamically varies over time in the face of unexpected setbacks or uplifts.
An association between apathy, reward insensitivity, and fronto-striatal pathology was found in small vessel disease. Behavioural phenotypes of amotivation varied across conditions depending on associated factors such as level of cognitive function in schizophrenia, and concurrent depression in patients with focal stroke. Finally, dopaminergic treatment may serve as a therapeutic option for some apathetic patients with subcortical lesions.

Keywords: drift diffusion modelling
motivation
apathy
effort-based decision making
Advisor: Husain, M
Manohar, S
Polymer solubilisation and lipid characterisation of bacterial and fungal membranes

Fungal infections are a major threat to immunocompromised patients. A potential target for treating such invasive infections is Pma1, a P-Type ATPase that pumps protons across the plasma membrane of fungi to create an electrochemical gradient essential for the secondary transport of nutrients. As yet, efforts to study Pma1 in vitro have been focused on detergent solubilisation and purification, which does not necessarily preserve the native lipid environment and can potentially alter the native hexameric assembly and ATPase activity of Pma1. This study had two main aims: (i) to develop a protocol for purifying Neurospora crassa Pma1 from its native source using polymer-lipid-protein particles, with the aim of maintaining a native lipid environment, and (ii) to characterise the native lipidome of the host organism N. crassa, and identify those lipid species that co-purify with Pma1. The effectiveness of several commercially available polymers in solubilising fungal membranes under various conditions were evaluated and compared to bacterial membranes. The well-characterised polymer, styrene maleic acid (SMA 3:1), was identified as a potential candidate for solubilising Pma1 from N. crassa, and limitations of this polymer for assessing protein purity and activity for fungal membranes were investigated. Using LC/MS to analyse the full N. crassa lipidome, 420 different lipid species were identified. By analysing lipids present in different purification steps of Pma1 in detergent, it was observed that purified N. crassa Pma1 hexamers are characterised by an enrichment of inositol-containing ceramides. Knowing these tightly associated lipid species will aid with future efforts to preserve Pma1’s native lipid environment during purification.

Keywords: SMA
SMALP
proton pump
native environment
membrane proteins
lipidome
neurospora crassa
structural biology
PMA
Pma1
DIBMA
lipid
lipid-polymer nanoparticles
lipodisq
lipidomics
fungal membranes
styrene-maleic acid copolymer
P-type ATPases
Advisor: Bublitz, M
Watts, A
Merchants and their cultural horizons in late medieval northern Italy

The primary aim of this inquiry will be to explore the cultural horizons of merchants in late medieval northern Italy (c.1348 to c.1460). This exploration will dismantle the mythical figure of the merchant in late medieval northern Italy as herald of capitalist modernity. The secondary aim of this thesis is to propose a new methodology of cultural history that explores ‘cultural horizons’. These were the constantly shifting frames through which knowledge was categorised. I will investigate how a specific medium, quaderni, gave structure to those categories, and I will reunite material which has been artificially divided by the boundaries between disciplines. Merchants in late medieval Italy reasoned through the ethical and tensions that their profession generated, read tales, heard sermons and responded to art in particular ways through their cultural horizons. Yet, to explore these cultural horizons is not in any sense to posit a fixed or coherent mercantile world view. Both aims will offer new avenues of research, into merchants at different times and places, as well as in cultural history more widely.
The first chapter of this thesis, ‘Keeping Books’, will focus on the impact of quaderni on merchant culture. These paper books, sold as blank bound codices, were a versatile new medium that created a space not just for accounting but for many kinds of writing. The second chapter, ‘The Perfect Merchant’, will examine merchant education and the ideal models that merchants aspired to. The third chapter, ‘Measure’, will study the role of measure and measuring in merchant commerce, ethics, and eschatology. The fourth chapter, ‘Time’, will focus on the ways in which merchants perceived and ordered time. The fifth chapter, ‘Charting Horizons’, will explore the ways in which merchants navigated and contemplated trade routes and spiritual landscapes. The final chapter, ‘Fama’, will examine how merchants were perceived, how they established and lost their reputations, the circulation of information, and how they were remembered. For merchants, fama was distinctive; their businesses and their afterlives depended on it.

Keywords: medieval merchants
Fama
late medieval Italy
account books
merchants
Dante
Advisor: Rosser, A
Skoda, H
A mechanistic investigation of the neuropharmacological and metabolic actions of lithium

Bipolar disorder is a chronic mood disorder characterised by cycling episodes of mania and depression. These episodes can have devastating impacts on life quality and expectancy in patients. Currently, the ion lithium is the gold standard mood stabiliser in BD – alleviating both manic and depressive episodes. Lithium pharmacotherapy is accompanied with side effects, however, such as weight gain and nephrotoxicity which limit the application of treatment and patient compliance. Given that the mechanisms underlying lithium’s mood stabilisation and side effects remain unknown, we embarked on a detailed mechanistic investigation to shed light on lithium’s molecular interactions.
Previous research has focused on lithium’s inhibition of glycogen synthase kinase-3β (GSK-3β) as a possible explanation for its mood stabilising properties. We explored the hypothesis that lithium inhibits a wide array of kinases beyond GSK- 3β and found that lithium is indeed capable of inhibiting 76 kinases in a cell-free assay in vitro. A functional consequence of the inhibition/knockout of 50 lithium- sensitive kinases was demonstrated by alterations to the circadian rhythms of immortalised cell lines in vitro. Upon administering lithium to mice in vivo, we made the surprising discovery that lithium tolerance is greater in female mice than male mice. Using cryptochrome knockout mice, we further established that period change mediated by cryptochrome does not play a role in lithium’s modulation of circadian wheel-running activity in vivo. Finally, lithium’s selective induction of weight gain in obese patients was examined using a diet-induced obesity mouse model. The transcription factor peroxisome proliferator activated receptor γ was identified as a lithium-sensitive target which could be responsible for lithium-induced weight gain and improved insulin and glucose tolerance in obese patients. Thus this DPhil thesis proposes new cellular targets for lithium which explain how it drives widespread alterations of disparate signalling pathways and further explain lithium’s promotion of weight gain.

Keywords: circadian rhythms
lithium
bipolar disorder
Advisor: Vasudevan, S