VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Theories of poetry, 1256-1400

This thesis explores some submerged aspects of the history of the theory of poetry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, examining the circumstantial factors motivating its intellectual, religious, and moral developments. Starting with the early university men, it argues that the important poetic initiatives of scholastic writers, specifically, Roger Bacon, anticipated the literary advancements and innovative claims conventionally ascribed to the poetic theories of the Italian humanists at the turn of the century. It tracks these theoretical developments and ideas as they move through the exuberant affirmations of poetry made by Albertino Mussato and into the vernacular works of the English writers, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, who ruthlessly interrogate the instability of their own art and explore the uncertainties of literary reception and transmission. Here, the progressive expansion of the status and power of poetic discourse, which had been fought for and won by previous generations of theorists, is conclusively and soundly rejected. The literary history that presents itself describes a rise and a fall of poetry, where the poetic theories born in Paris appear to flourish in Padua, before dying on the streets of London, crushed beneath the stampeding crowds of the House of Rumour. As the nature of poetic discourse (and of the poet) were crucial points of conflict throughout the period, a study of the theory of poetry is necessary for a full understanding of medieval literary history. This thesis represents a contribution to these discussions.

Keywords: medieval
poetry
Developing a tileable superconducting circuit for quantum computation

Superconducting circuits have been demonstrated at the ~50 qubit scale, with gate fidelities approaching the thresholds required for error correction using surface codes. It is generally considered that maintaining and improving this performance while scaling to >100 qubits will require 3D integration of control wiring, and techniques to prevent or mitigate the effects of unwanted electromagnetic modes which emerge in the circuit environment at larger scales. At the present time, no single design has emerged as the clear scaling "winner'', and many different modalities are being explored. In this thesis, we describe one potential scaling architecture for superconducting circuits, which is based on a unit cell containing a set of controllable, measurable qubits. In analogy to the unit cell of a crystal, this unit cell can be tiled, in this case to form 2D arrays of individually controllable and measurable qubits. This is enabled by three key technologies: 3D integrated off-chip control wiring, reverse-side readout resonators, and inductive shunting of the device enclosure with micromachined pillars. To validate this approach, we design and build a demonstration device featuring four transmon qubits and containing within it a single unit cell of the architecture.
The device construction involves the fabrication of reverse-side circuits and the use of novel CNC drilling of the circuit substrate. We measure coherence times and single-qubit gate fidelities comparable with the state-of-the-art for transmon qubits (avg. T1 = 149 µs, avg. echoed pure dephasing T2 = 189 µs, avg. F > 99.98%), establishing that the design is compatible with high coherence. An important feature of the design is that the infinite construct formed by tiling the plane with the unit cell possesses a cutoff frequency, below which the circuit environment cannot sustain any electromagnetic modes. We develop models to predict this cutoff frequency, and predict that environment mediated crosstalk between qubits inside this structure decays exponentially with spatial separation. This crosstalk can be viewed as being mediated by evanescent waveguide modes, or by bound states formed by the interaction of qubits with the environmental modes around the cutoff. Both models provide quantitative predictions for the rate of crosstalk decay, which are shown to be in good agreement. We propose this architecture as a promising candidate for building 2D arrays of hundreds or thousands of nearest neighbour coupled superconducting qubits, which could provide a testbed of quantum error correction schemes such as the surface code.

Keywords: spurious modes
out-of-plane wiring
quantum computing
superconducting circuits
crosstalk
circuit QED
3D integration
coherence
randomized benchmarking
characterization
qubit
tileable architecture
quantum
Advisor: Leek, PJ
Exemplarity and allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia

This thesis builds a new framework for understanding the literary context of Macrobius’ Saturnalia. It takes the first systematic look at Macrobius’ interaction with his literary predecessors and argues that he consistently engages with his predecessors as both moral and aesthetic authorities, a process which I call ethical allusion. Focusing on this connection between literary and ethical agendas in the Saturnalia not only offers a fresh perspective on the significance of ‘classical’ and imperial literary presences in Macrobius’ dialogue. It also furnishes a more thorough knowledge of Macrobius’ relationship to his late antique contemporaries. Despite the lively debates in mid-twentieth century scholarship on the date of Macrobius and his oeuvre, nearly all the work done on elucidating the place of the Saturnalia in the late Latin intellectual scene is dominated by one of two scholarly meta-narratives, the relationship between ‘pagan’ and Christian culture, or the merits of ‘classical’ vs. ‘late’ Greco-Roman literature, both of which have come under question in recent years.
This dissertation uses the concept of ethical allusion to shift scholarly focus in two ways. It uses this allusive technique as a means of establishing a better understanding of the relation of the Saturnalia to Macrobius’ other extant work, the Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, a project which has been overlooked in the effort to assimilate Macrobius to the aforementioned critical paradigms. Second, ethical allusion serves as the basis from which I compare Macrobius’ reworking of his predecessors to those found in authors writing across the fourth and fifth centuries. The result throws into sharp relief Macrobius’ use of ‘antiquarian’ or scholarly knowledge to challenge and explore the existing elite social norms of his day.

Keywords: canon
intertextuality
late antiquity
Macrobius
Advisor: McLynn, N
Reinhardt, T
God as Dionysus: Martin Buber's reception of Friedrich Nietzsche

Martin Buber was a source of inspiration for a generation of young German Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century; throughout his career, however, he was also criticised by scholars of Jewish history and mysticism. In response, Buber and contemporary scholars alike have tended to split the development of his thought into two main phases: the earlier mystical phase, which sought to realise the divine, and the more mature dialogic phase, which overturns mysticism and instead attempts to encounter God.
This thesis contributes to the growing scholarship that argues for the continuities in Buber’s career by examining his reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. Buber’s transition from mysticism to dialogue is inextricable from Nietzsche, who exerted a powerful influence on the young Buber but was later dismissed as a ‘mystic of the Enlightenment’. With reference to Harold Bloom’s theories on the anxiety of influence, the thesis suggests that Buber developed his dialogic thought on the basis of his aesthetic encounter with Nietzsche: Buber subconsciously misreads his literary precursor, as well as his own controversial mysticism, in order to maintain his artistic authenticity. Crucially, Buber does so through two specific ratios: tessera, which reads Nietzsche as overly idealistic and abstract; and daemonization, which reads him as all too human. The result is that the precursor is distanced in two diametrically opposed directions, yet encountered as another artist in between. The thesis locates the embodiment of Buber’s mysticism and dialogue in his description of the Bacchant, a figure who recurs throughout his oeuvre and functions as a mise en abyme of anxiety: as he or she is being observed on stage, the Bacchant, directed towards Dionysus as the ultimate precursor, simultaneously performs a mythical role yet remains a distinct physical presence.
In chapters that cover Buber’s aesthetics, mysticism, myth, history and philosophical anthropology, the thesis discovers that Buber returns time and again to Nietzsche and the figure of the Bacchant, demonstrating not only a synchronic anxiety of influence at any given moment, but also a diachronic anxiety across Buber’s thought; it hopes to offer a new organic development in our understanding of Buber’s career, to highlight the religiosity of Nietzsche’s thought, and to emphasise the importance of German romanticism in Buber and the generation of young Jews whom he influenced in turn.

Advisor: Groiser, D
Structural, quantitative and functional MRI for the study of demyelinating diseases of the spinal cord

Myelin-oligodendrocyte glycoprotein associated disease (MOGAD) is a recently described inflammatory demyelinating disorder of the central nervous system. It has been shown to be distinct from both aquaporin-4 (AQP4) antibody (Ab) neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) and multiple sclerosis (MS). Spinal cord involvement is a hallmark feature of all three diseases and a central cause of disability, and so, is an important phenotype to study. This thesis consists of a retrospective clinical study and then a cross-sectional research MRI study that compares structural, quantitative and resting-state functional MRI scans across MOGAD, AQP4-NMOSD, MS and healthy volunteers (HV).
The principal clinical research findings are:
• MOGAD myelitis presents more frequently with short cord lesions, multiple cord lesions, conus lesions and involvement of either the brain or optic nerves at the time of the acute attack; these MRI lesions are likely to resolve at follow-up.
• MOGAD myelitis results in significant sphincter dysfunction, despite good motor recovery. Conus lesions are associated the need for long term catheter dysfunction and the presence of a brainstem lesion during the acute attack may predict higher long term disability.
The principal research MRI findings are:
• AQP4-NMOSD myelitis shows the most severe, localised damage in areas of the cord involved during the acute episode. In MS, metrics show significant differences compared to HV but the relationship with lesion location is not as pronounced. In MOGAD, metrics are comparable to HV after recovery from myelitis but localised grey matter atrophy is noted in the affected area of the cord.
• Patients with relapsing MOGAD show significantly more thoracic cord atrophy than monophasic MOGAD, even where the relapse occurred outside of the spinal cord. This may indicate that relapsing MOGAD denotes a more severe phenotype.
• Non-conventional MRI metrics show clinical relevance: cervical cord cross-sectional area associates with disability outcomes and spinothalamic fractional anisotropy with pain scores, independent of disease type.
• Distinct and robust functional networks exist in the spinal cord without a particular task. Damage in the spinal cord may lead to either a compensatory increase or a decrease in connectivity related to atrophy and cord lesions.
The publications from this work, which form part of this thesis, have added to the growing body of research into the study of MOGAD. Additionally, advanced spinal cord imaging techniques were used, which add novelty to the research and its conclusions.

Keywords: Multiple sclerosis
Myelitis
NMOSD
Neuromyelitis optica
MRI
Functional MRI
Neurology
Diffusion MRI
Spinal cord
MOG antibody
Demyelination
Transverse myelitis
MOGAD
Advisor: Palace, J
Kong, Y
Asymmetric synthesis of the loline alkaloids

This thesis centres on the asymmetric synthesis of the loline alkaloids. Initially, a scalable synthesis of 3-hydroxyproline was developed. This synthetic route was used to prepare an advanced intermediate for the synthesis of the tricyclic loline alkaloid scaffold, from which four loline alkaloids were derived.
Chapter 1 presents a summary of 1-aminopyrrolizidines. Initially, the isolation and previous syntheses of the 1-aminopyrrolizidines absouline and laburnamine are described and discussed. Followed by a review of the isolation, biological activity and syntheses of the loline alkaloids.
Chapter 2 describes the development of two complementary syntheses of both epimers of 3-hydroxyproline utilizing either an inter- or an intra- molecular, regioselective aziridinium ring-opening reaction by oxygen nucleophiles as the key step in both syntheses.
Chapter 3 summarises the first-generation approach to the loline alkaloids. A lithium amide conjugate addition with enolate oxidation inserted the C(1) and C(3) amino and oxygen atoms of the loline alkaloids. However, this first-generation synthesises was not pursued further due to prohibitively low yields being obtained.
Chapter 4 describes the synthesis of the loline alkaloid scaffold. An enolate addition to a sulfinyl imine inserted the exocyclic amine and oxygen of the ether bridge, and was followed by pyrrolizidinone formation. Finally, a base-mediated cyclisation and deprotection gave (+)-norloline dihydrochloride.
Chapter 5 describes the synthesis of four loline alkaloids (loline, norloline, N-acetyl loline and N-methyl loline) from (+)-norloline dihydrochloride, which was followed by comparison of their spectroscopic data with those previously reported in the literature.
Chapter 6 contains full experimental procedures and characterisation data for all compounds synthesised in Chapters 2–5.

Keywords: Total Synthesis
Loline Alkaloids
Organic Chemistry
Advisor: Davies, S
The only woman: the agency of gender in the career and memorialisation of Soviet politician Ekaterina Alekseevna Furtseva

This is the first comprehensive academic study of the Soviet politician Ekaterina Alekseevna Furtseva (1910-1974), Central Committee Secretary and Presidium member, Khrushchev ally, Brezhnev colleague, and the USSR Minister of Culture who presided over the golden age of Soviet-West artist exchanges. The only woman in leadership for most of the Soviet era, Furtseva is a lost historical figure, her description fractured and distorted by myths, gossip, and primitive errors - even about her name - in both Western scholarship and popular biography. The thesis reinstates her astonishing career on documentary record, using a microhistorical approach combining new with ignored evidence to show the historiographical discrepancies; it then investigates her narrative commodification, subjective reality, emotivity, and wider memorialization problems. Her powerplay, self-presentation and genderedness are scrutinized in two core episodes: the 1957 Kremlin crisis which brought her to supreme power, which has never been explained, and her renowned 1960s-1970s arts transactions with the USA and UK. The thesis establishes her momentous role in Khrushchev’s rescue from the ‘anti-Party’ ambush and its obscuring, and interrogates notions of her tokenism through analysis of her performance in the crisis and her handling of her gender. The juxtaposition of the episodes uncovers Furtseva’s preference for marginal transactionality and ‘otherness’ as a strategy for her unusual longevity. Her subjectivity is further examined through comparing and contextualizing early female identity formation; I conclude that she was a charismatic exemplar of the emancipated first Revolutionary generation, accepted unproblematically by male peers if not by wider society, or indeed other women. Furtseva emerges as a missing link in the understanding of the heteronymities in gender relations and power discourses. Additionally, the handling of her life in extant retrospective sources raises important questions about archival documentation and its gaps and silences, and the soundness of post-Cold War historiographical method.

Keywords: Komsomolka
Furtseva, Ekaterina Alekseevna 1910-74
Khrushchev leadership
Anti-Party Group crisis 1957
Moscow Communist Party First Secretary
Central Committee Presidium
USSR Minister of Culture
female leaders
Communist party Secretariat
Soviet women
Soviet government and politics
Advisor: Kelly, C
Bridging the gap 

Sensory information necessarily informs decision-making, but both sensory information and the biological structures that receive and process it are subject to inherent limitations and uncertainty. Both these factors degrade an animal’s capacity to make informed, adaptive decisions in a complex and ever-changing world. How is it that animals manage these constraints?
In this thesis, I set out to examine multiple cue use and decision-making in a highly derived marine teleost: the Picasso or lagoon triggerfish, Rhinecanthus aculeatus. The use of multiple cues represents an integrative solution to the problem of informational uncertainty; however, it remains poorly understood outside of a narrow range of species and behaviours, largely mammalian. This thesis begins to address the question of how the processes of cue integration are accomplished in other vertebrate taxa.
I approached this through two complementary sets of experiments, addressing related questions of decision-making in relation to information use. In Chapter 2 I examined whether triggerfish are capable of sensory updating, i.e., weighting their prior estimates with incoming information to inform their decision-making. In Chapter 3, I re-examined the same data set and performed a modified replicate to dissect multiple factors contributing to decision-making, focusing on task learning and how subjects might have taken advantage of low-level heuristics to solve the problems presented to them. I placed this discussion in an integrated associative learning framework. For Chapter 4, I was curious as to how aquatic environments, which are highly labile and may favour different sensory channels in different contexts, might affect learning style in triggerfish. To examine this, I tested how triggerfish learn to discriminate objects with multiple competing cues in an environment where cue quality is subject to varying environmental transmission quality. I approached all these questions through the framework of associative learning, using conditioning techniques to train triggerfish to discriminate between sets of stimuli with different properties and examine how they make decisions under different conditions.
Fishes are not only taxonomically distant to more typically studied models of decision-making such as mammals, but also represent an ecological contrast, moving with relative freedom in a three-dimensional environment that exerts radically different pressures on their movement, sensory, and decision ecology. The findings presented in this thesis increase our understanding of information use within fishes and expand our understanding of the evolution and ecology of decision-making within the vertebrates.

Keywords: triggerfish
perception
ethology
animal cognition
fish
learning
animal behaviour
operant conditioning
Advisor: Burt de Perera, T
Technological transfer in production of Majiayao-style pottery between Neolithic communities in northwest China

This study investigates the transfer of technological knowledge in production of the Neolithic Majiayao-style pottery (5300-4000 cal yr BP) on the territories of the modern Chinese provinces Gansu and Qinghai. The Majiayao-style pottery includes fine painted ware and coarse cord-impressed ware. Both wares of the Majiayao style were widely distributed across different river valleys located hundreds of kilometres away from each other. This study investigates whether there are similarities in production technology of the Majiayao-style beyond the shape and decoration and addresses communication and connectivity of prehistoric people living in the Tao River, Huangshui River, and the Yellow River valleys.
The methods of macroscopic examination, ceramic petrography and experimental firing of raw materials were used to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire of the Majiayao-style pottery from sites in three river valleys. The results of this study revealed similarities in raw materials and techniques for making this pottery in different locations indicating common technological knowledge that could have been disseminated among potters. The combination of macroscopic and microscopic analyses has shown that there are patterns in connection between coarse and fine clay pastes with specific decoration and firing atmospheres. The observations suggest that beside the technological knowledge, the production of Majiayao-style pottery also required specific social knowledge to connect outer appearance of the Majiayao style with the production materials and techniques.

Keywords: pottery technology
ceramic petrography
prehistoric pottery analysis
Chinese archaeology
experimental archaeology
technological knowledge transfer
pottery analysis
Advisor: Hein, A
Spataro, M
Accommodating a vision of diversity in different school contexts: "Unity-in-Diversity" in Indonesia

This thesis explores the ways in which schools accommodate the national vision of a multicultural society, specifically focusing on Indonesia’s national vision of “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” (Unity-in-Diversity). Employing a multiple-case-study research approach, it examines the ways head teachers, teachers, students, and parents from six state and private schools with different mixes of student ethnicity and religiosity promote this national vision in terms of educational practice. The research considers the perspectives of education stakeholders on the meanings of Unity-in-Diversity and their responses in promoting Unity-in-Diversity in schools and classrooms in contemporary Indonesia, drawing data from observations, interviews, photos, and documentary analysis.
Using multicultural education as a conceptual lens, this research finds that promoting religious diversity is key to achieving Unity-in-Diversity in religious and democratic Indonesia, and schools generally have demonstrated some commitment to promoting inter-religious harmony as mandated. Yet, it argues that the discourses of diversity, particularly of religious diversity, continue to be spaces of complex interpretation, rather than settled policy positions. In schools, this process of interpretation is manifested in the school policies, school cultures, and teaching across subjects in classrooms. The strong narratives of religiosity and piety in the current education system, which are found to privilege the dominant religious culture(s), have ramifications in the accommodation of Unity-in-Diversity in practice. In response to the different schools’ demographies, the nuanced accounts regarding the implementation of Unity-in-Diversity suggest the importance of considering identity and power dynamics, positionality, and contextuality in the school accommodation of the vision of diversity.
In light of this research, this thesis also presents the usefulness and challenges of applying a theory of multicultural education, which has focused mainly on ethnic and racial diversity, in researching the issue of religious diversity. Based in the largest Muslim country in the world, this thesis offers a critical insight into the complex role of education in the development of an inclusive, religious society.

Keywords: Indonesia
religious education
multicultural education
case study
education and diversity
religious diversity
Advisor: Fancourt, N
Johnson, D