VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
William Radclyffe (1770-1828), genealogist and antiquarian in Yorkshire and London

William Radclyffe was born in Yorkshire in 1770 and died in London in 1828. He was a member of the College of Arms from 1802 to 1823. During his lifetime he enjoyed considerable repute as a genealogist, but his career as a herald was terminated in scandalous circumstances, and his name was subsequently obscured. This thesis attempts to re-evaluate his social status and professional activity, in the light of evidence derived from a newly discovered group of his manuscript diaries covering the period 1803 to 1820. These diaries place Radclyffe in the setting of his immediate family and ancestry, and also offer insights into aspects of English society during a period of rapid social change. Radclyffe emerges as a figure of several identities, including those of gentleman-professional in London, minor landowner in Yorkshire, supplicant for patronage, and enterprising capitalist. The thesis also proposes, with particular reference to the work of Rosemary Sweet, that he may be seen as an aspiring antiquarian, who was closely involved in the production of some of the most important works of local history to have been published in the period, and who may have been a minor participant in the early phases of the scholarly Gothic Revival. Finally, a discussion of Radclyffe’s activities at the College of Arms concludes that his role in College affairs has been seriously under-rated until now, and that he should be seen not as the fraud depicted by Sir Anthony Wagner, but as a failed reformer, a protagonist in an unsuccessful attack on the forces of ‘Old Corruption’ which were dominant in the College during the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

Advisor: Tiller, K
Imperfect reconciliation in anglophone southeast Asian novels (1989-Present)

This thesis offers a critical exposition of postcolonial reconciliation in selected post-1989 Anglophone Southeast Asian novels. It considers how fiction is used as a medium to explore reparative possibilities for past and present conflicts in Southeast Asia.
Though postcolonial critical discourses have engaged with reconciliation, they have hitherto tended to overlook English-language Southeast Asian narratives. As an attempt to address this critical lacuna, my thesis examines four Anglophone Southeast Asian novels on four conflicts: Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain (2007) on the Japanese occupation of Malaya, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) on the war in Vietnam, Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage (1991) on the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, and Bonnie Etherington’s The Earth Cries Out (2017) on the ongoing conflict between Indonesia and its annexed territory, West Papua. The four literary case studies begin with Tan’s querying of reconciliation through queer romance, then turn to Nguyen’s and Mo’s respective engagement with two of the conditions of reconciliation, that is, confession and witnessing, and end with Etherington’s ecofeminist critique of the neglect of the environment in a human-focussed reparative paradigm.
The thesis argues that by addressing violent events and their aftermaths, the selected novels thematically and formally register what I term an ethics of imperfect reconciliation. This seeks to redress injustices and repair injured communities within and beyond Southeast Asia, despite the acknowledged enormity, if not impossibility, of the task. Imperfect reconciliation as expressed in the selected novels captures the paradoxes, partiality, and cultural-historical contingency of reconciliation. All four cases consider the possibility of reconciliation and the countervailing prospect of irreconcilability. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that Anglophone Southeast Asian novels make an important contribution to rethinking reconciliation outside bureaucratic and legal-judicial domains.

Advisor: Boehmer, E
Nationcraft in twelfth-century England

This thesis explores how national categories – both generic concepts such as gens and natio, and particular ethnicising terms – were perceived, constructed and used in the long twelfth century. Its main goal is twofold. On the empirical level, it aims to deepen our understanding of national identifications in twelfth-century England by focusing on exceptions, contradictions and previously side-lined material and themes. On the theoretical level, the thesis is an intervention in a broader discussion of the conceptual nature and chronology of ‘nationhood’. Its key purpose is to move beyond the unresolved tension in the literature between constructivist rhetoric and a tendency to reify ‘nations’ and ‘peoples’ as bounded entities or groups existing out-there-in-the-world. In order to do so, the thesis introduces the concept of ‘nationcraft’ that redefines ‘nations’ as ideology. This heuristic suggests that ‘nations’, ‘ethnic groups’, (ethnicised) ‘peoples’ and medieval ‘gentes’ are not only ‘constructed’ in the sense of not being ‘natural’ (‘biological’) unchangeable units – they always are and remain ‘fictions’, ‘imagined things’, with no substance and independent existence of their own.
The empirical part of this thesis begins from an examination of twelfth-century reinterpretations of the meaning of Britishness and explores exceptional and overlooked uses of the words Britones and Britanni and other ethnic terms derived from the concept of Britain. The next three chapters address the interplay between ‘nationhood’ and religious ideas and institutions. They focus on the notion of divine election, the applications of national categories to the cults of saints in twelfth-century England, as well as the motif of the saintly lineage of Norman dukes and its role in reimagining national boundaries at the time. The final chapter explores the political pertinence of national identifications – both as applied to and by individuals (with a special focus on those records documenting explicit changes in national identification at the time) and at the level of political-economic organization. The conclusion discusses the conceptual gaps between modern and medieval thinking about nationhood and postulates two general arguments about national categories in the twelfth century. First, it claims that these categories were not neutral, either in the sense of being taken-for-granted and un-reflected, or politically irrelevant. They were consciously thought about, reinterpreted and instrumentalized by twelfth-century actors. This leads to the second key argument: medieval notions of ‘nationhood’ cannot be reduced to essentialism, rather, they reflected the central paradox of ‘nationcraft’ as ideology: simultaneously, its tendency to naturalise ‘peoples’ and ‘countries’ as objectively existing and singular entities and the self-awareness of its own performativity and artificiality.

Advisor: Thompson, B
New visions of the human in contemporary French fiction: bodies, writing, survival

This thesis examines the work of four contemporary French novelists—Antoine Volodine, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Michel Houellebecq, and Marie Darrieussecq—whose work probes the limits of the human and expresses anxieties about the future of humanity. The thesis critically analyses the ways in which “the human” has re-emerged as a vital axis of reflection and anxiety for contemporary novelists. This is demonstrated by the proliferation of works that borrow from science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, and related speculative genres. Adapting familiar conventions and tropes, these authors insert themselves into a popular cultural heritage while pursuing idiosyncratic scenarios of human transformation that speak strongly to contemporary fears about political violence, social injustice, and ecological catastrophe. Ultimately, I argue that these novels continue to find enduring value in the concept of humanness and humanity, but that they recognise the necessity of articulating new visions of the human appropriate to global social and cultural change.
The thesis comprises four chapters that focus on a small number of novels by a single author. Each chapter engages in close reading framed by conceptual insights from posthumanist criticism, theories of embodiment, and twentieth-century philosophy in order to demonstrate the significance and relevance of these novels. Though they pursue distinct critical paths, these analyses are linked through a shared emphasis on three themes—embodiment, writing, and survival—which I identify as sites of particular importance with respect to questions of humanness. In particular, I argue that each author expresses a belief in storytelling as a humanising force beyond the transformations and traumas to which narrators and characters are frequently subject. Taken together, the four chapters of this thesis illustrate how commonplace understandings of the human are being challenged in contemporary French fiction while simultaneously attributing considerable ethical force to the persistence of an identifiable humanity.

Keywords: speculative fiction
Houellebecq
dystopian
post-apocalyptic
Rufin
humanism
posthumanism
storytelling
Volodine
embodiment
survival
Darrieussecq
contemporary French fiction
Advisor: Lubecker, N
Homogenisation of the electrothermal behaviour of granular material

Granular material is a critical component of many industrial applications and is particularly important for metallurgical processes. In particular, granular carbon experiences electrical heating in a metallurgical furnace known as a calciner. As the temperature of the carbon increases, its chemical and physical properties transform, namely to resemble those of graphite. However, the high temperatures within the calciner make ex- perimental measurements very difficult to obtain. Consequently, a funda- mental understanding of the inner mechanisms of the process has proved to be most challenging.
Mathematical models can be used to assimilate the behaviour of the fur- nace by studying the tight coupling between electric and thermal conduc- tion. However, for the multitude of particles present within the calciner, direct or discrete models that consider every particle individually are com- putationally intractable. It has been shown that the electrothermal be- haviour on the scale of a particle is crucial to explain the behaviour on the scale of the furnace, yet the former scale is several orders of magnitude smaller than the latter.
In this thesis, we propose mathematical models to approximate the physi- cal phenomena that govern the operation of the calciner furnace, validate their accuracy and demonstrate their numerical feasibility. The models that we study are founded upon the homogenisation technique known as the method of multiple scales. This is a systematic, effective-medium ap- proach that exploits the vast discrepancy between the scale of the furnace and the scale of the particles to extract homogeneous effective parameters from the heterogeneous media. In particular, we discuss how to extend the standard multiple scales technique to include a nonlinear, nonlocal, integral boundary condition for radiative transfer. Furthermore and signif- icantly, we demonstrate the influence of contact resistance by considering jumps in the electric potential at contact interfaces and conducting an asymptotic analysis to study the effect of microscopic contacts.

Keywords: Composite material
Method of multiple scales
Thermal radiation
Thermal transfer
Electrical transfer
Homogenisation
Granular material
Advisor: Please, C
Howison, S
Examining the neural correlates of cognitive and social activity levels in middle-aged and older adults

As populations around the world are rapidly ageing, there is an urgent need to identify modifiable determinants of brain health in late life. Cognitive and social activities represent potential candidates, particularly as they have previously been linked to a lower risk of cognitive decline and dementia. The aim of this thesis was therefore to evaluate whether cognitive and social activities associate with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) markers of brain structure and functional connectivity and performance on neuropsychological assessments.
A systematic review and meta-analysis were first conducted of previous MRI studies, to evaluate whether cognitive and social activities relate to imaging indices of brain structure. The review suggested that when combined, higher activity levels were linked to greater white matter volume, fewer white matter lesions and greater hippocampal volume.
With the review largely inconclusive about the independent associations of cognitive and social activities, late life activity levels were next examined in relation to brain integrity and cognitive function. In a cross-sectional analysis of Whitehall II data, cognitive activity was the only activity to associate with cognition (global and executive function), whereas social activities were related to total grey matter volume, without any cognitive correlates.
Given that a cross-sectional design is insensitive to changes in activity levels that occur over time, the Whitehall II dataset was revisited in order to evaluate whether trajectories of leisure activities relate to the ageing brain. Between mid-life and late life, a curvilinear pattern of change in activities was observed. Level and change in cognitive activities also associated with global cognition, executive function, memory and processing speed, while social activities related to executive function, only. The links with brain structure and functional connectivity, however, remained small.
Considering that composite measures of leisure activities are non-specific indices, the next objective was to assess whether particular activities play a significant role in maintaining the brain in late life. Examining data from the UK Biobank study, weekly leisure-time computer use during mid-life and late life was linked to performance on multiple tests (e.g. fluid intelligence and prospective memory) with mid-life computer use further related to putamen volume. Late life educational classes demonstrated links with higher fluid intelligence, while mid-life attendance at a sports club or gym was related to sensorimotor connectivity.
Overall, this thesis provides evidence to suggest that leisure activities – cognitive activities in particular – are consistently linked to late life cognition. However, associations with measurable brain structure and functional connectivity were found to be scarce.

Advisor: Ebmeier, K
Sexton, C
Uncertain identities in German-language novels since 2010

Literary authors in the German context have a high degree of public visibility, but performatively enact their public role in different ways. Whether they are actively involved in broader social and political debates or simply trying to maximise, through their public presence, the impact of their work, their identities inevitably take on a political dimension, which in turn affects the reception of their work in complex ways. This thesis explores experimental identity narratives in five recent German-language novels, arguing that these texts nuance, question, or destabilise their authors’ own public identities. Through a detailed discussion of five texts published after 2010 – Eva Menasse’s Quasikristalle (2013), Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (2011), Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest (2014), Jenny Erpenbeck’s Aller Tage Abend (2012), and Felicitas Hoppe’s Hoppe (2012) – it explores how fictional identities within these texts renegotiate authorial identity constructs beyond them. They all centre around narratives of individual and collective identities which are blurry, fragmented, or elusive. By using narrative elements such as narrative voice, focalisation, and order of narration in experimental and often disorienting ways, they generate uncertainty about the identities – collective and individual, contemporary and historical – which they present. The novels discussed in this thesis exemplify and yet resist recent debates about authorship and identity politics. By combining a study of contemporary performative models of authorship within the German Literaturbetrieb with narratological readings of the aforementioned five novels, this thesis shows that a profound ambivalence concerning models of identity is characteristic of twenty-first- century fiction and its underlying expectations of authorship.

Keywords: Eva Menasse
Uncertainty
Saša Stanišić
2010s
Wolfgang Herrndorf
Identity Narratives
Felicitas Hoppe
Jenny Erpenbeck
Literaturbetrieb
Advisor: Duttlinger, C
Global and local persistent homology for the shape and classification of biological data

Persistent homology (PH) is an algorithmic method that allows one to study shape and higher-order interactions in high-dimensional data. Over the last decade, PH has been used in a wide variety of applications, including biology. PH considers topological invariants, such as connected components, loops, and holes, and their changes across a filtration which one can imagine as observing the data through multiple scales or resolutions. The filtration determines the questions that can be answered about the data and, in many cases, needs to be developed specifically for the problem of interest. There are also many other practical challenges when applying PH such as computational complexity and interpretation of PH output. This thesis has two parts: In the first part, we showcase how PH can be applied to two types of biological data: tumour blood vessel networks and functional neuronal networks. For tumour blood vessel networks, we develop a novel filtration that spatially characterises their structural abnormality. We show that the number of vessel loops and their distribution in the networks change over time when tumours undergo treatment with vascular targeting agents and radiation therapy. In functional neuronal networks, we find that PH can provide insight into dynamical processes in motor-learning data as well as in working-memory data from healthy versus schizophrenic human subjects. We highlight what type of information we can gain by applying persistence landscapes and persistence images to analyse and interpret the output from PH. In the second part of this thesis, we develop novel methods that consider PH locally around data points. To address computational issues when applying PH to large and noisy data sets -- both traits are commonly found in biological data -- we develop a novel landmark selection technique for point clouds. In contrast to existing methods, our subsampling process is robust to outliers and is developed specifically for PH. We further introduce a novel method that can detect geometric anomalies, such as intersections or boundaries, in point cloud data sampled from intersecting surfaces. Our detection is based on the computation of PH in local annular neighbourhoods around points and is less sensitive to the size of the local neighbourhood and surface curvature than an existing method.

Advisor: Harrington, H
Tanner, J
Jews and climate science in Palestine, 1897-1948

My doctoral project is situated at the intersection of modern Jewish history and the history of Zionism, climate and environmental history, the history of knowledge, colonial history and transnational history. It focuses on Jewish experts who examined the ramifications of climate on the success of the Zionist project in Palestine from the establishment of the Zionist Organisation in 1897 to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.
Through the prism of climate, I explore processes of knowledge production that took place within Jewish and Zionist thought in the fields of medicine, science, and technology. By doing so, I also explore the political, social and cultural ideas and conventions that have constructed and informed professional and popular knowledge concerning climate. This knowledge developed partly in relation to existing Western scientific and colonial ideas and practices. However, Zionist knowledge about climate also contained a variety of cultural perceptions which were unique to Jewish history and identity and reflected a long tradition of awe and wonder towards the Land of Israel. It is through the examination of this complex combination of ideas and practices that I propose a new – spatial and environmental – perspective on the evolution of a modern Jewish national, racial and cultural identity.

Advisor: Penslar, D
Harrison, M
The role of the retrosplenial cortex in associative memory

Encoding of episodic memories involves associating different features of the environment and experiences. Understanding how sensory-sensory associations are encoded would shed light on the basis of how events are stored in the brain.
The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is known to reciprocally connect to the hippocampal formation and to sensory areas. Its connectivity suggests a role in both episodic and spatial memory processes. A role in the formation and storage of sensory associations might underlie these processes and is supported by RSC-lesion and -inactivation studies.
In this thesis, I use optogenetics to inactivate the RSC while mice perform various memory paradigms to clarify the function of this structure in encoding associations to support memory. Thus, I develop a sensory associative memory task in mice which allows me to test sensory-sensory associations. Developing, for the first time, an appetitive sensory preconditioning (SPC) paradigm in mice, failed to provide robust results. So, I chose an aversive SPC paradigm as the best way to probe neutral sensory associations in mice.
I show that while control mice successfully learned the preconditioned association in the task, precise closed-loop optogenetic disruption of the RSC when mice form associations between neutral stimuli reduces performance to chance levels. Moreover, I demonstrate that this disruption is independent of spatial confound.
Using the same technique to silence RSC activity during short-term or long-term spatial learning did not affect the formation and retrieval of memory, in contrast to previous studies.
Finally, in order to truly address the question of how sensory-sensory associations are formed, I present preliminary data of a calcium imaging study aimed at understanding the mechanisms by which these associations are formed in the RSC.
In summary, I established a new sensory preconditioning task for mice allowing us to timely probe associative memory between neutral stimuli. Optogenetic silencing of RSC demonstrate the necessity of the RSC in this type of memory and combined with future functional imaging studies will help understand how the brain forms neutral associations.

Keywords: associations
retrosplenial cortex
memory
optogenetics
behaviour
Advisor: Kohl, M
Bannerman, D