VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Accommodating poetic, linear narratives with cyclical, repetition-based musical-poetic structures in the Cantigas de Santa Maria

Central to the world of thirteenth-century Galician-Portuguese song are the Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM), of which the cantigas de miragre are the focus of this study. This body of Marian miracle narratives is not without its hermeneutical complications. The songs’ musical-poetic forms largely comprise alternations between a refrain, and strophes that finish by reiterating the refrain’s metre, rhymes and melody. Combining the strictly linear narrative of the miracle cantiga with this cyclical framework poses manifold complications. Seemingly self-contained narrative logic is divided by interstrophic refrains, and chains of thought are divided. This setup in the cantigas de miragre is rendered all the more curious, given that few comparable instances of cyclical structure and linear narrative occur elsewhere in late-medieval vernacular repertory. In essence, concatenating the linear with the circular does not typically work in narrative song.
This thesis is the first scholarly work that examines how the cantigas de miragre navigates this dichotomy. Parsing the musical, poetic and narrative structures of a selection of songs, Part I of the thesis demonstrates how the sonically tenacious refrain, when recapped within strophes, works to highlight the narrative thrust of a miracle story. The memorially marked recurrence of refrain metre, rhymes and melody functions as a device to separate the narratively central from the extraneous. It thereby exposes a miracle song’s essential message to its audience. Given late-medieval attitudes towards sonic repetition and memory—as well as a deeply ingrained awareness of the power of rhetoric—it is understandable that such a manner of declamation arose from the cantiga de miragre’s cyclical form. As Part I sets out this theory, songs are considered in more detail in the case studies that make up Part II. Here, the multifaceted nature of the repertory is shown to influence the way Part I’s theory is applied. These case studies all comprise different musical-poetic structures that manipulate the cantiga de miragres’ approach towards sonically turning back. The way these diverse structures coexist alongside their narratives indicates that the cantigas de miragres’ text-music relationships are far more intimate and complicated than existing scholarship has considered up until now.

Keywords: Rhyme
Poetry
Medieval
Musical analysis
Narrative
Cantiga
Miracle
Music
Advisor: Leach, E
Us in the time of strangers imagining community in colonial Kenya and Tanganyika, c.1900-1965

In the mid-nineteenth century, while linguistic and cultural similarities were acknowledged and prudential links maintained across ecological zones, insurance against environmental disaster, ‘felt’ community across East Africa was, pushing generalisation to its limits, intensely local, indeed parochial. A century later, as independence loomed, public argument turned on the fate of historically novel visions of ethnic, racial and territorial community. My thesis seeks to explain this development. It explores the way in which community came to be imagined by thinkers across East Africa, the way these communities featured in people’s lives, and developing, and diverging, understandings of the relationship between various visions of community in Kenya and Tanganyika, seeking to widen our understanding of community in East Africa beyond the recent domination of the literature by tribe. It argues that conceptually similar visions of ethnic and racial community were called into being in Kenya and Tanganyika as a response to what was by the 1940s a region-wide sense of disorder, the product of the disruptive impact of widening markets in labour and produce on existing moral economies, and rapidly became the central object of public argument. From this region-wide crisis and response, thinkers developed in the same decade specifically Kenyan and Tanganyikan understandings of the relationship between these communities, more forcefully in Kenya, more ambiguously in Tanganyika, understandings upon which intellectuals in the next decade, convinced now of colonialism’s destructiveness, brought the novel imperative to independence to bear, further shaping distinctively Kenyan and Tanganyika visions. These longer-term developments, in turn, shaped the imaginations of the region’s post-colonial nation-builders.

Keywords: Decolonisation
Nationalism
Comparative history
Tribe
Tanganyika
Entangled histories
Kenya
Community
East Africa
Advisor: Deutsch, J
The life and theology of Bishop John Ponet (1516-1556)

This thesis provides a major revision of the life and theology of Bishop John Ponet (1516-1556). Ponet was one of the most important English bishops within the mid-Tudor Church of England. However, he has been seriously neglected thanks to the paucity of scholarly attention given to his life and theology, and the tendency to minimise his contribution to the English reformation to political theology. This thesis corrects both the neglect and imbalance of Ponet studies through the retrieval of a substantial body of newly discovered sources, including thirty-six books owned and annotated by Ponet, over seven-hundred pages of manuscript material authored by Ponet, various letters relative to Ponet, and other archival material pertaining to Ponet. The introductory chapter of the thesis provides the historiographical context and methodological framework of the dissertation. Chapter one investigates Ponet’s upbringing in Kent and uncovers his intellectual, linguistic, astronomical, and dramatical contributions as a leading member of the ‘Athenian Tribe’ at Cambridge University. Chapter two surveys the period of Ponet’s archiepiscopal patronage under Henry VIII and progress during the early reign of Edward VI. It reveals the continuities between Ponet’s private convictions under Henry VIII and his public writings under Edward VI. Chapter three details Ponet’s episcopal accomplishments and demonstrates his transition from evangelical theologian to one of the most important figures among English bishops, alongside Archbishop Cranmer and Bishop Ridley. Chapter four examines Ponet’s reaction to the accession of Queen Mary and his subsequent exile, elucidating Ponet’s role as superintendent of the Strassburg exiles. Chapter five provides the theological counterpart to the previous chapter, and illuminates Ponet’s thought concerning clerical marriage, political theology, and sacramental theology. This dissertation contributes the most detailed account of Ponet’s life to date and presents the most comprehensive survey of his theological thought within the history of reformation scholarship.

Keywords: John Ponet
Tudor
Reformation
Thomas Smith
Thomas Cranmer
Advisor: MacCulloch, D
On the decidability of the field of maximal abelian extension of p-adic numbers

In this project we investigate some approaches attacking the question of whether the theory of the maximal abelian extension of the p-adic numbers is decidable. A list of axioms is presented whose completeness we aim to show via quantifier elimination. We separated the quantifier elimination process into five embedding stages. We constructed four of the embeddings, up to the subextension field whose residue field is algebraically closed. For the last stage, some possible approaches are discussed.

Advisor: Koenigsmann, J
Characterisation of SAMHD1's ancestral function

Deoxynucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs) are the building blocks of DNA. DNA synthesis requires dNTPs for replication and subsequent cell division. Therefore, nucleotide metabolism in cells is tightly regulated and failure of this regulation results in damage, toxicity and cell death. SAMHD1 is a highly conserved protein that degrades dNTPs and restricts HIV-1 through dNTP starvation. SAMHD1 is mutated in Aicardi-Goutières syndrome, a disease characterised by the chronic production of type I interferon. SAMHD1 is also involved in DNA repair and is mutated in cancer. SAMHD1 evolved before lentiviruses, suggesting that SAMHD1’s main function is not to restrict viruses. This project aimed to identify and characterise SAMHD1’s ancestral function. I show that addition of deoxynucleosides (dNs) to the culture medium resulted in the death of SAMHD1-deficient cells but not of WT cells. dNs were taken up by the cells and converted into dNTPs through the nucleotide salvage pathway. Cell death was most pronounced upon feeding with deoxyguanosine (dG) alone, suggesting that dGTP overload is particularly toxic to cells. In this model SAMHD1 tunes dNTP levels and protects cells against apoptosis triggered by dNTP overload or imbalances in the dNTP pools. Characterisation of this mechanism shed light on the mechanism of action of forodesine, an anti-cancer agent that inhibits purine nucleoside phosphorylase. Forodesine induces the accumulation of dGTP and subsequent cell death. Nevertheless, forodesine showed efficacy only in a minority of leukaemic patients, for unknown reasons. PBMCs from CLL patients with SAMHD1 loss-of-function mutations showed a significant reduction of CLL B-cells upon treatment with forodesine and dG compared with the control group. Therefore, I propose a model where SAMHD1 limits the efficacy of the PNP inhibitor forodesine which predict that patients with SAMHD1 mutations respond well to forodesine treatment. Forodesine could be used as a precision medicine. This new important role of SAMHD1 in dealing with dNTP overload and unbalances may be SAMHD1’s ancestral function. This mechanism can be exploited physiologically where dNTP accumulation is required for toxicity, such as forodesine treatment.

Keywords: SAMHD1
Nucleotide metabolism
Cancer
Cell death
Leukaemia
Advisor: Rehwinkel, J
Borrow, P
High time-resolution observations of convective cloud lifecycles

Quantifying the variability of convective cloud is of fundamental importance in order to understand and accurately model global weather and climate systems. While broad features of the diurnal and lifecycles of convective cloud are understood, the spatial and temporal variability of convective properties are not well characterised on the global scale, particularly over large areas of Africa. Due to the complexity of the processes involved, models also struggle to realistically simulate the spatial and temporal variability of convective cloud.
Observations provide insight into the properties of convective cloud and valuable information about avenues for model development. Due to the wide range of spatial and temporal scales involved in convection, the continuous nature of observations from geostationary satellites makes them ideal for investigating convection. This study uses high temporal resolution data from the geostationary Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) instrument to quantify seasonal and diurnal cycles of cloud top temperature (CTT) and the lifecycle of individually tracked convective clouds over a large area and period of time.
This study demonstrates that biases in SEVIRI CTT retrievals vary from less than 5 K over the southeast Atlantic Ocean, up to 30 K over central Africa at night, while biases can also differ by up to 30 K between night and daytime retrievals. This highlights the importance of considering spatial and diurnal variations in retrieval errors. Keeping these biases in mind, it is shown that the diurnal cycle of cloud tops is measured accurately in regions of stratiform cloud, while quantifying the diurnal cycle over the tropics and regions of desert is more difficult.
SEVIRI observations are used to track individual convective cloud cores and anvils across sub-Saharan Africa. The distributions, diurnal cycles, lifecycles and spatial and seasonal cycles of a number of properties are quantified. Horizontal core and anvil areas are shown to increase with longer cloud lifetimes, while minimum core CTTs are shown to decrease with cloud lifetime. The diurnal cycle in convective activity is shown to have both a morning and an evening peak, while the total anvil coverage peaks in the late afternoon. Seasonal and spatial variations in core and anvil area, CTT, time of convective initiation and dissipation are also quantified.
These results will be of interest to those in the observation and modelling communities, particularly for studies considering the diurnal cycle of convection, or developing new convective cloud process models and parameterisations.

Advisor: Stier, P
Interdisciplinary communities of practice: a blended learning in higher education model

This study investigates Innovative Food Systems Teaching and Learning, a postgraduate programme designed by the University of Oxford in collaboration with four higher education institutions. The programme aims to provide food systems teaching and interdisciplinary learning opportunities, to facilitate high­-level knowledge and skills needed to understand, analyze, communicate and address complex systems­-based efficiency, resiliency and sustainability challenges within the UK and globally. The purpose of this research study is to explore the ways in which the programme facilitated students’ interdisciplinary learning outcomes within a community­-based, blended learning environment. The study incorporates a variety of qualitative data collection methods including a focus group, interviews and survey, to capture students’ in­-depth interdisciplinary learning experiences associated with the programme. The findings indicate many ways in which IFSTAL demonstrated a successful community of practice and blended learning design, promoting students’ interdisciplinary learning. However, participants identified some barriers and offered recommendations to improve the programme and further enhance interdisciplinary learning outcomes. The programme’s in­-person settings facilitated students’ interdisciplinary learning but the virtual learning environment presented conflicting findings across the data collection methods, requiring further investigation.

Keywords: Cross-Institutional
Online Education
Qualitative Research
Communities of Practice
Higher Education
Blended Learning
Interdisciplinary Learning
Food Systems
Advisor: Finlay, I
Technology and autobiographical selves in contemporary Russian life writing

The present work deals with the strategies of identity production which were characteristic of Russian LiveJournal during the first decade of its presence on the Russian online ego-writing scene. In this work, I argue that personal narratives found in blogs of this period reflect the process of self-writing’s adaptation to a new technological reality. In addition, I suggest that LiveJournal texts of this period testify to the consolidation of a new socio-cultural group following in the footsteps of the Russian intelligentsia and defining the forefront of political and cultural discussion in Russia at a time of tightening media censorship.
In this work, I adopt William James’ interpretation of identity as a complex structure which, along with material expressions of Self and introspective selfconceptualizations, includes numerous self-identifications related to different social situations.1 I look at Russian LiveJournal as a specific socio-technological environment in which bloggers’ various Selves are produced, and compare and contrast these Selves to those characteristic of traditional diaries as well as to those supported by contemporary social media.
For this purpose, I perform micro-analysis of the corpora of biographical texts by four bloggers belonging to a community of young intellectuals and creative professionals. The corpora include all of their open, semi-open, double-locked and private LiveJournal entries made between the years 2003 and 2016, as well as the comments to these entries. These data are supplemented by fragments of handwritten diaries and biographical interviews, used for reconstructing the contexts of narration, for defining the areas of untold experiences, and for providing the frames of reference for the Selves narrated in the journals. In addition, twenty-three journals linked with the central sample and largely authored by the representatives of cultural and intellectual elites are analysed quantitatively to support the propositions about the community’s trends of self-presentation.
I maintain that the production of identity in LiveJournal is mediated by synergic influence of three different forces - the cultural, the social and the technological. Following the methodological route of the Actor-Network Theory, developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law,2 I discover the webs of semiotic, human and material actors conditioning the processes of identity production in LiveJournal. In the three chapters of this thesis, I successively describe how the application of various cultural scripts, the subjection to the gaze of various Others as well as the use of the website’s technological capabilities allow bloggers to create and to cycle through their different Selves. I also show how the formation of the new types of identity in LiveJournal secures the transition of life writing from its traditional forms to the ones presented in today’s social media.

Advisor: Zorin, A
Aspects of supersymmetry and gauge theories

In this thesis we consider generalisations of symmetry structures, and their applications to quantum field theories and associated vacuum spaces. The construction of supersymmetry algebras is described in abstract notation. We then consider applications of a further generalisation of symmetry structures, namely categorified groups and algebras. In particular, the links between gauge anomalies as 3-cocyle obstructions and Lie 2-algebras are discussed. Finally, we detail algorithms we have implemented to generate statistics describing the vacuum spaces for supersymmetric non-toric Calabi-Yau quiver gauge theories. A selection of results are presented for low order quivers.

Advisor: Hannabuss, K
Spatio-temporal control of network activity through gain modulation in cortical circuit models

Animals perform an extraordinary variety of movements over many different time scales. To support this diversity, the motor cortex (M1) exhibits a similarly rich repertoire of activities. Although recent neuronal-network models capture many qualitative aspects of M1 dynamics, they can generate only a few distinct movements all with the same duration. Therefore, these models can still not explain how M1 efficiently controls movements over a wide range of shapes and speeds. In this thesis, we demonstrate that simple modulation of neuronal input–output gains in recurrent neuronal-network models with fixed connectivity can dramatically reorganise neuronal activity and thus downstream muscle outputs. Consistent with the observation of diffuse neuromodulatory projections to M1, our results suggest that a relatively small number of modulatory control units provide sufficient flexibility to adjust high-dimensional network activity on behaviourally relevant time scales. Such modulatory gain patterns can be obtained through a simple reward-based learning rule. Novel movements can also be assembled from previously learned primitives, thereby facilitating fast acquisition of hitherto untrained muscle outputs. Moreover, we show that it is possible to separately change movement speed while preserving movement shape, thus enabling efficient and independent movement control in space and time. Our results provide a new perspective on the role of neuromodulatory systems in controlling cortical activity and suggest that modulation of single-neuron responsiveness is an important aspect of learning.

Keywords: Motor primitives
Motor cortex
Cortical circuits
Motor system
Gain modulation
M1
Learning
Excitatory
Inhibitory
Advisor: Vogels, T
Porter, M
Interactions between myofibroblasts and colorectal cancer (CRC) epithelial cell lines

Myofibroblasts are an important cellular component of the tumour microenvironment and play an essential role in facilitating carcinogenesis through bidirectional communications with epithelial cells. Accumulation of myofibroblasts is associated with poor prognosis in colorectal cancers. Myofibroblasts are distinguished from skin fibroblasts by positive expression of amine oxidase, copper containing 3 (AOC3) and NKX2-3. The current project aims to study the in vitro interactions between myofibroblasts and colorectal cancer (CRC) epithelial cell lines and their effects on gene expression in myofibroblasts, primarily AOC3 and NKX2-3.
In vitro interactions between myofibroblasts and CRC cell lines were analysed using various assays. An increase in cancer cell growth, myofibroblast migration and formation of bigger lumens in CRC cell lines was found in co-culture as compared to monoculture (Chapter 3). The results show high expression of NKX2-3 in all myofibroblasts, while AOC3 expression was more heterogeneous. These data suggest NKX2-3 to be a key mediator for maintaining the myofibroblast phenotype, while AOC3 serves as a negative indicator for their activation state. Knockdown experiments indicated NKX2-3 to be a regulator for AOC3 and ACTA2 expression in myofibroblasts. AOC3 expression in myofibroblasts is downregulated by TGFβ1, EGF, PDGF-AA and CC. Our data indicate that PDGF-AA and CC are significant players for the interactions between myofibroblasts and CRC cell lines. The fibroblast activation protein (FAP) was shown to be an indicator of myofibroblast activation whose regulation by PDGF-AA differed between normal and cancer-derived myofibroblasts (Chapter 4). Lastly, we established a serum free chemically defined (NEW) medium which supports the growth of myofibroblasts but not CRC cell lines (Chapter 5).
In conclusion, our results illustrate in vitro cross-communication between myofibroblasts and CRC epithelial cell lines with a significant role for the PDGF-A and C/PDGFRA signalling pathway in the interactions between those two cell types.

Advisor: Bodmer, W
Ecclesiastical penance in the Church of Constantinople

The present study provides for the first time a systematic and comprehensive examination of the evidence for ecclesiastical penance found in the vast corpus of pre-Metaphrastic Byzantine hagiography.The value of the thesis lies primarily in the body of evidence which it makes available and interprets within the context of what can be known of the historical development of penitential practice among the Byzantine laity and of the nature and limitations of hagiographical evidence.
The evidence is arranged chronologically in four sections (330-551, 451—692, 692-863, 843-983), and a distinction is made within each section between evidence which reflects a Constantinopolitan milieu and evidence taken from other areas of the Greek-speaking Christian world.
The cumulative weight of the evidence supports the following conclusions about the history of Byzantine penance: 1) ecclesiastical penance did not cease to exist in the Byzantine churches following the "Nectarius incident" of 391/2; 2) monastic influence upon the outward form and inner understanding of ecclesiastical penance spread gradually from the fourth century onwards and was not a sudden phenomenon provoked by the events of the iconoclastic age; 3) the constitutive elements of the modern Greek practice of confession can be found in the practice of Byzantine lay people already in the fifth and sixth centuries, but the Lives of the saints nowhere suggest that confession was ever an obligation upon the laity in the period under survey or that a majority of the Byzantine faithful had recourse to the institutions of ecclesiastical'penance as a normal or routine part of their religious practice; 4) the phenomenon of unordained monks consciously exercising the apostolic power of binding and loosing was not, as Holl asserted, a central and informing element in the history of Byzantine penitential practice; 5) enthusiasm for hagiographical sources as privileged reflectors of the Byzantine popular milieu must be tempered by a realistic appreciation of the limitations inherent in the narrative forms and techniques of hagiography.

Keywords: Constantinople
ecclesiastical
Christian
Church
Byzantine
hagiographical
penance