VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Self-referential rhetoric: the evolution of the Elizabethan 'wit'

The thesis traces the evolving attitudes towards rhetoric in the highly-rhetorised English-language prose of the late sixteenth century by focusing on a term that was itself subject to significant change: ‘wit’. To wit’s pre-existing denotations of intellectual acumen, capacity for reason and good judgement was added a novel meaning, related to the capacity for producing lively speech. As a term encompassing widely divergent meanings, many Elizabethan and early Stuart works explored ‘wit’ as a central theme or treated the term as significant to explorations of the human mind, its capacity for rhetoric, and the social and moral dimensions of this relationship.
The research centres on how ‘wit’ is seen and how it corresponds to rhetorical wittiness as produced in practice, and questions the implications of this for understanding the social and moral dimensions of the authorial wit. By focusing on the early vernacular manuals of rhetoric by author such as Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham, on Lyly’s and Greene’s euphuist prose, and on Thomas Lodge’s and Sir Philip Sidney’s prose defences of poetry, the first half of the thesis explores the term’s conceptual ambiguity. Potentially both reformative and deceptive, this ambiguity becomes a useful tool for the author looking to construct a profitable persona as a Wit, or a brilliant-yet-unruly master of rhetoric. The second half of the research notes how ‘wit’ tends to outlive its usefulness as a multivalent term in later writings when these seek to move away from the social commodification of an author’s rhetoric. Examining Sidney’s theological and political aims in The New Arcadia, Thomas Nashe’s carnivalesque questioning of the idea of profit, and Francis Bacon’s systematic interpretation of Nature, the research suggests that rhetoric and ‘wit’ maintain both their significance and their ambiguity into the seventeenth century. A meta-rhetorical signpost, ‘wit’ comes to reflect through its use and disuse both the issues at hand and the inherent self-reflexivity of any attempt to deal directly with rhetoric.

Keywords: Francis Bacon
John Lyly
Thomas Nashe
Euphuism
Robert Greene
Philip Sidney
Gabriel Harvey
Roger Ascham
Advisor: Burrow, C
Gaussian process tools for modelling stellar signals and studying exoplanets

The discovery of exoplanets represents one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history, and exoplanetary science has rapidly become uniquely positioned to address profound questions about the origins of life, and about humanity's place (and future) in the cosmos. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet over two decades ago, the radial velocity (RV) method has been one of the most productive techniques for discovering new planets. It has also become indispensable for characterising exoplanets detected via other techniques, notably transit photometry. Unfortunately, signals intrinsic to stars themselves - especially magnetic activity signals - can induce RV variations that can drown out or even mimic planetary signals. Modelling and thus mitigating these signals is notoriously difficult, which represents a major obstacle to using next-generation instruments to detect lower mass planets, planets with longer periods, and planets around more magnetically-active stars. Enter Gaussian processes (GPs), which have a number of features that make them very well suited to the joint modelling of stochastic activity processes and dynamical (e.g. planetary) signals. In this thesis, I leverage GPs to enable the study of smaller planets around a wider variety of stars than has previously been possible. In particular, I develop a principled and sophisticated Bayesian framework, based on GPs, for modelling RV time series jointly with ancillary activity-sensitive proxies, thus allowing activity signals to be constrained and disentangled from genuine planetary signals. I show that my framework succeeds even in cases where existing techniques would fail to detect planets, e.g. the case of a weak planetary signal with period identical to its host star's rotation period. In a first application of the framework, I demonstrate that Alpha Centauri Bb - until 2016, thought to be the closest exoplanet to Earth, and also the lowest minimum-mass exoplanet around a Sun-like star - was, in fact, an astrophysical false positive. Next, I use the framework to re-characterise the well-studied Kepler-10 system, thereby resolving a mystery surrounding the mass of planet Kepler-10c. I also use the framework to help discover or characterise various exoplanets. Finally, the activity modelling framework aside, I also present in outline form a few promising applications of GPs in the context of modelling stellar signals and studying exoplanets, viz. GPs for (i) enhanced characterisation of stellar rotation; (ii) generating realistic synthetic observations, and modelling in a systematic way the effects of an observing window function; and (iii) ultra-precise extraction of RV shifts directly from observed spectra, without requiring template cross-correlation.

Keywords: Bayesian inference
Stellar activity
Gaussian processes
Exoplanetary science
Exoplanets
Advisor: Aigrain, S
Arming oncolytic viruses with bispecific T cell engagers (BiTEs) for expression and secretion into the tumour microenvironment

Oncolytic viruses exploit the cancer cell phenotype to complete their lytic life cycle, releasing progeny virus to infect nearby cells and repeat the process. We modified the oncolytic group B adenovirus EnAdenotucirev (EnAd) to express bispecific single chain antibodies, secreted from infected tumour cells into the microenvironment. The bispecific T cell engager (BiTE) binds to a selected antigen on target cells and crosslinks them to CD3 on T cells, leading to clustering and activation of both CD4 and CD8 T cells. BiTE transcription can be controlled by the virus major late promoter, limiting expression to cancer cells that are permissive for virus replication.
We first exemplified this approach using a BiTE that recognises EpCAM, which is highly expressed on many carcinomas and is recently identified as a marker of cancer-initiating cells. A second BiTE was engineered to target FAP on cancer-associated fibroblasts, demonstrating the power of such an approach in targeting cancer-promoting stromal cells of the tumour microenvironment. This strategy can potentiate the cytotoxicity of EnAd and we show using primary pleural effusions, peritoneal malignant ascites and solid prostate tumour specimens that infection of cancer cells with the BiTE-expressing EnAd leads to activation of endogenous T cells to kill endogenous tumour cells or fibroblasts despite the immunosuppressive environment. In this way, we have armed EnAd to combine both direct oncolysis and T cell-mediated killing, yielding a potent therapeutic that should be readily transferred into the clinic.

Advisor: Seymour, L
Ashfield, R
Combatting social exclusion through public space design

Changes in school architecture and design can improve educational outcomes (Sahlberg, 2011). Changes in hospital architecture and design can reduce patient violence in psychiatric wards (Ulrich et al., 2008). Can the design of public places help prevent social exclusion and promote social cohesion? This research compares public parks in the UK and the US. Near the turn of the 21st century, both countries had parallel political movements, similar design philosophies, and growing social polarisation. However, addressing social exclusion and cohesion were policy priorities in the UK, but not in the US. Textual analysis found that national political discourses influenced design recommendations for public parks in each country. Urban planners in the UK proposed design features aimed at preventing social exclusion. In eight case study parks, systematic observation suggests UK parks designed in this context attracted users more representative of the surrounding community than their correlate parks in the US. Where the design features were implemented, user interviews suggest they facilitated positive social interactions among park users. However, fieldwork revealed that implementation varied in both the UK and the US. Elite interviews underscore the role of park designers and urban planners as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ who influence how social policies come to fruition. The findings also suggest urban design can be a powerful tool in tackling social policy agendas.

Advisor: Walker, R
Controlling dopant rich layers in solar cells

Improving the efficiency of silicon (Si) solar cells relies on the understanding and optimization of individual processing steps. One such processing step, namely the diffusion of phosphorus (P), has been found to influence cell efficiencies significantly. This thesis discusses a mathematical model of P diffusion in Si based on first order approximations.
Phosphorus diffusion studies have been carried out in small increments of time that facilitate the development of a diffusion model which is shown to agree reasonably well with experimental profiles over a wide range of processing conditions. It is assumed that phosphorus diffuses via vacancies in the high concentration region and via interstitials in the low concentration region. A supersaturation of interstitials due to the kick out reactions enhances dopant diffusivity in the low concentration region. However, the dissociation of phosphorus interstitial pairs into phosphorus vacancy pairs at high doping levels facilitate the suppression of excess interstitials with the help of surface injected vacancies, resulting in the lowering of the overall free energy. For the very high doping levels, the dissociation rate of phosphorus interstitials is rapid in comparison to the kick out reactions that enables the slowly injected surface vacancies to completely suppress the interstitial supersaturation, thereby restoring point defect equilibrium wherein the system attains the lowest energy configuration.
The model uses the relative (to the intrinsic) concentration of point defects instead of actual point defect concentrations. This approach is particularly useful since it significantly reduces the number of fitting parameters of the model by allowing the use of an effective diffusivity in the flux equation. The effective P diffusivity is also used in the modelling of dopant precipitation kinetics, where the growth (and dissolution) of precipitates by the addition (removal) of single solute atoms is considered. Appropriate corrections are used to account for the formation of small sized clusters that are often present along with larger precipitates. The diffusion model is argued to be consistent with previous findings and is able to demonstrate very good simulation accuracies compared to all previous models.
Electrically inactive P limits the low wavelength response of the solar cell. The simulation developed here, based on the finite difference method (FDM), show that high temperature diffusion processes for very short durations can achieve low levels of electrically inactive P. In addition, such processes are predicted to result in higher levels of the electrically active P thereby improving contact resistance between metal and Si.

Advisor: Wilshaw, P
Land, settlement and narratives of history in Northern Bushbuckridge, c. 1890-1970

This thesis examines the history of African settlement in northern Bushbuckridge, South Africa. It reveals the ways in which the sprawling low-density villages around Acornhoek were made between 1890 and 1970. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, published secondary sources and over 100 oral history interviews, it makes original contributions to two distinct but related bodies of literature. Firstly, and primarily, it contributes to histories of rural South Africa by providing a detailed local history of African rent tenant communities settled on private white-owned (and to a lesser extent government owned) farms in a region at the margins of state control, and on the fringes of southern Africa’s major historical kingdoms. This account of the slow dispossession of communities in a liminal space, predominantly settled under conditions of rent tenure and outside the control of large chieftaincies, modifies an existing historiography that has often focussed on sharecropping regions or areas that have been historically under the control of large chieftaincies. Furthermore, this is the first study to examine the impact of the 1913 Natives Land Act and the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act in considerable detail at the local level, and in doing so I shed new light on the operations of two landmark legislative measures in the history of rural South Africa. Secondly, I make an important contribution to the increasing scholarship on land reform and historical narrative, much of which lacks detailed historical analysis. In analysing contemporary narratives of history, which are dominated by first-comer claims to land, I set up a dialogue between the past and the present and demonstrate how the history of settlement and removal in an ethnically heterogeneous region informs contemporary narratives of history.

Advisor: Beinart, W
Total synthesis of (–)-6,7-dideoxysqualestatin H5 by carbonyl ylide cycloaddition and cross–electrophile coupling

The work presented in this thesis focuses on the total synthesis of (–)-6,7- Dideoxysqualestatin H5. Particular emphasis was the development of a cross– coupling strategy for direct delivery of the side chain towards the end of the synthesis.
Various methods investigated to perform the key Csp3–Csp2 coupling initially led to the Fu variant of the Negishi coupling at elevated temperatures and subsequent cross– electrophile coupling at rt. Key features of the asymmetric synthesis of (–)-6,7- dideoxysqualestatin H5, include: (1) highly diastereoselective n-alkylation of a tartrate acetonide enolate and subsequent oxidation-hydrolysis to provide an asymmetric entry to a β-hydroxy-α-ketoester motif; (2) facilitation of Rh(II)-catalysed cyclic carbonyl ylide formation-cycloaddition by cogeneration of keto and diazo functionality through ozonolysis of an unsaturated hydrazone; and (3) stereoretentive Ni-catalysed Csp3–Csp2 cross–electrophile coupling between tricarboxylate core and unsaturated side-chain to complete the natural product.
Following completion of the natural product, further work was carried out on the ozonolysis of unsaturated tosylhydrazones as a direct approach to diazocarbonyls. The scope and limitations of reacting unsaturated tosylhydrazones with O3 followed by Et3N for the generation of 1,4- and 1,5-diazocarbonyl systems were explored. Tosylhydrazones, from tosylhydrazide condensation with readily available δ- and ε- unsaturated α-ketoesters, led in the former case to a 2-pyrazoline whereas the latter cases led to α-diazo-ε-ketoesters, although a terminal alkene produced a tetrahydropyridazinol. Tosylhydrazones from cyclic enones also allowed access to 1,4- and 1,5-diazocarbonyl systems using the ozonolysis–Et3N strategy.

Keywords: catalysis
cross-coupling
total synthesis of (–)-6,7- Dideoxysqualestatin H5
cross-electrophile coupling
Advisor: Hodgson, D
The development of catalytic enantioselective additions to imines

This thesis describes the development and application of catalytic enantioselective additions to imines. Chapter 2 describes the application of bifuntional iminophosphorane (BIMP) organosuperbases, which are a novel class of bifunctional organocatalyst developed in the group to the first 'unactivated' ketimine phospha-Mannich reaction of diethyl phosphite to afford α- aminophosphonic acid derivatives in excellent yields and moderate enantiocontrol (&GT;99% yield, up to 71% ee).
Chapter 3 describes the first silver-catalysed enantioselective Mannich reaction of diazoacetates to NBoc protected aldimines. The reaction proved to be broad in scope with respect to the aldimine; with 14 aromatic aldimines reported and variability on the diazoacetate was also tolerated, giving products with good yields (60-86%) and with very high levels of enantioselectivity (88-98% ee) under the control of the bisphosphine ligand, DM-Segphos. The reaction proved to be scalable as demonstrated on a 5.0 mmol scale with a 1 mol% catalyst loading with respect to silver triflate. The Mannich adduct was derivatised to a few useful products with retention of stereochemical configuration. NMR techniques and non-linear effects studies were used to analyse the catalytic system and gain an insight into the mechanism of this reaction.
Chapter 4 describes efforts towards the first enantioselective Mannich reaction of ethyl diazoacetate to ketimines. The catalytic system used for this reaction was a modification of the one described in chapter 3, where BEMP was required as a base for reactivity, silver acetate and a chiral aminophosphine ligand made up the catalytic system. Although new reactivity was identified, catalytic turnover was plausibly hampered by reduction of the Ag(I) from the deprotonated diazoacetate. The Mannich adduct was formed in up to 47% yield and up to 42% ee.
Chapter 5 describes the discovery of a novel, practical method for determining the longitudinal relaxation times of low γ spin -1/2 nuclei which are scalar coupled to high γ nuclei. The discovery of this method came about from mechanistic investigations into the catalytic system reported in chapter 3. The method makes it possible to extract T1 information for the insensitive low γ nucleus from the EXSY spectrum of the observable high γ nucleus. It is shown how the T1 relaxation constants of Ag can provide valuable insights into the geometrical properties of Ag-bisphosphine complexes. In principle, this method can be applied to any transition metal-ligand system and overcomes the limitations of conventional methods for T1 determination as it allows for the elucidation of T1 relaxation time constants of insensitive transition metal nuclei using standard NMR equipment.

Advisor: Dixon, D
Conflicts with jus cogens in international law

Jus cogens is a mysterious body of international law. It comprises legal standards which are thought to be superior to those in ordinary international law, namely, international treaties, customary international law, and general principles of law. The title of this study – ‘Conflicts with Jus Cogens in International Law’ – condenses its main aims. The study examines conflict-situations between jus cogens rules and rules of ordinary international law.
The study is divided into four Parts. Part I clarifies what jus cogens status means and how jus cogens rules are made. Part II analyses some of the different ways in which legal rules come into conflict with each other. I seek to push the boundaries of our understanding of legal conflict, and I also construct a typology of legal conflict. In Part III, I apply the analysis of conflict in Part II to the jus cogens context by identifying and classifying situations where rules of ordinary international conflict with jus cogens rules. Finally, Part IV explores the consequences of the conflicts with jus cogens which were identified in Part III. What we see is that the consequences of these conflicts are varied. Most strikingly, however, we find that in some cases jus cogens rules are being defeated by rules of ordinary international law. This challenges the orthodox thinking that jus cogens rules are straightforwardly superior to ordinary international law, in the sense that they always prevail in conflict-situations. But while the conclusion of the study may seem radical, it is informed by theoretical writing about law and about how rules conflict.
Ultimately, the study seeks to improve our understanding of jus cogens rules in international law, as well as the more general problem of how legal rules conflict with each other.

Keywords: inconsistency
jus cogens
sources of international law
normative conflicts
peremptory norms
conflicts
A complex and contested regulatory space: student protests and government’s financing of higher education in South Africa

The 2015 Fees Must Fall protests were unique. They were national protests; which culminated in a 0% fee increase for 2016; announced by South Africa’s President following a meeting with multiple parties, including various cabinet ministers, vice chancellors, chairs of University Councils, and presidents of Student Representative Councils. This raises the question: how did the protests, and their settlement, affect the regulation of university fees in South Africa?
This thesis answers this question by utilising regulatory space analysis to discern the cascade of regulation through time (1997 to 2015) and space (from South Africa’s Parliament to public universities). It maps the interactions between important fora, including University Councils and student movements, in the regulatory space constituted by university fee decisions. This mapping is based on qualitative empirical data obtained from interviewing a range of key actors involved in the protests and their settlement, and from a review of relevant public policy documents.
The focus is on decisions about university fees, because these show how the confluence of pressures in 2015 destabilised and recalibrated the regulatory space. My analysis tracks how contestation around the organisational identity and locality of the dramatis personae disrupted the delicate calibration between the actors (government, university management, and students), and university income streams, which regulated university fee decisions. It focuses on interactions between regulatory insiders and outsiders; and highlights the need to reconceive the resources traditionally focused on in the academic literature on regulatory space analysis.
This investigation reveals noteworthy regulatory effects. The settlement of the protests included an attempt to preserve the prevailing regulatory regime, mostly through channelling the disruptions back through previously established processes – such as those involving University Councils. Whether this created a more stable regulatory space turns substantially on how the ongoing ramifications of the protests and their settlement unfold.

Advisor: Lange, B
Underworld justice in Imperial China and its continuing influence in Hong Kong

This thesis explores the imagery of underworld justice, and its associated beliefs and practices, as they developed throughout Chinese imperial history. Certain elements of the Chinese imperial legal system, including judges and trials, and laws and codes, were borrowed by the Daoists and applied to their construct of the afterlife. Underworld justice beliefs and practices flourished throughout China‘s imperial past, and are still influential to some devotees in today‘s Hong Kong. Among the various questions that are explored, this thesis examines the place of underworld justice in the legal consciousness, or everyday law, of the devotees in contemporary Hong Kong. There are two dimensions to this thesis: historical and empirical. In the historical part, I trace the development of underworld justice beliefs and practices in imperial China. I analyse some of the characteristics and rituals of underworld justice, and relate them to the imperial laws and procedures upon which they were modelled. Such tracing allows us to discern the considerable overlap between the imperial legal system and underworld justice beliefs and practices. In the empirical part, I present data gathered at mainly three City God temples in Hong Kong. Such data involve conversations with Daoist and Buddhist priests, temple keepers and devotees. The data gathered not only shed light on the general state of City God veneration in contemporary Hong Kong, but also the influence of underworld justice on the devotees‘ understanding of law. The data reveal that the studied devotees regard underworld justice, which administers the law of karma, as superior to the state legal system. Hence, underworld justice is not considered as an informal dispute resolution process alternative to that of the state, but as a mechanism that can intervene in court cases, due to its being more authoritative.

Keywords: Legal Culture
Comparative Law
Hong Kong
China
Legal Pluralism
Advisor: Pirie, F