VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Mises en scène de la favorite dans la littérature du "Grand Siècle" (1665-1715)

This study enquires into the construction of a cultural fantasy, the favorite (or royal mistress), in the reign of Louis XIV (1661-1715), and aims to explore the kinds of narrative, the 'scénario pour l’imaginaire', articulated around this figure.
A process of crystallization in respect of the favorite, both as word and as literary figure, develops across the late seventeenth century. This process is on the one hand fuelled by the increasing prominence of female favouritism as a political practice during the period, and on the other facilitated by the emergence of new privileged media such as the novel and the 'nouvelle historique'. The favorite, as a new incarnation of the ‘femme forte’, becomes a trope by which anxieties can be expressed: about female power, but also about the monarchy in general.
This thesis advances by way of close readings and studies of vast corpora of texts; it alternates – both within and between chapters – between analysis and synthesis. Following the introduction, the first chapter introduces a set of mental landmarks, both semantic and axiological, and explores the dictionaries, treatises and courtly manuals of the time in search of the favorite. The second chapter focuses on the fiction of the 1660s and 1670s, and questions the way in which these texts established elements of definition and recurrent issues related to the staging of the favorite in this period.
The third chapter considers the representation of Louis XIV's mistresses, principally through a study of the ballets, poems, letters, memoirs, satires and pamphlets concerned with the Sun King's loves. Its object is to show how the favorite is inserted into the royal mythology. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the first text explicitly and exclusively devoted to the favorite: the Histoire des Favorites (1697) by Anne de La Roche-Guilhen. This chapter attempts to bring to light the tensions underlying the text, while interrogating the determining role of this collection in the process of crystallization explored throughout the thesis.
The fifth chapter sketches out the afterlife of the favorite under Louis XV and Louis XVI, and describes the principal evolutions which ensured her survival in the collective imagination.

Keywords: favorite
Louis XIV
France
favourite
royal mistresses
Advisor: Viala, A
Williams, W
Historical assembly of seasonally dry tropical forest diversity in the tropical Andes

The relative contributions of biome history and geological setting to historical assembly of species richness in biodiversity hotspots remain poorly understood. The tropical Andes is one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots, and with its diverse biomes and the relatively recent but dramatic uplift, the Andes provides an ideal study system to address these questions. To gain insights into the historical species assembly of the tropical Andes, this study focuses on investigating patterns of plant species diversification in the Andean seasonally dry tropical forest (SDTF) biome.
Three plant genera are used as study groups: Amicia (Leguminosae, Papilionoideae), Tecoma (Bignoniaceae), and Mimosa (Leguminosae, Mimosoideae). Species limits are re-evaluated to enable dense sampling of species and intraspecific diversity for phylogeny reconstruction for each group. Time-calibrated phylogenies for Amicia and Mimosa are presented and used to determine patterns of species diversification in time and space. For Tecoma, incongruence between nuclear and chloroplast gene trees precludes straightforward estimation of a species tree and this incongruence is attributed to possible reticulation caused by hybridization.
Divergence time estimates and patterns of diversification for Amicia and Mimosa are compared with other Andean SDTF groups (Cyathostegia, Coursetia, Poissonia; Leguminosae) using isolation by distance and phylogenetic geographic structure analyses. Consistently deep divergences between sister species and high geographic structure across all five groups suggest that Andean SDTF lineages have persisted over the past 10 million years (My) with high endemism driven by dispersal limitation, caused by geographic isolation, following the most recent episode of rapid mountain uplift 5-10 My ago. This prolonged stasis of the Andean SDTF biome is in line with Miocene fossil and paleoclimate evidence. Finally, wider analyses of the contrasting evolutionary timescales of older SDTF and more recent high-altitude grassland diversity suggest that the exceptional plant species diversity in the Andes is the outcome of highly heterogeneous evolutionary histories reflecting the physiographical heterogeneity of the Andean biodiversity hotspot.

Keywords: molecular dating
species diversification
Neotropics
taxonomy
seasonally dry tropical forests
phylogenetics
Advisor: Hughes, C
Pennington, RT
Pannell, J
Sub-hertz optical frequency metrology using a single ion of 171Yb+

Optical frequency standards offer the possibility of a step improvement of up to two orders of magnitude in the accuracy with which the SI second can be realised. 171Yb+ possesses two dipole-forbidden optical transitions that are promising candidates for a redefinition of the second. In this thesis, absolute frequency measurements of these two transitions are presented.
A number of experimental upgrades have been implemented, which have resulted in a large reduction in both the statistical and systematic uncertainties associated with the measurements and have improved both the reliability and simplicity of the experimental setup. In particular, the replacement of two frequency-doubled Ar+-pumped Ti:sapphire lasers with extended cavity diode lasers has eliminated the downtime associated with their maintenance. Additionally, the introduction of polarisation modulation on the cooling light has allowed the residual bias magnetic field required for laser cooling to be reduced by a factor of thirty.
The first measurement at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of the frequency of the 2S1/2 (F = 0) → 2D3/2 (F′ = 2) electric quadrupole (E2) transition at 436 nm is presented. The transition frequency was measured against a hydrogen maser using a femtosecond optical frequency comb, and was determined with a relative standard uncertainty of 1.3 × 10−14.
A commercial diode-based laser system was then implemented in order to drive the 2S1/2 (F = 0) → 2F7/2 (F′ = 3) electric octupole (E3) transition at 467 nm. The laser frequency was actively stabilised to the ultra-narrow atomic absorption with a resolved linewidth of 11 Hz, allowing the acquisition of ninety hours of frequency data measured relative to the NPL’s primary frequency standard CsF2. Combined with a thorough evaluation of the systematic perturbations, the total fractional uncertainty in the absolute frequency of the transition has been reduced by a factor of twenty to 1 × 10−15. Recent complementary results from Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) show that the E3 transition in 171Yb+ has the potential to be a highly accurate and reproducible optical frequency standard, and to date these measurements demonstrate the best international agreement between trapped ion optical frequency standards.

Keywords: spectroscopy
metrology
atomic clock
Advisor: Baird, P
Spatial analysis of exposure coefficients with applications to stomach cancer

Earlier ecological studies on the relation between H. pylori infection and stomach cancer have considered that the relation between these two variables, as estimated by the exposure coefficient, is constant. However, there is evidence to suggest that this relation changes geographically due to differences in strains of H. pylori. Since the prevalence of H. pylori varies with socio-economic status, the association between the latter and stomach cancer mortality may also vary geographically. This thesis studies stomach cancer by taking into account the geographical variability of the exposure coefficients. The study proposes the use of regression mixtures, clustering models and spatially varying regressions for the study of varying exposure coefficients. The effect of transformations of variables in these models appears to have been little considered. We provide new necessary conditions for invariance under transformations of variables for mixed effect models in general, and for the proposed models in particular. In addition, we show that varying exposure coefficients may induce a varying baseline risk. The regression mixtures and the clustering model are applied to a data set on stomach cancer incidence and H. pylori prevalence in 57 countries worldwide. We extend the clustering model to reflect any distance measure between the geographical units, including the Euclidean distance, in the formation of clusters. We also show that the clustering model performs better than the regression mixture model when the aim is to identify connected clusters and the observations present large variance. The results obtained with the clustering model supported the existence of three clusters where the interaction between the human and H. pylori populations have similar characteristics. Spatially varying regressions are applied to a data set of areal death counts of stomach cancer and spending power in 275 counties in continental Portugal. We provide an original strategy for implementing multivectorial intrinsic autoregressions as the distribution for the random effects. The results obtained with the application of this methodology were consistent with a varying exposure coefficient of spending power.

Keywords: H. pylori
stomach cancer
spatial analysis
regression mixtures
Portugal
spatially varying regressions
clustering models
varying exposure coefficients
Advisor: Bithell, J
Statistical dynamical models of multivariate financial time series

The last few years have witnessed an exponential increase in the availability and use of financial market data, which is sampled at increasingly high frequencies. Extracting useful information about the dependency structure of a system from these multivariate data streams has numerous practical applications and can aid in improving our understanding of the driving forces in the global financial markets. These large and noisy data sets are highly non-Gaussian in nature and require the use of efficient and accurate interaction measurement approaches for their analysis in a real-time environment. However, most frequently used measures of interaction have certain limitations to their practical use, such as the assumption of normality or computational complexity. This thesis has two major aims; firstly, to address this lack of availability of suitable methods by presenting a set of approaches to dynamically measure symmetric and asymmetric interactions, i.e. causality, in multivariate non-Gaussian signals in a computationally efficient (online) framework, and secondly, to make use of these approaches to analyse multivariate financial time series in order to extract interesting and practically useful information from financial data.
Most of our proposed approaches are primarily based on independent component analysis, a blind source separation method which makes use of higher-order statistics to capture information about the mixing process which gives rise to a set of observed signals. Knowledge about this information allows us to investigate the information coupling dynamics, as well as to study the asymmetric flow of information, in multivariate non-Gaussian data streams. We extend our multivariate interaction models, using a variety of statistical techniques, to study the scale-dependent nature of interactions and to analyse dependencies in high-dimensional systems using complex coupling networks. We carry out a detailed theoretical, analytical and empirical comparison of our proposed approaches with some other frequently used measures of interaction, and demonstrate their comparative utility, efficiency and accuracy using a set of practical financial case studies, focusing primarily on the foreign exchange spot market.

Keywords: Signal processing
Financial time series analysis
Interaction measurement
Multivariate analysis
Causality
Advisor: Roberts, S
A southern hemisphere record of the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event from the Neuquén Basin, Argentina

The Toarcian, Early Jurassic, Oceanic Anoxic Event (T-OAE: ~183 Ma) was characterized by globally synchronous deposition of sediments rich in organic carbon (black shales), and is associated with an abrupt negative carbon isotope excursion, disrupting a positive carbon-isotope excursion during the tenuicostatum–serpentinum ammonite Zone boundary. The T-OAE has been extensively studied in northern and southern Europe, but evidence from the southern hemisphere is limited. New geochemical data from the tenuicostatum–hoelderi (~serpentinum) Andean ammonite Zone, from the Neuquén Basin, Argentina provides evidence for the global imprint of the event. The event is recorded in bulk-sediment from Arroyo Lapa (North and South) and Arroyo Serrucho with δ13Corg values of -30‰ – -32.5‰ and δ13C values from fossil wood fall to -30.7 ‰, isotopic ratios that are comparable to those identified in Europe for the T-OAE. Hydrogen Index (HI) data for the T-OAE in Argentina give values ranging from 12 to 425 mg HC/ g TOC, indicating a mixture of terrestrial and marine organic components. Pristane/Phytane ratios and pyrite framboid distribution data indicative of anoxic conditions occur at some levels, and new δ98/95Mo data, with values ranging from ~ -0.2 to 0.78 ‰, which contrast with previously published molybdenum-isotope values from T-OAE black shales of northern Europe. Sedimentological data also reveals a marine transgression during the tenuicostatum–hoelderi Andean ammonite zone.

Advisor: Hesselbo, SP
Jenkyns, H
Wordsworth's revisionary reading

The subject of this thesis is revision in Wordsworth, and the ways in which he translates material into psychic and renewable experience.
The first three chapters offer different contexts for a theory of vision theological, philosophical and aesthetic. Chapter One discusses Wordsworth's relation to Coleridge's Unitarianism, as it evolves in the philosophical poetry and in the concept of The Recluse. I examine how Coleridge's 'love of "the Great", and "the Whole"' determines his critique of Wordsworth and the self-analysis of The Prelude. Chapter Two is divided between the Wordsworthian practice of revision, which transfigures visual memory for mental use, and the Coleridgean, that reads in landscape the symbolic text of a 'God in nature'. In Chapter Three, I address the definitions of vision Wordsworth makes independently of Coleridge, and in relation to Milton and Burke, to the applied aesthetics of the picturesque, and to their extension in the scenes of The Prelude.
The second half of the thesis considers the psychological content of Wordsworthian landscape. Chapters Four and Six follow the mental drama of the Tour, with its topographical notation of expectation, disappointment and recovery. These motifs are also related to the determining structures of the French Revolution, and to The Prelude's reading of the language and aspirations of the 1798 Recluse. Chapter Six examines strategies of compensation, and their function in the ideology of reconciling mind and Nature.
Chapter Five is concerned with revision proper, and the figures by which it is represented. As well as revision of a textual kind, I discuss Wordsworth's development of the more literal-minded 'second sight' of eighteenth-century aesthetics.
Fabians and 'Fabianism': a cultural history, 1884-1914

This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.

Keywords: Cultural history; British literature; literary history; British history; British socialism; Fabianism; Bernard Shaw; H. G. Wells; Edith Nesbit; history of British education; British drama; Russian emigres; Hubert Bland; Sidney Webb; turn of the century Britain; Pierre Bourdieu; literary modernism
Advisor: McDonald, P
Sensitivity of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation to surface forcing

The determination of the mechanisms setting the strength and structure of the large scale circulation is a fundamental and long-standing problem in physical oceanography. In this thesis, we seek to explore the mechanisms contributing to the steady state and variability of the large scale flow, with a focus on better understanding the dynamics of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).
In the first part of this thesis, we explore the linear sensitivity of the monthly mean subtropical AMOC to surface fluxes of buoyancy and momentum. Our approach is to use a numerical adjoint. Key insights are provided into the memory of the AMOC to historic atmospheric forcing. We find that significant memory to wind forcing is confined to timescales of less than a year. In contrast, we identify significant memory to surface buoyancy forcing spanning multi-decadal timescales and characterised by a large scale oscillation in the sign of sensitivity between the eastern and western North Atlantic basin. An important result is that to understand the origins of seasonal variability in the modelled AMOC, we must examine the response to a multidecadal history of atmospheric forcing.
In the second part of this thesis, a new tool is presented that enables a clean diagnosis of the force balance controlling the circulation regime for a Boussinesq fluid. Specifically, the tool is based on the development of the "rotational momentum" equations and sets of scalar "velocity potentials" and analogous "force functions". The latter allow the projection of all forces onto the acceleration of the vertical shears and external modes of overturning to be visualised in isolation. The rotational momentum decomposition is applied to the modelled circulation in idealised Atlantic and global configurations of the MITgcm, with a focus on elucidating the dynamics of the simulated AMOC. We discuss the key role played by the rotational buoyancy forcing right on the western boundary.

Keywords: ocean dynamics
adjoint modelling
climate variability
ocean memory
rotational momentum budget
Advisor: Johnson, H
Marshall, D
Common lands and economic development in 19th and early 20th century Spain

This dissertation contributes to the long-standing debate between those who argue that the enclosure of the commons was as a precondition to foster economic growth and those who defend common property regimes can be efficient and sustainable. Exploiting historical evidence from 19th century and early 20th century Spain, this research shows that the persistence of the commons in some Spanish regions was not detrimental to economic development, at least relative to the institutional arrangements they were replaced with. On the contrary, during the early stages of modern economic growth, the communal regime not only did not limit agricultural productivity growth, but indeed constituted a crucial part of the functioning of the rural economics in a number of ways. On the one hand, these collective resources complemented rural incomes and, subsequently, sustained households' consumption capacity. The reduction in life expectancy and heights in the provinces where privatisation was more intense, as well as the negative effect on literacy levels, strongly supports that the privatisation of the commons deteriorated the living standards of a relatively large part of the population. On the other hand, the communal regime also significantly contributed to financing the municipal budget. Deprived from this important source of revenue, local councils became unable to adequately fund local public goods and ended up increasing local taxes. Lastly, the social networks developed around the use and management of these collective resources facilitated the diffusion of information and the building of mutual knowledge and trust, thus constituting a vital ingredient of the social glue that hold these rural communities together. All things considered, the persistence of the commons in some regions provided peasants with cooperation mechanisms different from the market and made the transition to modern economic growth more socially sustainable.

Keywords: Commons
Spain
Privatisation
19th century
Advisor: Allen, R