VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
(Re)Creating the Self: The Female Subject in Veronica Franco’s Poetry

This study identifies and examines the concept of female subjectivity that Renaissance Venetian writer and courtesan Veronica Franco (1546-1591) advances in her Terze rime (1575) in order to determine our ability to designate Franco a protofeminist writer. The current study engages in a critical analysis of scholarship on Franco thus far, thereby building on this scholarship in order to better understand Franco’s significance as an early modern female writer. The present study’s innovative use of the feminist existentialist theory of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), as articulated in Le deuxième sexe (1949), as its methodology facilitates our analysis of Franco’s notion of gendered Selfhood. The three specific areas of Beauvoir’s theory that this study applies to Franco’s Terze rime are the following: woman as the inessential Other; the relationship between woman’s ontological situation and androcentric notions of female corporeality; and the relationship between literary self-expression and existentialist self-liberation. In this study, I modernize Beauvoir’s feminist existentialist theory by incorporating the scholarship of contemporary feminist critics, including Debra B. Bergoffen, Nadine Changfoot, Judith Butler, Margaret Atack, Sonia Kruks, Sidonie Smith, Leigh Gilmore, Ann Weatherall, Wendy Hollway, and Sara Mills, thereby enriching my study’s methodological scope. The present study examines both the dialogic and monologic poems of Franco’s Terze rime in order to analyze the relationship between form and content and the implications of this relationship for Franco’s female subject. In its analysis of the alternation in which the female “I” of Franco’s poetry engages between existentialist self-affirmation and self-negation, I endeavour to assess both the progress and limitations of Franco’s concept of gendered subjectivity and the consequences of these advances and shortcomings for Franco’s legitimacy as a protofeminist author.

Keywords: early modern women's writing
Italian women's writing
Renaissance Italian poetry
Renaissance Italy
Renaissance Venetian poetry
Veronica Franco
Advisor: Eisenbichler, Konrad
“The Enemies Next Door”: Stalinist Repression in the Postwar Latvian Countryside

This dissertation explores postwar Stalinist repression in the Latvian countryside, and especially in Vidzeme province, focusing on the March 1949 Soviet mass deportation, and on the broader repression of the so-called “kulaks,” “bandits” and “convicted nationalists” and their families. It is a work of social history “from below” and is concerned with the survival strategies of ordinary rural Latvians. It seeks to explore peasant mood, mentality and public opinion in the face of postwar repression and asks how and why rural Latvians felt compelled to participate in – or resist – repression. It explores how repression impacted family life and neighbourly relations. The dissertation examines the images of the “kulak,” “bandit” and “convicted nationalist,” finding that in both official sources and those presenting the voices of ordinary peasants, there was a great preoccupation with unmasking and destroying “enemies.” It presents case studies of two regions (pagasti), showing how land reforms, kulak-branding, mass deportations, and arrests of political criminals combined to create conditions where some families clearly benefited at the expense of others. It examines the criminal files of arrested “bandit supporters,” revealing the morally complicated situations many rural people faced, and the ways they were often compelled to turn against their neighbours. This dissertation finds that violence had a significant presence in everyday life is the postwar Latvian countryside; shoot-outs, revenge killings, armed robberies, kidnappings, beatings and other violent acts were all commonplace. Although the Soviet war against the Latvian peasantry was without question ignited from above, and directed from above, it was nevertheless fought from below, with Latvian peasants participating in the postwar struggle in a very real way. For various reasons, rural Latvians took part on both the Soviet and anti-Soviet sides – and it was virtually impossible to remain neutral. Thus, Latvians were deeply mistrustful of their neighbours. Betrayal, revenge, denunciation, secrecy, “unmasking,” and living under a false identity were key survival strategies of the postwar Latvian peasantry. Although division among the peasantry is not always emphasized in the Baltic historiography, the sources – both human and archival – of the postwar era tell a more complex story about the enemies next door.

Keywords: Latvia
Mass Deportation
Repression
Rural
Social History
Stalin
Advisor: Kivimae, Juri
Deciphering Genetic Drivers in Primary and Metastatic Medulloblastoma

Sonic hedgehog medulloblastoma (Shh-MB) encompasses a clinically and molecularly diverse group of cancers of the developing central nervous system. It initiates within the cerebellum and, in 20% of cases, disseminates throughout the brain and spinal cord. Current therapy consists of maximal safe resection, radiotherapy in patients over 36 months, and cytotoxic chemotherapy. Unbiased sequencing of the transcriptome across a large cohort of 250 primary tumors reveals differences between molecular subtypes of the disease, with a previously unappreciated importance of non-coding RNA transcripts. Analysis of a large cohort of a single molecular type of cancer allows for identification of novel genes with single nucleotide variants (MYCN, GNAS, IKBKAP, and KDM6A) as well as gene fusions, some of which are secondary to rearrangement of the genome (ZBTB20, NCOR1), while others appear to arise through trans-splicing (RALGAPA2, and GNAS). Integration of genetic and transcriptomic data allows further differentiation of driver from passenger genes. Molecular convergence on a core of specific genes by nucleotide variants, copy number aberrations, and gene fusion further emphasize the key role of specific pathways in the pathogenesis of primary Shh-MB. Little is known about genes driving metastatic progression since matching human primary and metastatic samples are rare. The Shh-MB Sleeping Beauty (SB) mouse model uses random integration of transposons to initiate tumorigenesis and drive the metastatic cascade providing valuable insight onto the human disease. Common insertion site analysis using 549 metastatic tumors from 131 mice reveal networks of recurrent metastatic drivers (n = 336) and demonstrate extensive heterogeneity between metastasis. A subset of drivers, such as loss-of-function events in Crebbp and Ctnna3, arise independently between metastasis and are under the pressure of convergent evolution. Recurrent gain-of-function insertions in Lgalg3 suggest an oncogenic role in metastatic progression which was validated using Lglas3 knockout experiments in multiple models. Mice missing copies of Lgals3 had no change in metastatic burden in the brain but showed significantly less metastasis along the spinal cord suggesting a site-specific role as a metastasis driver gene. These findings enhance our understanding of the genomic complexity and heterogeneity underlying Shh-MB pathogenesis and highlight several targets for therapeutic development.

Keywords: Medulloblastoma
Metastasis
Primary
RNAseq
Sleeping Beauty
Advisor: Taylor, Michael
Bader, Gary
Gaze Reinstatement Supports Relational Memory in Younger and Older Adults

Eye movements support memory encoding by binding distinct elements of the visual world into rich relational representations. However, the role of eye movements in memory retrieval is less clear. In this thesis, I propose that eye movements play an active and functional role in memory retrieval by reinstating the encoding context. Specifically, by overtly shifting attention in a manner that broadly recapitulates the spatial locations and temporal order of encoded content, eye movements facilitate access to, and reactivation of, associated details. Study 1 demonstrates that both younger and older adults recruit gaze reinstatement to support the retention of visuospatial arrays over long and short intervals, respectively. Studies 2 and 3 provide further evidence that gaze reinstatement facilitates long term episodic retrieval in younger and older adults. Specifically, in Study 1, reinstatement of encoding-related eye movements during an immediately succeeding, stimulus-free maintenance period was positively correlated with performance on a subsequent change detection task. Moreover, the relationship between gaze reinstatement and mnemonic performance varied as a function of both age and memory load, suggesting that eye movements may play a compensatory role in memory retention over short delays. Extending this work, Studies 2 and 3 showed that whereas gaze reinstatement following a degraded and briefly presented old test probe image was correlated with correct recognition, reinstatement following a lure test probe was correlated with false alarms, suggesting that eye movements are involved in the pattern completion of incomplete visual cues from memory. Although this finding was observed in both younger and older adults, younger adults showed a pattern of reinstatement that was more episodic and idiosyncratic relative to older adults, further suggesting that the nature of the relationship between eye movements and memory retrieval may vary as a function of age and memory integrity. Together, the results of the presented studies suggest that gaze reinstatement may be obligatorily recruited to support memory maintenance and retrieval when task demands exceed cognitive resources.

Advisor: Ryan, Jennifer
Buchsbaum, Bradley
Eventalizing Berlin Anti-homophobia Policy in the Racialized and Sexualized "Social Curriculum of Germanness"

My dissertation offers an eventalization of two interrelated anti-homophobia policy proposals, which were introduced to the Berlin House of Representatives in 2008/2009: (1) the Green Party Berlin’s “Berlin Action Plan Against Homophobia,” and (2) the SPD Berlin/Left Party Berlin’s “Initiative: ‘Berlin Champions Self-Determination and Acceptance of Sexual Diversity’” (ISV). I conduct a Foucault-inspired genealogy of these policy texts and trace their emergence in the wider public debates around “homophobic hate-crime” in Berlin in the early 2000’s. I trace how the discourse on “homophobia-as-violence” interlocks in these social and political debates with the “social curriculum of Germanness” to produce three affectively charged figures through and against which the “progressive liberal German subject” comes to know itself: “the vulnerable homosexual” in need of state-protections, the “backwards homophobic (Muslim/Turkish/Arab) migrant” in need of civilizing measures, and the “pre-democratic homophobic (neo-)Nazi.” In the first part of my dissertation, I work my way towards the policy texts. I highlight some of the discourses, actors, and institutions that helped “homophobia” emerge as a social and political problem. These discourses are: (1) discourses of national remembrance, which help frame the fight against homophobia as a moral lesson from Germany’s Nazi past; (2) discourses around Berlin’s exceptional tolerance for gays and lesbians; (3) hate-crime statistics, which make homophobia intelligible as a problem of violent crime; and (4) Orientalist and psychological discourses, which tie “anti-gay attitudes” to “migrant youths.” In the second part, I work backwards from the policy texts. I illustrate how the Green Party’s action plan centers “homophobia-as-violence” in productive ways. Situating the policy problematizations of “homophobia” in the wider public debates on “homophobic hate-crime” in Berlin, I demonstrate that the proposed policy measure of special anti-homophobia education for “migrants” is rooted in Orientalist discourses that frame the social problem of “homophobic violence” in Berlin as a “clash of civilizations.” I further illustrate how the discourse on “migrant homophobia” produces some areas of Berlin as “tolerant spaces” for gays and lesbians and others as dangerous “no-go areas.” This discursive strategy of containing “homophobia” in “migrant” bodies and spaces helps to maintain the myth of Berlin’s sexual exceptionalism.

Keywords: Anti-Homophobia Policy
Anti-Muslim Racism
Curriculum Studies
Homonationalism
Islamophobia
Policy-as-discourse
Advisor: Sykes, Heather
Parental Involvement in the Education of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Adolescents

This thesis consists of two studies investigating parental involvement (PI) in the education of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) adolescents. The overarching goal of the thesis was to adapt existing measurement tools and conceptual frameworks of PI to become more developmentally and culturally appropriate for the target population. There is a need for an adolescent-report questionnaire to assess the process of PI within a CLD population. The first study examined the psychometric properties of the Parental Involvement Questionnaire for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Adolescents (PIQDA) within a sample of 150 CLD secondary school students. The PIQDA is composed of two complementary adolescent-report questionnaires. Confirmatory factor analyses confirmed a 6-factor structure for the Antecedents of PI Questionnaire and the 5-factor structure for the Types of PI Questionnaire. Cronbach’s alpha showed good to excellent internal consistency for all factors. Preliminary evidence of convergent validity was also presented. Future directions for instrument development were suggested. There is a need for a theoretical model of PI that explains why and how CLD parents become involved in their children’s education. Hoover-Dempsey, Ice, and Whitaker (2009) proposed that aspects of cultural context be included in a revised theoretical model of PI. Multiple regression analyses showed that the original antecedent variables from the Hoover-Dempsey model (Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2009) significantly predicted various types of PI in a sample of 90 CLD secondary school students. Language Skills for PI also predicted the types of PI, above and beyond the original antecedent factors. In addition to predicting traditional types of involvement (i.e., home-based and school-based PI), the model factors were shown to strongly predict more culturally and developmentally appropriate types of PI, namely PI of Others (e.g., involvement of community members and extended family members), Supportive PI (i.e., autonomy-supportive school-work assistance) and Academic Socialization (i.e., parental educational expectations). Furthermore, regression analyses revealed that Supportive PI was the most effective type of PI in terms of decreasing negative academic attitudes, indicative of risk for high school dropout. Research is needed to further develop a theoretical framework of the PI process that is developmentally and culturally appropriate for CLD adolescents.

Keywords: Adolescence
Educational Achievement
Immigrants
Parental Involvement
Scale Development
Advisor: Geva, Esther
Taboo Dynamics: The Translation of Sexual Rights in Nepal

Nepal has developed a reputation internationally for being the most progressive country in South Asia in terms of sexual rights (Pokharel et al., 2014). Women’s rights and LGBTI activists in Nepal have successfully fought for widespread sexual rights reform and the Government of Nepal and its donor partners have actively invested in development programs to implement these rights in the education, media, and health sectors. However, changes in the law do not always translate into widespread social change (e.g., Swidler, 2002 2006). In many cases, top-down legal changes inspire social resistance or backlash (Weiss Bosia, 2013; Wilkinson, 2014; Symons Altman, 2015). This dissertation uses Nepal as a case to explore how sex taboos shape perceptions and practices of the individuals who work in the sectors charged to implement these rights. Specifically, this includes educators, health care workers, journalists, and media personalities. Social scientists associate taboos with resistance and backlash because subjects that are taboo are “undiscussable” in many circumstances and limit an individual’s perception of possible action (e.g, Butler, 1997; Fiske Tetlock, 1997; Olick Levy, 1997; Tannenwald, 2007; Tebble, 2011). I show how norms with taboo qualities, such as stigma, shape the motivations of individuals in norm-transmitting sectors to accept, resist, or subvert new sexual right norms. The findings show that agents in these sectors rely on the vocabulary of taboo, such as expressions of fear and anxiety to describe specific areas of sexual rights—especially the ones that challenge patriarchal gender roles and require the open discussion of same-sex desire. The perception of sexual rights as taboo has led to practices in these sectors that reproduce the harms that advocates who fought for these rights intended to remove.

Keywords: Human Rights
Nepal
Norms
Sexuality
Taboo
Translation
Advisor: Nedelsky, Jennifer
Levi, Ron
Ambivalent (En)counters in the Iranian Dissident Theatre from 1990 to Present

ABSTRACT This dissertation defines, contextualizes, and analyzes Iranian dissident theatre from the perspective of artists’ ethico-critical intentionality in creating responsive counter-narratives to three sources of power (religiosity, community norms, and government). I examine the way dissident theatre foregrounds the diversity in religious practices arising from Iranians’ everyday religio-moral ambivalences in manifold spaces of contestations: war frontline, houses, pilgrim residences, censorship sites, streets, universities, and taxis. My queries inevitably lead back to creating a localized and hybrid methodology that benefits both reader, researcher, and artists and consists of context-specific parameters. I combine these parameters with expanded semiotics and the Foucauldian concept of “counter-conduct” and substantiate them with artists’ and authorities’ visions and introduce the term theatrical counter-conduct. This notion allows me to examine dispersed tactics of critique and the pertaining formative process of an ethical self, but it equally sheds light on the complexities, compromises, and tolerance that have been (re)shaping the mutually constitutive relationship between artists and disperse systems of appropriation. Through several in-depth, textual and aesthetic analyses of six canonical plays written and staged between 1990 and 2014, I demonstrate that Iranian theatrical counter-conduct is part of a re-engagement with complex everyday reality and uncertain boundaries, and not a total negation of values. The plays use a diverse range of representational styles from naturalism and documentary to surrealism and expressionism, and from interactive adaptations to intermedial and fusional representations. A diachronic study of counter-conductive styles reveals an interesting shift toward relying more on the indeterminacy of meaning, unpredictability of immediate and intimate actions, and fluid, experimental dramaturgy. The analytical model of Iranian theatrical counter-conduct unsettles the simplistic binary of “oppressed artist” vs. “oppressor state” or Ideal Islamic values vs. secularism and warns us against a limited focus on theatre’s political efficacy, a focus that taints theatre scholarship. Theatrical counter-conduct and dissident intentions must be studied in relation to the questions it raises for its audiences and researchers. Scholarship on dissident theatre in the Middle East is woefully scant but replete with crucial and exciting questions that foster more artistic and scholarly contributions. My intervention is a scholarly wrestle with such questions.

Keywords: ambivalence
dissident
everyday Islam
Foucault
Iranian drama and theatre
political theatre
Advisor: Johnson, Stephen
BRAINI: Bidirectional Rail-to-rail Artifact-immune Neural-interface

Closed-loop modulation of the nervous system for the treatment of neurological or psychiatric disorders requires recording of neural electrical potentials. Unfortunately, the closed-loop neural recording is hampered by noise, large artifact, and stimulation transients. These challenges pose constraints to brain implants due to prohibitive increases in size, power, and dynamic range. This dissertation presents the design of three high-dynamic-range sensor front-ends for implantable closed-loop neuromodulation systems featuring concurrent neural recording and stimulation. The development consists of two system-on-a-chip prototypes comprising incremental improvement of the architectures, which are validated both bench-top and in vivo. These improvements in performance and functionality enable closed-loop neural recording systems to integrate thousands of channels and scale down to extremely small form-factors, decreased power, and compressed dynamic range for the next generation of brain-machine interface (BMI) systems. The first design, named track-and-zoom Δ2Σ-ADC, yields a significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art Δ2Σ-ADCs by providing immunity to large stimulation artifacts, which would blind existing neural recording systems. Therefore, this design concurrently records during stimulation, which allows expanding neuromodulation applications to adaptive neurostimulation by updating stimulation parameters toward an optimized point for maximum therapeutic results efficacy. The second design is an opamp-less low-power neural-ADC, which achieves sub-µW power consumption and super-GΩ input impedance. These features open the possibility of free-floating highly parallel neural recording/stimulation nodes on the brain to stabilize long-term recording of chronic disorders by eliminating the constraints of existing systems caused by transcranial wires and high-impedance intracortical electrodes. The third design is an adaptive neural-ADC, which not only auto-ranges to accommodate large-amplitude artifacts but also boosts the sampling-rate to track quickly-alternating artifacts. Therefore, these adaptations speed up the recovery time ten times quicker than state-of-the-art responsive neuromodulation systems while keeping the array power consumption low during artifact-free neural-recording. These designs utilize circuit techniques such as spectrum-shaping to compress the neural signal dynamic range and reject rail-to-rail electrodes DC offset without sacrificing the input impedance, which is critical for emerging non-invasive neuromodulation techniques such as temporal interference stimulation. Furthermore, each full-duplex channel integrates an arbitrary-waveform current-mode stimulator to modulate brain dynamics in the targeted applications.

Keywords: bidirectional neural interfaces
closed-loop neuromodulation
high-dynamic-range neural-ADC
implantable neurostimulator
mixed-signal integrated circuit
system on chip
Advisor: Genov, Roman