VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
State capacity, violence and industrialization in Rwanda and England

Economic prosperity across African countries has greatly diverged over the last decades. One the one end, countries like Botswana, Ethiopia and Rwanda have grown rapidly. Others, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are poorer in the 21st century than they were at independence. Growing evidence shows that a considerable share of this variation is explained by the presence of centralized precolonial polities within these countries (Michalopoulos & Papaiannou, 2013). In this thesis, I investigate whether there is an effect of having a tradition of statehood matters for development outcomes today. I also investigate potential mechanisms behind the effect of a longer tradition of statehood and ask if there are interaction effects between historical states and intermediate outcomes. I furthermore attempt to understand the effects of large-scale state intervention in the rural economy of England on industrialization. This dissertation, then, is a study of the role of the state in comparative economic development.

Advisor: Fenske, J
Collier, P
A theology of disagreement

Even the most casual contemporary observer of Christianity must recognise that the notion of Christian community being identifiable through the mutual love of its members (John 13:35) is difficult to reconcile with the schismatic reality of current ecclesial life, dominated in the public sphere by divisive debates on matters such as gender or sexuality. Given the constant presence of disagreement throughout the church’s history, it remains an ethical subject neglected by scholars.
This study examines how New Testament texts might inform Christian approaches to disagreement. It is the first systematic consideration of disagreement as a New Testament theme; it follows, and critiques, the methodological approach of Richard Hays in The Moral Vision of the New Testament. The context is public disagreement among Christians: how the church speaks in public when facing its inevitable disagreements, and what theological and ethical concerns might inform how this speech proceeds.
The thesis is in three parts. Part One is an examination of the New Testament in relation to disagreement, following Hays' 'descriptive task'. In Part Two, the 'synthetic' and 'hermeneutical' tasks of Hays' methodology are critiqued and some modifications are proposed; a theology of disagreement that emerges from the New Testament is outlined.
Part Three considers some ecclesiological implications of this theology of disagreement. Following Hays' 'pragmatic task', it examines how moral theological insights from the New Testament interact with the life of the contemporary church. Illustrative examples consider the church's public theological witness, its pneumatology, and its liturgy, to demonstrate the need for a Christian ethic to engage with extra-Biblical authority with greater enthusiasm than Hays. The thesis concludes by affirming the particular value of reading the New Testament in pursuit of ethical wisdom, but without excluding insights from tradition, reason and experience. The challenge for the church is identified as a move Towards Loving Disagreement; an integral part of its mission is to disagree Christianly.

Keywords: Disagreement
Christian ethics
New Testament
Ethics
Biblical ethics
Ecclesiology
Church unity
Richard Hays
Moral theology
Advisor: Biggar, N
Investigating the role of ciliary localisation of the TRPP Channel, Polycystin2 (PKD2), on development and progression of polycystic kidney disease

Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease (ADPKD) is a common inherited disease, affecting 1:400-1000 people worldwide and leads to end-stage renal failure in most patients before their 6th decade. ADPKD is characterised by abnormal persistent cellular proliferation combined with luminal fluid secretion in the kidneys leading to bilateral development of cysts. There are two causative genes associated with the development of ADPKD; PKD1 and PKD2. PKD2 is an essential Ca2+ permeable cation channel which localises to the primary cilium in renal tubules as well as other locations within the cell.
Here we investigate the effects of aberrant cellular localisation of PKD2, specifically the loss of ciliary localisation. We used a non-ciliary localising mutant allele (Pkd2lrm4) which retains channel function, for in vitro and in vivo mouse studies to show that there is an absolute requirement for the protein within the cilium. Embryonically, Pkd2lrm4/lrm4 kidneys exhibit gross cystic development, beginning at E15.5. Heterozygotes develop a mild cystic phenotype in combination with polycystic liver disease. When expressed in combination with an inducible null allele in the proximal tubule of the adult kidney, a progressive development of cysts is observed. In vitro studies using Pkd2lrm4/lrm4 MEFs show specific accumulation of the protein at the mother centriole. In addition to protein glycosylation studies, this indicates that PKD2 is able to traffic normally to the ciliary base, but cannot enter the cilium.
This work indicates an essential role for PKD2 in the cilium and that non-ciliary function alone is not sufficient to prevent cyst formation. In addition, this work provides a viable genetic model for the study of progression in Polycystic Kidney Disease.

Advisor: Norris, D
Christian, H
Development and testing of a coupled vegetation/sediment-transport model for dryland environments

Drylands are characterised by patchy vegetation, erodible surfaces and erosive aeolian processes. The extreme nature of dryland environments means that semi-arid vegetation cover is often dynamic through time and space, due to complex relationships among plants, soil and transport processes. Understanding how ecogeomorphic processes interact and shape landscape evolution is critical for managing potential environmental and anthropogenic impacts in drylands, since these vulnerable regions are often used for pastoralism, agriculture and habitation.
Despite a wealth of vegetation distribution models that simulate distinctive patterning that is often observed in drylands, relatively little is known about the effects of vegetation patch distribution, geometry and scale on the entrainment and transport of aeolian sediment. Empirical and modelling studies have shown that vegetation elements provide drag on the overlying airflow, thus affecting wind velocity profiles and altering erosive dynamics on desert surfaces. However, these dynamics are significantly complicated by turbulence, porosity and pliability effects in canopies. This thesis therefore presents new high-resolution field data for parameterising wind flow around individual plants and vegetation patches.
Wind transport models have played a key role in simplifying aeolian processes in partly vegetated landscapes, but they remain challenging in some respects. Most models do not recognise the heterogeneous nature of desert surfaces, and those that do are often computationally expensive to run. Cellular automaton (CA) modelling has been successfully used to simulate dryland ecogeomorphic processes over large spatial and temporal scales. However, no existing CA model explicitly links vegetation growth, wind flow dynamics and sediment flux over a surface.
This thesis presents a new CA approach that couples a sophisticated vegetation distribution model with a sediment transport model. The Vegetation and Sediment TrAnsport model (ViSTA) is verified and validated against existing dunefield theory and field datasets. ViSTA is then forced with potential 21st century climate and land use change scenarios, to characterise possible transition scenarios between environmental states in the Kalahari Desert. ViSTA is shown to be a robust geomorphological tool for predicting landscape responses to a variety of human and environmental stresses.

Advisor: Wiggs, G
Bailey, R
The Symphony in 1933

Begun in Berlin, completed in exile in Paris, and premiered on both sides of the Atlantic, Kurt Weill's Symphony No. 2 sets up the symphony circa 1933 as both resolutely international and messily interdisciplinary, and spotlights how fundamentally a transnational approach is needed in order more comprehensively to understand both the genre and the localised political and social issues shaping symphonic discourse at this time. Taking the issues raised by Weill’s symphony as a starting point, and borrowing fine-grained, historically synchronic approaches from year studies, this thesis examines the symphonic genre in 1933 through four other case-study works composed or premiered in that year. I thus position the symphony as a site of cultural exchange between and within the major contexts traversed by Weill and his work: Berlin, Paris, and a messier U.S. East-Coast nexus that centres on New York and Boston, via Mexico City, looking in detail at Hans Pfitzner's Symphony in C-sharp minor, Roy Harris's Symphony 1933, Aaron Copland's Short Symphony, and Arthur Honegger's Mouvement Symphonique nr. 3.
The Germanic genre has long been associated with nationalism, monumentality, and power display, wedded to Germanic Enlightenment philosophical discourses about universalised selfhood and its relationship to society. 1933, the year in which Hitler took power and the Great Depression reached its peak, was politically and economically fraught, concentrating social questions that intersect with symphonic issues about power, selfhood, space, and mass audiences. It is also a neglected year within symphonic surveys. The thesis combines archival work and hermeneutic perspectives to foreground those social and political discourses historically associated with the genre. I argue for the significance of their differing legacies in co-existent contexts, for the complicity of the genre in establishing and perpetuating political and colonial hegemonies, and for the urgency of rethinking the symphony as an international phenomenon.

Keywords: Great Depression
Aaron Copland
Berlin
Mexico City
Arthur Honegger
National Socialism
New York
Roy Harris
transnationalism
Boston
Carlos Chávez
Hans Pfitzner
Paris
Kurt Weill
Advisor: Grimley, DM
Not foreign to each other: Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conferences 1944-1969

The Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conferences were a unique experiment. They were an attempt at an intermediate mode of multilateral relations: members were no longer bound in an imperial hierarchy, nor were they fully foreign. A conscious effort was made to position the Commonwealth as a family, and the Conferences as their periodic reunion. Avoiding a 'diplomatic' culture at the Conferences in favour of a familial veneer allowed participants to claim that binding resolutions were not necessary and that meaningful cooperation could occur by consensus. This appeared to offer potential for forging a 'third way' between superpower blocs in a Cold War environment.
This thesis makes an important contribution to the existing Commonwealth literature as the Conferences were the core structure of the Commonwealth until the formation of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1965, yet have never been the subject of a full-length study. The thesis also engages with the concept of the 'British world', arguing that the Conferences had a major role in projecting British 'soft power' once martial or economic hegemony proved impracticable. By drawing on archival sources in eight Commonwealth countries, this thesis shows that the Conferences were effective in facilitating discussions on flashpoint topics such as white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia, even if the Commonwealth failed to fulfil hopes that it would remain an important international grouping. The study also has contemporary relevance, given that the Conferences continue as Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings, and that questions of transnational identity and 'foreignness' continue to shape debates over Britain's relationship with Europe and its 'world role'.

Advisor: Darwin, J
Genetic, pathologic, and radiographic correlations in multiple sclerosis

Substantial evidence suggests that cortical tissue injury plays a key role in the progression of permanent disability in multiple sclerosis (MS). A greater knowledge of factors that drive pathology in the MS cortex is therefore desperately needed in order to develop novel medicines that can ameliorate disease burden in the progressive stage. In the current thesis, we undertake a robust and quantitative analysis of motor cortical neuropathology in a large cohort of post-mortem MS cases. We find that genetic variation at the HLA-DRB1 locus is associated with the extent of cortical demyelinating and inflammatory disease, especially in younger cases. Relevant to cortical neurodegeneration, we identify fibrinogen deposition as a novel component of MS cortical pathology that associates with neuronal loss, show that carriage of HLA- DRB1&ast;15 has a critical impact on the relationship between microglia/macrophage inflammation and cortical neuronal density, and demonstrate disease-relevant changes to motor cortical neuronal glutamic acid decarboxylase expression. Given the myriad subcortical connections of the motor cortex, we have also undertaken an extensive assessment of corticospinal tract lesional burden throughout the neuraxis and find that motor cortical neurodegeneration appears independent of subcortical tissue injury. Taken together, this thesis highlights the importance of genetic variation at the HLA- DRB1 locus to cortical pathologic outcome, and the fundamental contribution of fibrinogen deposition and cortical parenchymal inflammatory factors to neuronal fate.

Advisor: De Luca, G
Palace, J
The devil's paradise: the Vilnius conflict in European diplomacy, 1919-1923

This thesis is a history of the international settlement of the Lithuanian-Polish dispute over Vilnius, focusing on the involvement of Britain, France, Soviet Russia and the League of Nations. As its theoretical point of departure, the thesis considers that alongside motivations of the balance of power and the national interest in international relations, there exist more salient and less visible unspoken assumptions and mentalités that lay down the intellectual framework in which those realist considerations take place, and that can sway judgments and shape concrete policy decisions.
The thesis traces the emergence of 'didactic' and 'romantic' traditions of historiography on the fall of 'Poland' in the eighteenth century and shows how they shaped the way in which Poland's claim to Vilnius, as well as its geopolitical role in general, was imagined in the making of the new Europe after the Great War. The thesis also demonstrates how assumptions about Lithuanian backwardness and civilizational inferiority conditioned the settlement of the dispute.
By presenting a thorough account of the settlement of the Vilnius dispute under the auspices of the League, this study enriches the League of Nations scholarship with a hitherto neglected episode of inaugural importance in the League's history. Focusing on the bargaining between the intergovernmental Council and the international Secretariat, the work sheds light on the 'league temperament', or the inter -nationalist mindedness, in the most 'realist' of the League's policy avenues - that of international dispute settlement.
In parallel, the thesis analyses the efforts of the dispute unsettlement by Soviet Russia. Focusing on the work of Soviet diplomats in Lithuania, the thesis reconstructs Soviet attempts to derail the dispute settlement in the League and beyond, shedding light on the period of 'peaceful coexistence' and of consolidation of power in early Soviet diplomacy.

Advisor: Clavin, P
Evans, R
BERyL: unified approach to web block classification

Web blocks such as navigation menus, advertisements, and headers and footers are key components of web pages which define not only the appearance of a web page but also the way in which humans interact with different parts of the page. For machines, however, classifying and interacting with these blocks is a surprisingly hard task. Yet, web block classification has varied applications in the fields of wrapper induction, assistance for visually impaired people, mobile web browsing, web page topic clustering and web searching. Our system for web block classification, BERyL, performs the automated classification of web blocks through a combination of machine learning and declarative, model-driven feature extraction based on Datalog rules. BERyL uses refined feature sets for the classification of individual blocks to achieve accurate classification for all of the block types that we have so far observed. The high accuracy is achieved through these carefully selected features. Some are even tuned to the specific block type. At the same time, BERyL avoids the high cost of feature engineering through a model-driven rather than programmatic approach to feature extraction. Not only does this reduce the time for feature engineering, the model-driven, declarative approach also allows for semi-automatic optimisation of the feature extraction system. BERyL also employs a holistic approach to web block classification where individual blocks are considered within the context of a web page powered by the knowledge representation rules specific to that domain. We validate these claims for a broad range of web blocks in an extensive evaluation.

Advisor: Gottlob, G
Literature, language, and the human: a theoretical enquiry, with special reference to the work of F.R. Leavis

This thesis proposes a theory of literature's human relevance in literary terms, developing hints in the critical practice of twentieth century literary critic F.R. Leavis. It examines how literary texts can be humanly relevant in a manner that depends on their literary merit, and does so in three stages, interrogating: the way literary texts operate; the role literary language plays in thinking; and the interaction of literature and morality. The thesis has two, related, aims: to reconceptualise literature's relation to human living, and to offer a recharacterisation of Leavis's literary criticism, with the investigation of aspects of Leavis's practice forming part of the more fundamental enquiry regarding the nature of literature's human significance. In the first stage, the thesis argues that Leavis's critical practice in his works of the 1930s (his first major decade of critical output) provides fruitful ways for conceptualising the interaction between form and meaning in literature, with important consequences for present-day understandings of how literature functions and how it matters. It focuses on an untheorised (by him or others) achievement in Leavis's criticism, the introduction of the term ‘attitude' into literary analysis and judgement, and argues that the term enables a different mode of attention to the question of how literature relates to the human world. The second stage first interrogates the role that language in general plays in understanding, constructing a hypothesis from arguments by philosophers R.G. Collingwood and Charles Taylor, and then turns to literary language, arguing that it enables a mode of relating to experience not otherwise possible, and forms a process of thinking, for reader and writer alike. The final stage focuses on arguments in aesthetics against literature's cognitive value, and in moral philosophy for its empathic and moral value. Building on earlier arguments about the operation of literary language and language's relation to thought, the thesis claims that literary language is humanly meaningful in a way that is both cognitively and morally significant. Throughout, the thesis argues for the inescapable link between well-written literature and the morally resonant, such that good literature forms what Taylor calls ‘moral sources'. The crucial query is how literature functions, which will help us better to answer why it is humanly important. This thesis engages with literary criticism, philosophical aesthetics and moral philosophy, as well as offering close readings of literature itself.

Keywords: Literature
Peter Lamarque
Martha Nussbaum
Human living
Charles Taylor
F.R. Leavis
Advisor: Perry, S
Driver genes for metastasis of colorectal cancer

Cancer metastasis is the principal cause of death in patients with solid organ tumours. Once cancer has spread, it is generally considered incurable. This spread of cells from the primary tumour to distant sites (metastasis) is a complex process and this DPhil focuses on colorectal cancer (CRC) metastasis. It has three aims; the development of a new CRC metastasis model, the completion of a whole-genome screen for drivers of metastasis and the development of a greater understanding of the molecular drivers of metastasis through use of human lymph node metastasis (LNM) samples.
The new CRC metastasis model is a mouse model utilising endoscopeguided orthotopic transplantation of tumour cells in combination with in-vivo imaging. This model has allowed the analysis of the role of the differentiation factor, Serum/Glucocorticoid regulated Kinase 1 (SGK1) in preventing metastasis and tumorigenesis. I provide preliminary data suggesting that the inhibition of metastasis by re-expression of SGK1 is associated with the down-regulation of the transcription factor Avian Myelocytomatosis Viral Oncogene Homolog (c-MYC), and low SGK1 is a poor prognosis biomarker identifying CRC patients with high risk of disease recurrence/death.
A genome-wide clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/cas9 screen was then performed to identify other genes that play important roles in CRC metastasis. The screen involved the orthotopic transplantation of the MC38 line in a mouse model of metastasis and subsequent analysis using targeted next generation sequencing. This approach identified the pioneer transcription factor, Forkhead Box F1 (FOXF1) as an important regulator of metastasis. I demonstrate that FOXF1 is down-regulated in human metastatic lesions, including LNM, liver and lung metastases. Metastasis driven by low FOXF1 is mediated through Mammalian Target of Rapamycin Complex (MTORC) signalling through transcriptional control of Regulatory Associated Protein of MTOR Complex 1 (RAPTOR).
Finally, I performed an analysis of 69 stage III paired CRC tumour-LNM human specimens. Metastasis in this cohort was mediated through a number of important genes and gene networks, including C-X-C chemokine receptor type 4 (CXCR4) and Kirsten Rat Sarcoma Viral Oncogene (KRAS) signalling. Non-hierarchical clustering was performed and identified two distinct subsets of LNM, LNMS1 and LNMS2 each conferring different prognoses. I have also identified different immune profiles within the "Lymphoid ecological niche" using gene expression profiling. This has enabled me to demonstrate an association between a patient's immune profile, particularly activation of CD8 cells and KRAS signalling within the tumour, with improved disease free survival in stage III CRC patients.

Advisor: Tomlinson, I