VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The spatiotemporal dynamics of neural activity in the neocortex during waking and sleep in mice

Sleep is a non-homogenous physiological and behavioural state, which is regulated at many distinct levels, some of which are the focus of this project. The first objective of this project was to investigate cortical EEG dynamics at vigilance state transitions. The experiments have been carried out in adult male C57BL/6 mice, implanted with EEG screws and electromyography (EMG) wires. The main novel finding was that following REM sleep episodes, cortical activity during the initial NREM sleep was desynchronised as compared to NREM sleep episodes following waking. This was manifested in reduced number and amplitude of EEG slow waves and increased incidence of isolated slow waves. The second objective was to investigate how spatiotemporal dynamics of cortical activity during waking and sleep is affected by ongoing behaviour and preceding experience. In these experiments, animals, implanted with EEG electrodes and micro-wire arrays for recording neuronal activity, were recorded during running on a wheel and during subsequent sleep. The result revealed that voluntary wheel running in free-moving mice is associated with a substantial reduction in firing rates among large subpopulation of cortical neurons. The third objective was to address circuit mechanisms of specific brain oscillations in sleep and waking, and their relevance for normal behaviour and disease. Experiments have been carried out in Blind-drunk mice (point mutation in Snap-25 gene), which are a newly established mouse model relevant for schizophrenia. The results confirmed previous findings of a circadian phenotype in Blind-drunk mice, and for the first time characterised their sleep electrophysiology. In conclusion, this work provides novel insights into the effects of preceding behaviour, state and specific waking experience on spatiotemporal dynamics of cortical activity during sleep. Understanding spatio-temporal dynamics of brain activity during sleep is essential for elucidating the mechanisms of sleep regulation and the role of sleep in health and pathology.

Advisor: Vyazovskiy, V
Oliver, P
Hellenistic and Roman bronze statuettes in the Ashmolean Museum

This thesis is an aetiological investigation of the Hellenistic and Roman figural bronze statuettes in the round that form part of the Ashmolean Museum’s antiquities collection. The collection serves as a lens through which to study aspects of ancient and modern receptions of Classical sculptural forms. This approach is based on the premise that the collection’s composition has been historically determined not only by how the modern parties responsible for its creation and growth responded to the sculptural forms and images recovered from antiquity, but also by how sculptural forms developed in Greece during the Classical and early Hellenistic periods were received by makers and users of bronze statuettes in antiquity.
The thesis has three primary objectives: firstly, to produce a useful and informative catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum’s collection of Hellenistic and Roman figural anthropomorphic bronze statuettes in the round; secondly, to determine not only how that collection came to have the characteristics that it does, but also how the reception of ancient sculpture has historically affected the formation of collections of bronze statuettes and their compositions; thirdly, to use archaeological evidence of bronze statuettes to reconstruct possible contexts and to determine in greater detail the reception of canonical sculptural figure types in the form of small bronzes during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Part I of the thesis deals with the modern contexts for the statuettes, investigating the collection history, pulling out its salient characteristics and then comparing these to other major collections to make informed observations about how and why specific types of statuettes have survived from antiquity and the roles that modern reception of antiquity has played in shaping collections. This leads to Part II, which attempts to reconstruct possible ancient contexts for the Ashmolean bronzes by looking at the archaeological evidence for their production, movement use and display. Part III uses some of the figures of dwarfs, Herakles and Hermes in the collection to develop case studies that examine aspects of the visual relationships that existed between small bronzes and classical sculpture from the Classical and early Hellenistic periods.

Keywords: Reception of Antiquity
Ashmolean Museum
Greek and Roman statuettes
Advisor: Smith, RRR
Walker, S
Aphorism in Stevie Smith

My thesis draws up a new theory of the aphorism, a form which has received limited critical treatment in literary and philosophical studies. It uses this model of aphorism to frame an original approach to the enigmatic poetry and novels of Stevie Smith (1902- 1971).
Surveying the aphoristic tradition through German, French and English lines of development, analysing a range of short-form writing including La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, Erasmus’s proverbs and Karl Kraus’s aphorisms, I suggest that aphorism represents a tool for the social management of emotion. Rhetorically corralled into a slick, collectable shape, the aphorism promises arresting and instantaneous epiphany. However, the accomplished elegance which positioned the aphorism’s message as self-evidently true in fact works to repel further enquiry, and ultimately ensures that it will be forgotten or bypassed in favour of another aphorism. Aphorism, therefore, is a form in which dangerous ideas and emotions can be safely displayed and, simultaneously, effaced. Because aphorism’s style defuses the imperative to act on what is clearly known, writers like Stevie Smith can use the form as a means of withdrawing from the burden of making an impact on the world.
I therefore find that Smith’s use of aphorism and its related forms (proverb, epitaph, caption and fragment) offers a route into her texts. With her disconcerting pen-andink drawings, dark comedy, and social ventriloquism which stops short of satire, the rhetorical force of Smith’s poetry fascinates and arrests its readers, but nevertheless leaves them unable to react coherently, identify the use-value which her writing appears to promise, or delve successfully beneath its compelling surface. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archival material, I argue that Smith’s texts resist analysis because like the aphorisms embedded throughout them, they offer and exemplify a mode of clearly-declared revelation which, at the same time, makes itself unusable.

Advisor: Bayley, S
Marcus, L
Intellectuals and the Eastern question: 'historical-mindedness' and 'kin beyond sea', c. 1875-1880

The intractable problems posed by the decline of the Ottoman Empire were a defining feature of the nineteenth-century British experience. Events such as the Greek War of Independence (1821-32), the Crimean War (1853-5), and the Bulgarian Agitation (1876-8) were merely prominent denouements in the protracted history of what contemporaries called 'the Eastern Question'. The Eastern Question could be construed in many ways and admitted many answers. But by the 1870s, many Victorians had come to construe the Eastern Question as primarily an historical question.
This thesis explores the ways in which Victorian public intellectuals brought 'historical-mindedness' to bear on the Eastern Question. Nineteenth-century historiography, it is suggested, may often be understood as a variety of contemporary political thought. Part One takes the historian E. A. Freeman, one of the Bulgarian Agitation's leaders, as its subject. Studied in depth, Freeman becomes a window onto how nineteenth-century intellectuals could experience and understand the Eastern Question.
Part Two turns to the remarkable efflorescence of historical writing elicited by the so-called Eastern Crisis of 1875-80, investigating how historical arguments were invoked not merely in history books but also in newspaper reports, politically-freighted travel writing, and above all in periodical articles, over two-hundred of which are studied here.
When Gladstone invoked the authority of 'the historical school of England' to criticise Lord Beaconsfield during this period, he did so advisedly, for historians both lay and professional were remarkably unanimous in their interpretation of events in south-eastern Europe. Drawing on the insights of comparative philology and often sympathetic to Eastern Orthodoxy for reasons of religion, these historians tended to emphasise the Balkan Christians' European identity, situating them within teleological narratives of progress which evoke contemporaneous Whig histories of England.

Keywords: historiography
race
religion
Advisor: Young, B
Skinner, S
Militancy, moderation, & Mau Mau: A reconsideration of Koinange wa Mbiyu and Peter Mbiyu Koinange

This thesis examines the lives of Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu and his eldest son, Peter Mbiyu Koinange. It joins with the growing rise of biographical work within African Studies. It challenges the historical understanding of late colonial rule in Kenya and the role of official myth in pre- and post-independence historical narratives. Koinange wa Mbiyu was the patriarch of one of the most respected, wealthy, and politically influential Kikuyu families of Kenya’s colonial and post-colonial period. His eldest son, Peter Mbiyu, received a prestigious education abroad and returned to Kenya where he became a prominent leader for African independent education African political action. Koinange and Peter bear frequent mention in academic discussions of collaboration, discontent, nationalism, and militancy in Kenya’s colonial era.
This thesis challenges the widely held narrative that Koinange and Peter embraced militant politics opposing colonial rule during the 1940s. While fitting larger understandings of decolonisation, it is not an honest depiction of the Koinange’s political actions. As a result, this thesis is intentionally a work of revisionist history that looks to the profound changes in the culture and nature of colinal rule during the 1940s, rather than a political shift in the Koinanges. In addition to challenging the prevalent understanding of Koinange and Peter’s political action, this thesis raises a number of areas – gender, wealth, elite and family dynamics, to name a few – where the Koinange family history would further illuminate the historical understanding of the colonial era.
This thesis is a dual biography, crafted as a work of narrative history. It challenges a breadth of current scholarship, utilizing the largest collection of pre-Mau Mau archival records to date. This thesis engages with a number of historiographical challenges related to biography, the individual, the family, and the challenges of oral history shaped in the crucible of cultural crisis.

Keywords: colonial Kenya
African politics
Mau Mau
African chiefs
Kenya
decolonization
Advisor: Mahone, S
Anderson, D
Defining mechanisms of NOD2 receptor function in myeloid cells

Pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) recognise foreign antigen to direct innate and adaptive immune responses against invading pathogens. Polymorphisms in the PRR NOD2 represent the strongest genetic risk factor for the inflammatory bowel disease Crohn’s, and thus this bacterial sensor is the focus of particular research interest. By recapitulating the hypoxic conditions encountered at sites of inflammation, this study utilised quantitative phosphoproteomics to identify novel downstream signalling hubs of NOD2 and its synergistic partner Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2). The deubiquitinase ataxin-3 was identified as being phosphorylated on serine 265, and this was mediated by RIPK2 and TBK1. Ataxin-3 was found to associate with the mitochondrial inner membrane protein MIC60, with ataxin- 3 depletion leading to dysregulation of mitochondrial DNA transcript expression and impaired oxidative phosphorylation, demonstrating a novel mitochondrial role. Interrogation of the ataxin-3 regulated ubiquitome in response to NOD2/TLR2 triggering revealed a broader immunometabolic function for ataxin-3, with the metabolism related proteins HIF1a, phospholipase D3 and LAMTOR1 identified as novel DUB targets. Ataxin-3 depleted cells show defects in PRR triggered autophagic flux, mitochondrial ROS generation and bacterial killing, suggesting the importance of this protein in the innate immune response.

Advisor: Simmons, A
The hindrances to the US pacification advisory effort in the Vietnam War from the perspective of the advisors

During the Vietnam War, an American advisory effort supported the South Vietnamese as they attempted to pacify the countryside. The subject of this thesis is that advisory effort. The pacification effort used a whole-of-government approach to counterinsurgency that included civilian development, humanitarian assistance, and local security. This inquiry explores the pacification advisory effort’s greatest impediments to success, and also seeks to determine pacification’s proper place in the story of the war. In general, the historiography is weak on that, and this thesis challenges the historiography by reconstructing the war from the perspective of the advisors rather than the policymakers. To do that it uses mostly untapped sources. The thesis also seeks to determine if there were conceptual problems with the advisory effort.
The inquiry makes several findings. First, despite the prevailing narrative, pacification was always at the center of strategy. Even the large search and destroy operations were explicitly intended to shield the pacification effort. Second, there were four significant hindrances to the advisory effort: (1) the challenge of achieving unity of effort among the various American agencies; (2) confusion over how to earn the allegiance of the people; (3) government corruption; and (4) a dysfunctional Vietnamese command and control system. In the end, the US had overcome the first, muddled through on the second, and completely failed on the third and fourth. However, perhaps the most significant finding of this project is that there was indeed a substantial problem with the way the US conceptualized the advisory effort. They invariably tried to solve problems at the bottom that could only have been solved at the top, and in the process made certain that the Vietnamese chain of command would never be forced to stand on its own.

Advisor: Davies, G
Vector correlations in gas-phase inelastic collision dynamics

This thesis presents a joint experimental and theoretical study of vector correlations in the electronically, vibrationally, and rotationally inelastic collisions of simple molecules with rare-gas atoms.
In the first instance, empirical and calculated data are presented for rotationally inelastic scattering in the NO(X)+Ar and ND3(X(tilde))+Ar systems at collision energies in the range 405 − 2210 cm−1. These experiments – the first to be conducted on a newly commissioned crossed-molecular beam machine – measured the k − k′ correlation, i.e. that between the vectors describing the relative velocities before and after collision, respectively. The empirical data were subjected to rigorous comparison with both quantum-mechanical and quasi-classical trajectory (QCT) calculations. For both the NO(X)+Ar and ND3(X(tilde))+Ar systems, there is generally good agreement between experiment and theory at all four collision energies investigated.
Two chapters of this thesis focus on the development of trajectory surface-hopping (TSH) QCT models of the OH(A, v = 0)+Kr and OH(A, v = 0)+Xe systems. Experimental data relating to scalar quantities (rotational energy transfer (RET) and electronic quenching) and to the j − j′ correlation (which quantifies the depolarisation of the angular momentum of the OH(A) radical) are compared to variable-collision-energy TSH QCT calculations in which the length of the OH bond is fixed. The algorithms involve all three PESs of the OH(A/X)+Kr system, and the full range of electrostatic and roto-electronic mechanisms that couple them, for the first time. The most complete model succeeded in accounting for 93% of experimentally observed quenching. For the OH(A/X)+Xe system, coupling matrix elements were estimated from those of OH(A/X)+Kr, and the most complete model recovered 63% of experimentally observed quenching.
This thesis also presents a novel theoretical study of rotationally inelastic dynamics in the OH(A, v = 1)+Kr system. Provisional results from adiabatic calculations in which the OH bond length is allowed to vary over the course of a trajectory are presented alongside experimental data that were reported previously. To date, these calculations continue to underestimate the extent of empirical RET data. Reasons for the observed discrepancy, and suggestions to resolve it, are outlined in detail.

Keywords: molecular beam
non-adiabatic
quenching
inelastic scattering
quasi-classical trajectory
Advisor: Brouard, M
Separate and interactive effects of catechol-o-methyltransferase and tetrahydrocannabinol on frontostriatal dopamine function

The frontostriatal dopamine system modulates brain function and is affected by both genetic and environmental factors. Dysfunction of this system is associated with many pathological states, including schizophrenia. The enzyme catechol-O- methyltransferase (COMT) metabolises dopamine and its gene contains a polymorphism (Val158Met) that affects enzyme activity. Delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive component of cannabis, has been suggested to interact with this polymorphism to increase the risk for psychosis and cognitive impairments. Dopaminergic mechanisms are a plausible candidate for mediating this interaction.
I used microdialysis coupled with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to examine the effects of THC on extracellular dopamine and its metabolites in the nucleus accumbens, dorsal striatum and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in freely moving mice. Following acute COMT inhibition with tolcapone, THC increased extracellular dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens in tolcapone-, but not in vehicle-, treated mice. The introduction of the low activity Met allele into the COMT gene produced a highly specific, novel mouse model of the Val158Met polymorphism. In contrast to the effects of acute COMT inhibition, the Met allele protected against THC-induced changes in accumbal dopamine. No interactive neurochemical effects were observed in the dorsal striatum (pharmacological and genetic study) or in a preliminary study of the mPFC (genetic study only). On a progressive ratio task measuring motivational salience, the direction of the interactive effect between COMT genotype and THC differed between 2 independent cohorts and provided tentative leads that stress/arousal-dependent effects on COMT may have a confounding effect.
My data provide evidence that COMT activity modulates the effect of THC on accumbal dopamine function, and suggest the mechanism through which this interaction is mediated differs between acute and lifelong reduction in COMT activity. Through the interactive effect on the dopaminergic system, the data provide a potential mechanism for the reported interaction between COMT and cannabis/THC in determining psychosis risk and cognitive impairments.

Keywords: COMT
THC
dopamine
psychosis
gene-environment interaction
schizophrenia
cannabis
Advisor: Tunbridge, E
Bannerman, D
Harrison, P
Honesty, trust, and debt in Istria's wine industry

This thesis asks how honesty and trust in economic relationships survive pervasive debt, and how debt and trust shape business relationships in post-socialism. It does so by examining the economic transition of Istria’s wine industry, and the changing relationships between various actors in the industry. It explains how production beliefs shape the industry and perceptions about how the local market is organized, and analyzes the roles of honesty, trust, and what I call reciprocal debt, in organizing business relationships.
Recent reforms impacting farmer livelihoods have led to decreasing trust in local governance institutions. This is compounded by the recent protracted recession, which has constrained state institutions from creating a healthy market economy within which small businesses may develop. Instead, winemakers and farmers have increasingly attempted to organize themselves into associations to both drive the industry’s professionalization and resolve systemic local market problems that the state has been unable to resolve. Meanwhile, the state is adopting European Union tax and accounting norms that strain small businesses. The state’s enforcement of these reforms is interpreted locally as predatory, compounding people’s disappointment with their government and transition in general.
Winemakers, grape-growers, and other small businessmen are increasingly turning to alternative modes of business to try to increase the likelihood of being paid in a business environment where contracts are rarely formalized and are anyway difficult to enforce. Instead, their reliance on trust and honesty make business decisions and to enforce payment unintentionally creates new problems. Large, national corporations take advantage of such informal payment systems to manipulate the liquidity of their clients, compounding the economic problems of winemakers. However, despite these problems, Istrians continue to organize business around trust and maintain long-term business relationships characterized by debt, revealing the strength of trust and the complex role of debt in society.

Advisor: Parkin, R
Oxidative radical cyclisations for the synthesis of lactones

The object of study of this thesis lies on the optimisation of the oxidative radical cyclisation methodology for the preferential formation of gamma-lactones from unsaturated alkyl malonate derivatives.
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of free-radical cyclisation; more extensive explanations are given for the intramolecular oxidative radical cyclisation using manganese(III) and copper(II) salts as oxidants. An overview of the contribution of the Burton group in the field is given, in which both the applicability and the limitations of the transformation are showcased.
Chapter 2 is concerned with the synthesis of the ethisolide family of natural products and one non-natural analogue, in which the oxidative radical cyclisation is key for the construction of the bis-gamme-lactone moiety present in such natural products. The initial limitations of the methodology allowed for the discovery of new conditions for the formation of chloro monocyclic systems and for the development of copper-free oxidative cyclisation conditions for gamma-lactone formation.
Chapter 3 reports the developments on the metal-free oxidative radical cyclisation. Bicyclic gamma-lactones were synthesised from all-carbon alkyl malonate derivatives through anodic oxidation via constant current electrolysis. The development of a novel ionic oxidative cyclisation is also discussed.
Chapter 4 describes our efforts towards the formation of both fused and spiro gamma-lactam-beta-lactone molecules, as potential analogues to proteasome inhibitors, from either gamma-lactam-gamma-lactones or exo-gamma-lactams precursors, previously synthesised through oxidative radical cyclisation.
Full experimental details, NMR spectra for the natural products and for the non-natural analogue, and a comparison between the obtained and the previously reported NMR data are also provided.

Keywords: Organic Chemistry
Oxidative Radical Cyclisation
Advisor: Burton, J