VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Growing old in Byzantium: the construction of ageing in twelfth-century literary and visual culture

Byzantium in the twelfth century was a society in which diverse images of the elderly existed simultaneously. This thesis analyses the multiple meanings of growing old in this period of Byzantine history, painting a nuanced picture of the ideas and associations that underpinned the many conflicting representations of ageing. The results of this study shed some light on the cultural significance of growing old, and on the role of age in the construction of Byzantine identity more generally.
To this date there has been relatively little scholarship on age in Byzantium, and much of this scholarship has tended to focus on the earlier part of the life course. This thesis focuses exclusively on representations of ageing and the elderly in the literary and visual culture of twelfth-century Byzantium. It utilises a range of Greek textual sources, including historiography, hagiography, fictional literature, occasional poems and verse epigrams, together with visual evidence in the form of religious icons, monumental art and manuscript illumination. The various age motifs are examined and situated within broader trends in contemporary discourse. The intended outcome of the thesis is thus the production of what might be termed a ‘thick description’ of old age in Byzantium. By interpreting the images of old age ’thickly’, the findings of the thesis contribute towards a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of ageing. From the evidence presented, it is suggested that in twelfth-century Byzantium growing old was a relative concept whose meaning was subject to the context in which it was depicted. Defined chiefly through contrast with youth, the imagery of old age represented a potent and emotive poetic tool, deployed in contemporary literature and art to convey a range of meanings.

Keywords: Byzantium
age
literature
ageing
visual culture
Advisor: Toth, I
Receding-horizon motion planning of quadrupedal robot locomotion

Quadrupedal robots are designed to offer efficient and robust mobility on uneven terrain. This thesis investigates combining numerical optimization and machine learning methods to achieve interpretable kinodynamic planning of natural and agile locomotion.
The proposed algorithm, called Receding-Horizon Experience-Controlled Adaptive Legged Locomotion (RHECALL), uses nonlinear programming (NLP) with learned initialization to produce long-horizon, high-fidelity, terrain-aware, whole-body trajectories. RHECALL has been implemented and validated on the ANYbotics ANYmal B and C quadrupeds on complex terrain.
The proposed optimal control problem formulation uses the single-rigid-body dynamics (SRBD) model and adopts a direct collocation transcription method which enables the discovery of aperiodic contact sequences. To generate reliable trajectories, we propose fast-to-compute analytical costs that leverage the discretization and terrain-dependent kinematic constraints.
To extend the formulation to receding-horizon planning, we propose a segmentation approach with asynchronous centre of mass (COM) and end-effector timings and a heuristic initialization scheme which reuses the previous solution. We integrate real-time 2.5D perception data for online foothold selection. Additionally, we demonstrate that a learned stability criterion can be incorporated into the planning framework.
To accelerate the convergence of the NLP solver to locally optimal solutions, we propose data-driven initialization schemes trained using supervised and unsupervised behaviour cloning. We demonstrate the computational advantage of the schemes and the ability to leverage latent space to reconstruct dynamic segments of plans which are several seconds long.
Finally, in order to apply RHECALL to quadrupeds with significant leg inertias, we derive the more accurate lump leg single-rigid-body dynamics (LL-SRBD) and centroidal dynamics (CD) models and their first-order partial derivatives. To facilitate intuitive usage of costs, constraints and initializations, we parameterize these models by Euclidean-space variables. We show the models have the ability to shape rotational inertia of the robot which offers potential to further improve agility.

Keywords: kinodynamic planning
numerical optimization
behaviour cloning
quadrupedal robots
Advisor: Fallon, M
Havoutis, I
Body, self and cosmic transformation: an anthropological insight into the Corpus Areopagiticum

This thesis explores bodily and psychic metamorphosis in the anthropology of Dionysius the Areopagite, author of the Corpus Areopagiticum (CA), and aims to provide a fresh analysis and development of the scholarly discussion around his concept of θέωσις, or deification. Its distinctive approach lies in its treatment of the notion of deification in Dionysius through an anthropological lens, which brings into focus the prominent role the bodily and psychic transformation of human beings holds in his thought. The thesis considers how this anthropology is underpinned by an eschatology that, though not often explicitly stated, is ever-present in his writings. Research on Dionysius in the course of the last century has predominantly focused on Neo-Platonic sources on the one hand and orthodox Christian sources on the other, reflecting the debate over whether Dionysius was primarily a Platonist or primarily a Christian, a dispute predicated upon the problematic assumption that the two might be incompatible. I argue that Dionysius successfully transformed and incorporated Neoplatonic concepts in his own Christian view of deification. Recognizing the formative influence of the later Neoplatonists involves seeing Dionysius as one who shares their ideas of communal worship practices as the means of deification, in contrast to those who believe unilaterally in either pagan philosophy or Christian mysticism as means to union with the divine. A common tendency has been to read Dionysius as a mystic mostly concerned with religious experiences of intense interiority, with few references to his theurgical context. As a correction to this approach, this thesis argues that Dionysius’ theology offers a communal and relational model of theological anthropology in which human subjectivity is formed and deified through communal theurgical worship. Furthermore, I suggest that rather than preaching a world-denying mysticism as the way to salvation, Dionysius offers a remarkably world-affirming approach which is based upon a Christian Incarnational affirmation of embodiment.

Advisor: Booth, P
China's evolving role in African conflict involvement: a balance of national interests, international expectations, and host-country receptiveness

Why has China exhibited seemingly inconsistent or even contradictory positions in its contributions to conflict involvement in different African crises? For example, why did China actively engage in the counter-piracy campaign in the Gulf of Aden but exhibited an indifferent position regarding the Darfur crisis before 2006?
This thesis investigates the determinants and logical flow behind China’s level of engagement in African conflict involvement. I argue that China’s foreign policy is a “two-step” mechanism involving both international and domestic factors, and that Chinese elites perceive external signals and translate them to the policy outcome. Endogenous threats to China’s economic interests, international expectations about China’s engagements, and the host country’s receptiveness to external intervention are China’s major considerations in African context. They then interact dynamically to jointly determine China’s level of participation.
I employ a small-N qualitative approach with controlled comparisons across small-N cases and within-case process tracing. I use existing literature, archival materials, and elite interviews across the Chinese government to test a series of hypothesized contextual relationships. A comparison between controlled pairs across five case studies – the Darfur crisis before and after 2006, the Gulf of Aden counter-piracy campaign before and after the hijacking of the Chinese vessel De Xin Hai, and the South Sudan civil war – allows tracing the mechanism by which the determinants interact with each other and demonstrating the causal relationships between the determinants and the policy outcome. In so doing, this thesis offers a systematic and comprehensive theory to explain how motivations influence China’s engagement in African peace and security, contributing to a better understanding of China’s foreign policy decision-making process in the African context.

Keywords: security
conflict
China
Africa
foreign policy
Advisor: Soares De Oliveira, R
Humanism and the Bible in the poetry of Benito Arias Montano (ca. 1525-1598)

Benito Arias Montano (ca. 1525–1598) is known for his polymathic scholarly interests. However, for him, humanist learning had to be put to the service of the study of the Bible. While the erudition of Arias Montano’s prose treatises has seen an increase in critical attention in recent years, his poetry is still understudied. This thesis shows that the fruits of his learning can also be seen in his original lyric poetry. However, I argue throughout this study that Arias Montano’s poetry betrays an anxiety about the limitations and proper use of humanist scholarship.
The first two chapters place his oeuvre in context. In Chapter One, I aim to situate Arias Montano’s work in a broader trend of European biblical encyclopaedism. In Chapter Two, I discuss how his choice of poetic form and his use of biblical material compares to that of other religious poets writing in Europe during the same period. In the following chapters, I focus on the appearance of particular disciplines in his poetry: respectively, the study of Classical texts; Hebraist studies; the study of historiography and political theory; and biblical geography and architecture.
More broadly, I aim to contribute to our understanding of sixteenth-century biblical humanism by demonstrating how Arias Montano balances his interest in emerging humanist disciplines with his conviction that the Bible was ultimately the only source of true knowledge. This thesis also aims to fill a surprising gap in scholarship by providing the first full-length study of Arias Montano’s Latin lyric poetry.

Keywords: Hebraism
humanism
Bible
Benito Arias Montano
lyric poetry
sixteenth century
Advisor: Thacker, J
Harrison, S
Community before liberation: theorizing gay resistance in San Francisco, 1953-1969

This thesis offers the first detailed account of the early history of homophile ideas of community. Its geographical centre is San Francisco. The thesis covers the period from the advent of homophile organising in the city in 1953 to the arrival of a new generation of post-Stonewall gay liberationists in 1969. In these sixteen years, ideas of community first emerged in San Franciscan gay bar-based activism, took hold, and from there, began to travel across the United States.
The thesis delivers two overarching arguments. First, it revises our understanding of when homophile ideas of community first surfaced. In the standard historical narrative, homophile activists first forged ideas of community in mid-1960s San Francisco. This thesis uncovers an earlier genesis. It locates the birth of ‘community’ in the mid-century activism of Latino female impersonator José Sarria, particularly his 1961 campaign for San Francisco City Supervisor. In the following years, ideas of ‘the community’ circulated in the newspapers of Sarria’s collaborator Guy Strait, gradually winning a national audience. The mid-1960s activists often heralded as community’s inventors were in fact the inheritors of this earlier generation.
Second, the thesis contends that the early history of homophile ideas of community demonstrated much greater doctrinal diversity than has previously been recognized. According to John D’Emilio’s influential account, homophile activists primarily conceived of community as sexual community, rooted in shared sexual behaviours and interests. In contrast, my thesis uncovers a plurality of traditions of imagining community to which homophile activists contributed in the 1960s. In particular, the thesis traces homophile projects which pursued broader, coalitional communities in concert with other contemporary political movements, including the Civil Rights, Black Power, sex workers’ and immigrant movements. Recovering their legacy corrects myths of a monolithic homophile investment in a single-issue gay politics.

Keywords: queer intellectual history
Jose Sarria
gay community
history of queer political thought
Society for Individual Rights
League for Civil Education
Gay San Francisco
homophile movement
Advisor: Smith, S
Blessed are the peacemakers? Framing crusade and diplomacy with Muslims in Latin Christendom, c.1095-1300

Diplomacy and holy war are generally understood as not only incongruous, but opposing concepts. Those inspired to take up arms in the name of their faith, such as the Latin Christians who endeavoured upon the capture of Jerusalem between the late-eleventh and thirteenth centuries, are often considered incapable of the rational compromises required by any effective diplomacy. This assumption, however, fails to adequately explain the prevalence and frequency of diplomatic encounters between those who led crusade campaigns to the East and their Muslim counterparts. While an openness to negotiations and treaties might be expected of the Latin Christians who chose to settle in the East, this thesis seeks to establish how diplomacy was viewed by those who took the cross and travelled great distances in order to capture the holy city of Jerusalem, as well as by those who never left the Latin West but whose chronicles, letters and other writings provided the crusading movement with its language and ideals. If these men saw no place for negotiation in holy war, then why did it occur so often? Where did diplomacy stand in the conceptual framework of crusading? Through a wide-ranging analysis of normative texts and contemporary sources, this thesis establishes a more firm foundation for the study of diplomacy between crusaders and Muslim leaders. Forgoing any assumptions that diplomacy and holy war must have been seen as incompatible, it provides new frameworks for understanding the relationship between the two concepts. It argues that negotiation was not an action which stood outside the normative boundaries of holy war in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but was rather an accepted component of a broader war effort, which was to be judged upon its results. Significantly, many of the same ideological, legal, and cultural frameworks which celebrated and encouraged religious violence also supported diplomacy and negotiation. A better understanding of how these concepts were entwined and understood in the period reveals how diplomacy should be seen as a core aspect of the crusading movement, in both practice and theory.

Keywords: diplomacy
crusades
inter-religious diplomacy
Christian-Muslim relations
medieval diplomacy
Advisor: Tyerman, C
Host immunity against acute viral respiratory infection: investigation of IFITM3 & discovery of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses

Appropriate host immune responses to acute viral respiratory infections are necessary for viral clearance and can determine clinical disease severity. Two such respiratory infections are coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) and influenza, the causative agents of which are severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and influenza A virus (IAV), respectively. Interferon (IFN)-induced transmembrane protein 3 (IFITM3), an innate immune effector, has been shown to restrict replication of IAVs and several other enveloped RNA viruses. While, both anti- and pro-viral activities of IFITM3 have been reported for SARS-CoV-2. Understanding the role of IFITM3 during virus infection is vital as it presents an opportunity to increase viral restriction, but it has yet to be fully elucidated and appears to change subject to the virus. At later stages of an infection, T cells are essential in viral immunity. While T cell responses to IAVs are well characterised, responses against SARS-CoV-2 were poorly defined when the COVID-19 started to spread worldwide in early 2020.
The first part of this study (Chapter 3) investigates the impact of IFITM3 during IAV and SARS-CoV-2 infection using induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived macrophages (iPSDMs). Our data demonstrated IFITM3 as a restrictor for H1N1 infection, a subtype of IAV, while a facilitator for SARS-CoV-2 in iPSDMs. By analysing RNA-Seq data from IFITM3+/+ and IFITM3-/- iPSDMs following virus infection, we uncovered potential associations of IFITM3 with antigen processing and presentation, and cytokine signalling pathways. Chapter 4 characterises SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses in 42 COVID-19 convalescent patients. We observed broad and strong memory T cell responses against SARS-CoV-2 and identified seven dominant CD8+ epitopes. Finally, I show work evaluating T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VoCs) in a small cohort of COVID-19 convalescent patients and uninfected donors vaccinated with ChAdOx1. We established two systems to evaluate T cell responses to naturally processed and presented SARS-CoV-2 spike antigens using recombinant vaccinia virus and live SARS-CoV-2 virus. We found that both natural infection and vaccination could induce multi-functional T cell responses with overall T cell responses remaining despite the identification of escape mutations in VoCs.

Advisor: Dong, T
Wellington, D
Pragmatics and the invisible language of relationships: the case of Korean and KFL learners

This thesis finds itself at the intersection of two fast-moving global trends in linguistics research: first, the swiftly growing interest in pragmatics as a field in need of further development, definition, and delineation between global languages with vastly differing sociocultural patterns of behavior, including politeness (Kiaer (2020b), Taguchi (2019)); and second, unprecedented international attention on the Korean peninsula, leading to a wave of Korean language study by learners of Korean as a foreign language (KFL learners), with steadily increasing enrollment numbers continuing to outperform other languages (Pickles, 2018). These two phenomena have created a specific set of circumstances in which the study of Korean pragmatics and Korean pragmatics education has become extremely relevant. This thesis seeks to address that set of circumstances by setting out, through a variety of ethnographic methodologies, to understand how native Korean speakers perceive their own pragmatic experiences. It then compares Korean speakers’ pragmatic experiences with those of Chinese and Japanese speakers, in order to identify the unique pragmatic features of Korean. Finally, this thesis explores the KFL classroom and examines how KFL learners are currently being exposed to Korean pragmatics in their studies. Through the methodologies pursued here, this thesis finds that Korean speakers are uniquely required by their linguistic circumstances to constantly engage with pragmatic skills, including speech styles and address terms, in order to engage in culturally required relational dynamics, and that KFL learners are being underprepared by current KFL curricula to engage in Korean relational dynamics using those pragmatic skills.

Keywords: East Asian language
honorifics
Korean
language learning
applied linguistics
Korean language
politeness
linguistics
pragmatics
East Asian pragmatics
language education
Advisor: Kiaer, J
Elucidating the role of inflammatory mediators in frozen shoulder

Frozen shoulder is a painful inflammatory fibrotic disease of the glenohumeral joint capsule. While it’s frequently self-limiting, patients can be symptomatic for years. The underlying pathophysiology of frozen shoulder is not fully understood, hampering the development of an effective therapy. Increased expression of inflammatory mediators has been identified in frozen shoulder, suggesting a potential role for these mediators in disease. However, the precise cellular interactions and the cell types expressing inflammatory mediators have not been identified.
A single cell atlas revealed that the rotator interval of the glenohumeral joint capsule is comprised of fibroblasts, myeloid cells, lymphocytes, endothelial cells, and mural cells. Clustering of myeloid cells revealed a CD48+IL1A+ macrophage subset which showed increased expression of several pro-inflammatory genes, including PTGS2, S100A8, EREG, IL1A, IL1B, IL1R1, IL1RN. In frozen shoulder, CD48+IL1A+ macrophages show increased expression of several pro-inflammatory genes, including IL-1 genes (IL1A, IL1B, IL1R1).
CD48+IL1A+ macrophages were localised to both the lining and sub-lining regions of the rotator interval of the glenohumeral joint capsule. The expression (immunohistochemistry) of CD68, CD48, IL-1α, IL-1β, and IL-1R was increased in frozen shoulder relative to comparator patient tissues. As the IL1R1 gene was mainly expressed by fibroblasts, ligand-receptor interaction analysis predicted several important IL-1 ligand-receptor pairs between CD48+IL1A+ macrophages and fibroblast populations, including IL1A-IL1R1 and IL1BIL1R1. In turn, fibroblast populations were predicted to communicate with myeloid cell populations via the CSF1-CSF1R pathway.
Fibroblasts derived from frozen shoulder capsular tissues acquire an inflammatory fibrotic phenotype upon IL-1α and/or IL-1β stimulation, which was characterised by an increase in inflammation (CCL2, CCL5, CCL8, CCL20, CXCL3, CXCL5, NFKBIA, NFKBIZ, IGF1, FGF7, IL6, CSF2, CSF3) and fibrosis related genes (TGFB1, TGFBR1, WNT5A, COL3A1, MMP2, TIMP1), as well as an increased secretion of inflammatory mediators (CXCL-12, GMCSF, IL-1RA, IL-33, IL-6).
This thesis provides novel insight into the cellular basis of frozen shoulder, revealing a distinct CD48+IL1A+ macrophage subset enriched for inflammation in advanced-stage frozen shoulder. CD48+IL1A+ macrophages release IL-1α and IL-1β, which activate surrounding macrophages and fibroblasts via IL-1R to release chemokines and other inflammatory mediators, further promoting inflammation and fibrosis. This data supports the hypothesis that macrophage-fibroblast crosstalk contributes to the underlying pathophysiology of frozen shoulder. Importantly, this thesis provides sufficient data to identify the IL-1R pathway as a potentially important therapeutic target.

Keywords: orthopaedic surgery
frozen shoulder
inflammation
fibrosis
Advisor: Carr, A
Dakin, S
Malonyl radical cyclisations in heteroaromatic functionalisation and natural product synthesis

This thesis describes the application of malonyl radical cyclisations to the synthesis of annulated heteroaromatics and towards the formal synthesis of ginkgolide B (V). It is divided into three chapters:
Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the generation and reactivity of malonyl radicals as well as a summary of their applications in organic synthesis.
Chapter 2 reviews the available methods for the synthesis of annulated heteroaromatics (III) and describes the development and application of a new, malonyl radical-based, photochemical method for their synthesis. This method is based on the photolysis of in situ generated iodomalonates (I) and builds on previous work in the Burton group. Our investigations into the mechanism of this transformation are also detailed in this chapter.
Chapter 3 covers our efforts towards the formal synthesis of ginkgolide B (V) via a malonyl radical cascade. It details the investigation of two different routes and the elaboration of a product of the radical cascade into the core of the natural product (IV). This chapter also describes the enantioselective synthesis of a key intermediate via an organocatalysed Michael addition. Finally, it suggests a synthetic plan to complete the asymmetric formal synthesis of ginkgolide B (V).

Keywords: radical chemistry
total synthesis
Advisor: Burton, J