VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Post-revolutionary body politics: Diego Rivera and Juan Rulfo (1922-1965)

This thesis explores evolving aesthetic and intellectual interpretations of nationhood in post-revolutionary Mexico through a comparative reading of the bodily imagery presented in the murals and illustrations of Diego Rivera (1922-1935) and the fictional, photographic and cinematic works of Juan Rulfo (1953-1965). Working in different media, Rivera and Rulfo are identified as monuments to two distinct moments in Mexico’s cultural history, yet they have never been examined comparatively. Reading their artistic corpora side-by-side reveals a shared preoccupation with the body that sheds light not only on its function as a critical political signifier in their works, but also on how the ideas of nation and revolution were conceptualised, both literally and figuratively, in primarily corporeal terms during this critical period in Mexican history. Examining their works in relation to key aspects of the post-revolutionary nation-building project, the four chapters of the thesis map an evolution in representations of the body, as it transitions from a state of stability, legibility and cohesion in Rivera’s works of the 1920s and 1930s, to one of precariousness, ambiguity and flux in Rulfo’s artistic output post-1953. Locating these images for the first time within Mexico’s evolving post-revolutionary intellectual landscape and the broader constellation of thinkers and artists that shaped the national imaginary during these years, I analyse their distinct corporeal imaginaries to trace the imagined lifecycle of the revolutionary nation from the euphoria of the 1920s to the phase of disenchantment beginning with the Alemán administration (1946-1952). Corrective to previous studies examining the cultural negotiation of post-revolutionary identity, the thesis analyses these representations within an interdisciplinary framework that sheds light on the intimate but previously unexplored links between artistic and intellectual activity during this period and contextualises Rivera’s and Rulfo’s works within the broader dialogue between visual and literary forms that defined post-revolutionary artistic production.

Advisor: del Pilar Blanco, M
Molecular and physiological consequences of prematurity and blood pressure elevation on the young adult left ventricular stress response

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of global mortality. Acute disease usually strikes later in life, but risk trajectories are established earlier and are impacted by factors including preterm birth and blood pressure elevation. Prematurity results in increased left ventricular (LV) mass and is a risk factor for hypertensive disorders and heart failure later in life. Blood pressure elevation also contributes to increased LV mass and cardiovascular risk, and is increasingly prevalent in young adults. This thesis used purposive recruitment of young adults with a range of blood pressures and birth histories (preterm-born and term-born) and employed deep baseline cardiovascular phenotyping combined with exercise stress assessments to characterise LV stress response phenotypes in young adults born preterm, or with blood pressure elevation. Those born preterm were found to have impaired, declining exercise ejection fraction with increasing workload. This defect related to shorter LV length, a characteristic structural feature in the preterm-born. Preterm-born young adults also had a lower aerobic capacity than controls, which was commensurate with their exercise systolic impairment. In young adults with elevated blood pressure, it was found that submaximal exercise produced greater fatigue and impaired LV systolic performance vs normotensive controls. Blood pressure elevation was also associated with lower exercise capacity and enjoyment of physical activity and also sub-clinical LV mass increase. Collectively, these findings suggest preterm-born young adults have reduced myocardial functional reserve which likely contributes to risk of future disease including heart failure. Continued research is needed to better understand risk stratification and management for this population. In the blood pressure studies, the dysfunctional exercise stress response and lower aerobic capacity may indicate greater risk, while lower enjoyment of physical activity may confound exercise prescription. Future studies are needed to identify intervention strategies to optimally manage physiological and experiential challenges in this growing population.

Keywords: hypertension
prematurity
cardiac stress response
Advisor: Leeson, P
Lewandowski, A
Gender segregated labor markets and social inequality between occupations

This thesis is concerned with the link between gender segregation in the labor market and social inequality between occupations. Two topical questions are at the basis of the presented research: First, are female-typed jobs paid less than other jobs? Second, does women’s gender-typed occupational sorting lead to wage inequalities in the female population? In both cases, interest lies in sizes of statistical effects or associations, and in the mechanisms driving observed results. All three of the empirical chapters in this thesis employ a measure of occupations’ gender-type. This way, we classify occupations–either on a continuous or a categorical scale–as rather female-typed, male-typed, or as gender integrated. Confirming broad findings in the extant literature on segregation, this thesis identifies occupational gender-types as a key structural component of past and current wage inequality. Results on the United States suggest that cultural devaluation of female-typed jobs has been confined to the immediate post-war era, and to jobs in the bottom eighty percent of the wage ladder. Effects have strongly declined over time, which we explain by historical trends in society’s adoption of gender-egalitarian views. Analyses of the German case also show a strong link between segregation and wage disparities. This is evidenced by two separate findings: First, occupational gender stereotypes covary negatively with wages in the bottom half of the wage distribution, and in particular for women. Second, gender segregation has recently become a source of emerging wage inequality between women. The most important factor explaining this trend has been the increasing rate at which highly educated women select into male-typed jobs.

Keywords: segregation
gender
wage gap
inequality
labor market
United States
Germany
occupations
Advisor: Mills, C
Critical readings of perceptual models in the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson: bass culture

This thesis offers an extended reading of the poetry of the Jamaican-born British poet and reggae performer Linton Kwesi Johnson and seeks through these readings to also understand the wider Anglophone Caribbean literary canon’s concern to define a Caribbean aesthetic. It proposes three perspectives through which to understand Johnson’s influences and to analyse the relationship between aesthetics and politics in his poetry: first, the Anglophone Caribbean literary canon (chapter 1); second, British reggae and punk subcultures (chapter 2); and, third, Jamaican dub and reggae music (chapter 3). By taking up these three perspectives, the thesis positions Johnson’s poetry within, respectively, the post-independence Caribbean canon, post-war British poetry, and Black British writing. The thesis demonstrates how Johnson’s poetry and criticism both implicitly and explicitly think through the importance of aesthetic choices in the process of generating different forms of black political consciousness through poetry. As reflected in the order of the chapters, Johnson’s poetry and criticism recovers a Caribbean past, while also voicing the Black British present, and finally anticipates a utopian ‘dubwise’ future. Throughout, the thesis acknowledges the interconnectedness of these three elements, and discusses how Johnson’s work is filled with tensions between themes of universality and Jamaican particularity, political commitment and aestheticism.
More concretely, the thesis argues that Johnson takes forward and redirects Kamau Brathwaite’s and The Caribbean Artist Movement’s interest in defining a Caribbean aesthetic. He paradoxically continues Brathwaite’s project of developing new and authentically Caribbean ‘perceptual models’ in poetry by interacting with the punk movement and creating specifically Black British forms of reggae. Reading Johnson’s poetry through the prism of the Caribbean canon, and the canon through the lens of Johnson’s poetry, therefore allows us to see that the concept of a Caribbean aesthetic is not only a stylistic or ethnic category, but also a methodological one. Furthermore, the thesis shows that Johnson is inspired by the belief systems of dub and reggae music to develop the core aesthetic-political concept of ‘bass culture’. The concept frames Caribbean aesthetics, as well as black aesthetics more generally, as radically inclusive, even universal categories, which nonetheless have a determinate content.
Overall, the thesis extends existing academic scholarship on Johnson’s poetry, while contributing more broadly to our understanding of both the possibilities and limitations involved in approaching Caribbean literature, Black British literature, and British literature as distinct categories.

Advisor: Boehmer, E
'The refugee' reproduced, negotiated, and represented: hierarchies of Malian refugeeness in Burkina Faso

This dissertation starts from an empirical observation and an intellectual assumption. The former dates from 2013: during a research trip in Burkina Faso I heard and observed humanitarian workers distinguish (in both discourse and practice) between who they thought were 'real refugees' and those who were not, regardless of their legal status. The intellectual assumption is that a category and a label are not only imposed on people designated as such, but are negotiated by the actors themselves and within their interactions with other actors and their social and political economies.
Building on these elements, the questions at the centre of this work are: how are hierarchies of refugeeness (re-)produced? And how, when, and why can this (re-) production create or reinforce inequalities among the refugees? I answer these questions by relying on three empirical chapters which focus on different aspects of the construction of refugeeness and the experiences people have and make of 'the refugee' category in the context of Malian forced migration in urban Burkina Faso. More specifically, I look at the encounter of the refugee regime and the refugees' lives through the study of the reproduction, negotiation, and representation of 'the refugee' status and category.
What I found and show is how hierarchies of refugeeness can create or reinforce inequalities among the refugees, and how refugeeness, and the possibilities to negotiate with it are unequally produced and distributed, locally but also globally. By unpacking refugeeness through the notion of commodification and relying on ethnographic methods and economic anthropology to study humanitarian interventions, I analyse how the encounter between the refugee regime and the refugees' complex, situated, and varied lives can produce inequalities and is experienced unequally by the refugees themselves.

Keywords: Burkina Faso
Intersectionality
Commodification
UNHCR
Refugees
Mali
Inequalities
Advisor: Chatty, D
Crivello, G
Essays on foreign direct investment: some missing pieces

This thesis contains three chapters. All are based on firm-level data for Chile between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, and all concern the effects of foreign direct investment: the first and second chapters are about the gender balance of employment and training, respectively, while the third analyses how productivity spillovers depend on distance from the productivity frontier.

Keywords: Gender
Training
FDI
spillovers
Advisor: Javorcik, B
Venables, A
Stability for nonlinear diffusive PDEs

This thesis focuses on well-posedness and stability estimates (i.e. continuous dependence with respect to the nonlinearities) for a family of cross-diffusion systems that includes several models used to describe cell diffusion in Mathematical Biology for one or more species. We discuss rigorous quantitative results for a class of (possibly degenerate) parabolic PDEs, including scalar equations as well as systems. The approach is typical of Analysis of PDEs, hence the concepts of weak solutions in Sobolev spaces, a priori estimates and well-posedness are crucial. Considering scalar, nonlinear diffusion, we extend the existing solvability, uniqueness, boundedness and stability results. Regarding non-degenerate models for multiple species, we work in the framework of systems with an entropy structure and a limited set of other assumptions that allow us to prove stability estimates, improving some of the existing results. Finally, we have been working on the multi-species, degenerate case, providing a continuous dependence estimate under suitable (but rather restrictive) assumptions. Two different types of numerical simulations are presented in order to complement the abstract results.

Keywords: Stability estimates
Cross-diffusion systems
Advisor: Capdeboscq, Y
Bruna, M
Analysis of stochastic PDEs arising from large portfolios of stochastic volatility models

The aim of this thesis is to study a large market model of defaultable assets in which the asset price processes are modelled as stochastic volatility models with volatility mean-reversion and default upon hitting a lower boundary. We assume that both the asset prices and their volatilities are correlated through systemic Brownian motions. In the first part of the thesis, we are interested in the loss process that arises in this setting and we prove the existence of a large portfolio limit for the empirical measure process of this system. This limit evolves as a measure valued process and we show that it will have a density given in terms of a solution to a stochastic partial differential equation of filtering type in the two-dimensional half-space, with a Dirichlet boundary condition. Next, we employ Malliavin calculus to establish the existence of a regular density for the volatility component of the SPDE, and an approximation by models of piecewise constant volatilities combined with a kernel smoothing technique to obtain existence and regularity for the full two-dimensional filtering problem. We are able to establish good regularity properties and uniqueness for solutions, except in the CIR case where uniqueness remains an open problem. In the second part of the thesis, we study the convergence of the total mass of a solution to this stochastic initial-boundary value problem when the mean-reversion coefficients of the volatilities are multiples of a parameter which tends to infinity. When the coefficients of the noises of the volatilities are multiples of the square root of the same parameter, the convergence is extremely weak. On the other hand, when the noise coefficients are independent of this exploding parameter, the volatilities converge to their means and we can have much better approximations. Such approximations can be used to improve the accuracy of certain risk-management methods in markets where fast volatility mean-reversion is observed.

Keywords: fast mean-reversion
large portfolio limit
partial Malliavin calculus
Malliavin calculus
stochastic volatility
probabilistic solution
SPDE
empirical measure
ornstein-uhlenbeck
Sobolev estimate
empirical limit
weighted Sobolev space
mean-reverting
particle approximation
conditional expectation
boundary condition
CIR process
fast mean-reverting asymptotics
Regular density
half-space
Advisor: Hambly, B
Signal processing for next generation coriolis flow metering

This thesis aims to develop new signal processing techniques for Coriolis flowmeters. Two/multi-phase flow metering is a long established problem in many applications (e.g. the oil & gas, chemical, biotech, pharmaceutical industries) and no perfect solution is available.
In the light of this challenge, recent developments in the Coriolis flowmeters are explored and issues for applying Coriolis flowmeter in two-phase flow conditions are identified. Benchmarks for both empty-to-full batch and continuous two-phase flow reflecting real-world applications are developed for evaluating signal processing techniques. Then current Coriolis flowmeter signal processing techniques are reviewed and tested using the benchmark examples.
A new family of signal processing techniques based on complex signal processing are developed: these include Complex Bandpass Filter (CBF), Complex Notch Filter (CNF) and a combination of CBF with CNF (CBF-CNF). The new techniques are compared with the current methods via the benchmarks and exhibit good performance.
CBF and CBF-CNF are implemented in a prototype transmitter to test alongside with an ‘Oxbox’ transmitter which is a laboratory version of the Foxboro CFT-50/1 (a commercial transmitter developed by the Oxford research group). Signal generator tests are carried out first in order to validate the proper operation of each new technique. Next, single-phase flow tests are carried out to demonstrate that the new algorithms running on the prototype transmitter measure accurately and, joined to a flow tube, can perform as a basic Coriolis flowmeter. Finally, two-phase (water/air) flow tests are carried out with the new algorithms. The performance is compared with that of the Oxbox. From the results, the new CBF and CBF-CNF algorithms perform comparably with the Oxbox at low Gas Void Fraction (GVF), while at high GVF they reduce frequency and phase difference standard deviation by as much as 10 times.
Finally, a new non-linear state space model with Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is developed as a further promising signal processing technique for Coriolis flowmeter. The new model shows good performance compared with both existing and complex signal processing based techniques but some challenges need to be solved before EKF can be implemented in a prototype transmitter.

Keywords: Two-phase Flow
Coriolis Flow Meter,
Signal Processing
Batching
Advisor: Henry, M
Duncan, S
Interpreting the expressive worlds of Schubert's late instrumental works

This thesis offers a contextual framework for interpreting the expressive worlds of the instrumental works Schubert composed in the last six years of his life (1822–1828), focusing on notions of the gothic, the sublime, and the grotesque. These interrelated categories are examined from both semiotic and hermeneutic perspectives, with attention devoted to their musical signifiers, notably in terms of topical content, as well as their associations with trends in literature and the visual arts. Areas of investigation include excess and transgression; death, ghostliness, and evocations of the past; emotional distress and the fear of the unknown; and an emphasis on fantasy, the sublime, and the grotesque. Case-studies are drawn from selected impromptus and sonatas for piano solo, as well as chamber and orchestral works, including the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, D 759, and the String Quintet, D 956. Ultimately what emerges across the course of the study is a view of the composer’s late instrumental style as one that exhibits myriad forms of aesthetic strangeness, drawing us into the psychological dimension of this extraordinary music.

Advisor: Wollenberg, S
Tunbridge, L
Characterisation of mechanical responses of nickel based superalloys to deformation at high strain rates and high temperatures

The project established an understanding on the mechanical and microstructural characteristics of two Nickel based superalloys, RR1000 and IN718 under high strain rate deformation at elevated temperatures. The strain rates tested are from 0.5s−1 up to 3000s−1 and the temperatures from 700◦C up to 1200◦C at 100◦C intervals, with a heating rate of 100◦Cs−1 or 50◦Cs−1 at higher temperatures. These conditions are selected to closely resemble the conditions seen in inertia friction welding.
It was found that both yield and peak stresses of RR1000 and IN718 are relatively independent of strain rates, but decrease with increasing temperatures. Both materials harden significantly below 700 ◦C, and the work hardening decreases with increasing temperature but remains relatively independent of strain rates, as a result of the excellent precipitation hardening effect from the γ' and γ''in RR1000 and IN718 respectively. RR1000 work hardens considerably more than IN718, which is attributed to twinning observed in both γ matrix and γ' precipitates, whereas twinning only occurs in the γ matrix in IN718.
At high temperatures, particularly just below the solvus temperature, the adiabatic temperature rise at high strain rate can be sufficient to push the deformation above the solvus temperature. Therefore, the mechanical strength of the material is significantly decreased, from not only the further dissolution of strengthening γ' precipitates, but also from constitutional liquation of the remaining γ' precipitates. As the deformation continues, dynamic recrystallisation of grains occurs in the microstructure, which softens the material. This process occurs at a critical strain, which decreases with increasing temperature but increases with increasing strain rates.
Therefore, the mechanical strength of RR1000 and IN718 at high strain rates and high temperature is dependent on the competition between the hardening of precipitates and twinning in the microstructure, and the softening from the adiabatic temperature rise, as well as the dynamic recrystallisation of the grains during plastic deformation.

Advisor: Siviour, C
The function of Ana1 in centrosome assembly, and the regulation of centriole growth in Drosophila

Centrioles are microtubule-based structures that play a crucial role in the formation of centrosomes, cilia and flagella. Centriole defects are linked to several human diseases such as microcephaly, primordial dwarfism, cancer and ciliopathies. In Drosophila, Plk4, Sas-6, Ana2, Sas-4 and Asl form a conserved pathway that is essential for centriole assembly. Ana1 was identified as a potential centriole assembly protein in two genome-wide RNAi screens in Drosophila S2 cells, and ana1 mutant flies are uncoordinated, and their sperm are immotile. Thus, Ana1 appeared to have an important role in centriole assembly, but it was unclear how it functioned in the context of the known assembly pathway.
The primary aim of my thesis was to characterise the function of fly Ana1 in vivo. I found that Ana1 is not essential for centriole assembly, but it helps recruit Asl to new-born centrioles to allow them to mature properly so that they can duplicate and organize mitotic PCM. Unexpectedly, I discovered that Ana1 also promotes centriole elongation in a dose-dependent manner. Several centriolar proteins can influence centriole length, but how they do so is unclear. In collaboration with several colleagues in the laboratory, we developed techniques that allowed us, for the first time, to monitor the kinetics of daughter centriole growth in Drosophila embryos. We found that Plk4 sets the size of the centriole cartwheel by enforcing an inverse relationship between the cartwheel growth rate and period. I found that Ana1 does not influence cartwheel growth, but I identified several other proteins that do so, most notably CP110 and Cep97, that normally bind to the distal end of the centrioles. These studies have provided several important new insights into how centriole length is regulated.

Advisor: Raff, J