IDA Mount Holyoke College Institutional Digital Archive
Not a member yet
1794 research outputs found
Sort by
Genetic Analysis of Tissue Remodeling and Lipid Storage in Drosophila melanogaster
No full textTissue remodeling has been used as a model to study cancer. It is also
an important process during the development of Drosophila melanogaster.
During D. melanogaster metamorphosis, which is the transition from the
larva stage to the adult stage, larval fat body remodeling occurs. The
larval fat body changes from a single-cell layered sheet of connected cells
to individual sphere-like motile cells that supply energy to the organism.
Failed or abnormal fat body remodeling can result in death during the
pupal stage.
In my research, I examined the abnormal larval fat body remodeling
phenotype in three D. melanogaster mutant lines. All three lines were
incompletely penetrant for the abnormal larval fat body remodeling phenotype.
I also observed possible developmental delay in mutant lines during the head
eversion process. In addition, I noticed that there are two types of remodeled
larval fat bodies - whitish fat bodies and clear fat bodies in both wild type and
in the mutant lines. I stained remodeled larval fat bodies to detect lipid
droplets and nuclei under fluorescence. Further research should continue on
staining of identified whitish and clear fat bodies to visualize lipid storage,
which might give insights into the regulation of nutrient during
metamorphosis.Biochemistr
“Beneath the colour there was the shape”: Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Artistic Vision in To the Lighthouse
No full textVirginia Woolf’s novels are considered to be amongst the treasures of modernist literature. Revising the conventional realist novel, Woolf explores new techniques in her writings to examine and expand the notions of art, experimenting with her portrayal of time and space and of consciousness and reality. The influence of art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell were crucial to these explorations, especially in connection to visual arts and aesthetics more generally.
This project explores Woolf’s application and reinterpretation of Fry and Bell’s aesthetics and analyzes her contemplation on art through the lens. Three central questions are constantly reviewed: What is art? How are works of art created? And what are the justification for and significance of art? Specifically, it sets up two frameworks, namely the contrast between “actual life and imaginative life” and between “vision and design,” based on Fry’s Vision and Design and Bell’s Art. It discusses how Woolf’s own theory of art emerges in To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts from her use and revision of Fry and Bell as she provides their formal frameworks with historical context that focuses on the position of women and the female artist.Englis
A Modern Dance with Death: Percy Delf Smith and the Aesthetic of Direct Experience
No full textIn 1919, immediately following the First World War, the English artist Percy Smith produced a series of seven etchings entitled Dance of Death 1914-1918. Contemporaries responded enthusiastically to his inventive treatment of the subject. This paper reinterprets the series in its historical and social context to better understand its original emotional impact.
During the war, censorship created a chasm between the home front and the Western Front. Towards the end of the conflict, soldiers began producing writings and visual art that presented an unfiltered image of the war, which an uneasy public began to crave. These frontline accounts brought the daily perils of the Tommies home, and contained what historian Samuel Hynes called the “aesthetic of direct experience.” This quality of authenticity became a prized ingredient in the public’s eye.
Smith illustrated his own military experience through the reimagining of a recognized Medieval trope. The series vicariously transports viewers to the front line, following Death as he meanders through the war zone, pausing here and there to either spare or collect a soldier. By conflating the factual with the macabre, Smith expanded the aesthetic of direct experience to expose not only the war’s physical trauma but its psychological toll.
Despite the War’s centennial and reinvigoration of scholarship on its art, Smith’s contributions have remained largely unstudied. My research draws heavily on unpublished archival material housed in the Percy Smith Foundation in Cheshunt, England, and early published sources.Art Histor
"The Butchery Which We Call Justice": Petit Treason and Domestic Crime in the English Common Law, 1351-1828
No full textFrom 1351 to 1828, women who killed their husbands were not charged with murder but instead with petit treason, a special category to designate the killing of one’s superior. Petit treason was a capital crime, and convicted petit traitors received the same punishment as high traitors, heretics, and witches: execution by burning. “‘The Butchery Which We Call Justice’: Petit Treason and Domestic Crime in the English Common Law, 1351-1828” uses petit treason as a case study to explore the evolution of the English legal system. Over the five hundred year tenure of petit treason, judges, juries, defendants, and other legal actors reshaped medieval legal standards. Petit treason was directly affected by changing attitudes toward gender roles, social hierarchy, and both domestic and monarchical authority.
This project analyses petit treason in three phases. During the textualist period, from 1351 to 1691, courts generally followed the letter of the law in trial proceedings, jury verdicts, and sentencing. In the transition period from 1691 to 1752, the approach changed, as common law principles were incorporated back into petit treason proceedings. The bounds of the Treason Act were stretched by judges, juries, and executioners, who challenged statutory law. The convergence period, from 1752 to 1828, witnessed the culmination of a struggle between top-down statutory law, enacted through legislation, and ground-level common law driven by the courts. In 1828, Parliament abolished petit treason as part of an international movement towards legal codification. The evolution of petit treason fit into a larger transformation in the prosecution of domestic crime, a parallel which is explored through comparison with infanticide, petit treason by a servant, and a husband’s murder of his wife.
By tracing the evolution of criminal law through the family, this project reveals a tension at the core of the English legal system. This case study illustrates the ongoing conflict between common law and statutory law. Petit treason addressed the paradox of women’s place in the home, both as a subject and as an actor, and how public attitudes towards authority and the law shifted over time. Resting on court records, popular media, and legal guidebooks, this project assesses the intersection of gender, violence, and power in the early modern home.Histor
Reduced Damage From Facing-Target Sputtering of Indium Tin Oxide Films
No full textThis study addresses a current limitation in the development of high performance organic optoelectronic devices: depositing indium tin oxide (ITO), a transparent, conductive film, without damage to underlying organic films. ITO is deposited with a plasma sputter deposition process which causes damage to organic films. Previous research demonstrates that damage can be reduced with a sputtering configuration with substrates placed perpendicular to two facing guns. We employ fluorescent organic material Alq3 (tris-(8-hydroxyquinoline)aluminum) to explore damage caused by radio-frequency facing-target magnetron plasma sputtering by means of photoluminescence spectroscopy. We present an investigation of the degree to which Alq3 is damaged in the plasma sputtering process. We explore the dependence of the damage on the rate of growth. We evaluate the effects of closing the sputter system shutter to eliminate direct plasma exposure as well as the effect of employing a BPhen (bathophenanthroline) protective layer. We find that facing-target sputtering can be performed at a high growth rate without causing significantly more damage than that caused when sputtering is performed at a low growth rate, with only a 10% reduction in PL from a rate of 0.2 ̊A/s to 2.4 ̊A/s. We demonstrate that the greatest amount of damage occurs at the start of plasma sputtering. The BPhen protective layer is shown to mitigate damage to the surface of the organic material by exposure
to gaseous ions.Physic
Transformation and Totalization: Intimate Violence in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands, 1918-19, 1939, and 1941
No full text“Transformation and Totalization: Intimate Violence in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands, 1918-19, 1939, and 1941” examines the transformation of intimate violence—violence between and among neighbors—before and after communities in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands were exposed to totalitarianism. I structure my comparison around the methods, motives, and scale of intimate violence during the Polish-Ukrainian Civil War (1918-19), the Soviet invasion of Poland (1939), and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (1941). However unlike many scholars before me, I go beyond the traditional focus on anti-Jewish violence. The Polish-Ukrainian borderlands were multi-ethnic and all three ethno-linguistic groups (Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews) must be examined equally in order to present a neutral narrative of inter-ethnic violence. In my two chapters I present primary source evidence of violence not only against Jews, but against Poles and Ukrainians as well, with most attacks being initiated by locals against their neighbors. The shift in intimate violence that occurred after the establishment of totalitarian rule in the region is extraordinary. In 1918-19, the most brutal methods of violence (e.g. rape, torture, and murder) were monopolized by militias and the armed forces. The Soviet invasion of 1939 destroyed all existing social hierarchies—including those present in the military—providing civilians the ability to engage in methods of violence previously restricted to them. It was not until 1941, however, that civilians employed rape, torture, and murder on a large scale; unlike Soviet authorities, Nazi commanders gave many Poles and Ukrainians a “free hand” with regard to the initiation of violence against their neighbors.Histor
A Little Justice: Settler Colonialism, Shasta Dam, and the Metabolic Rift in California’s Hydrologic Cycle
No full textCalifornia’s water resource management relies on the Central Valley Project. This network of dams, canals, pumps, and diversions extracts water from the northern, wetter parts of the state and subsequently conveys water south to irrigate agriculture in the semi-arid San Joaquin Valley. Shasta Dam, the lynchpin of the Central Valley Project, sits at the confluence of the Sacramento, Pit, and McCloud Rivers. The Bureau of Reclamation plans to enlarge Shasta Dam and Reservoir in order to provide additional water to agribusiness interests. Westlands Water District, the largest and wealthiest water district in the United States, has argued that the Dam raise is necessary to secure agricultural production against drought. However, the initial construction of Shasta Dam flooded approximately 90% of the traditional and allotment land of the Winnemem Wintu, who were never compensated for the loss. The Winnemem Wintu argue that because the Dam raise would destroy dozens of additional sacred sites, the Dam raise constitutes cultural genocide. In this thesis, I interrogate the political ecology and environmental history of Shasta Dam in order to place the Dam raise in historical, political economic, and ecological context. I argue that the capitalist logic of accumulation and the settler colonial logic of elimination intersect in California’s water resource management.
The Central Valley Project was conceptualized by the State of California in the 1920’s as a “salvage” project to rescue capitalist agriculture from the ecological barrier of aridity. When it was constructed, the Central Valley Project simultaneously dispossessed Indigenous peoples and generated a metabolic rift. Drawing from the work of Patrick Wolfe (2006; 2016), I argue that the displacement of the Winnemem Wintu in the 1930’s must be understood a function of settler colonial structures of elimination; no clean line can be drawn to separate the construction of Shasta Dam from the 1848-1873 California Genocide. Drawing from Foster, Clark, and York (2010), I theorize the Central Valley Project’s disruption to the flows and flood patterns of Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers as a metabolic rift in the hydrologic cycle, a “hydrologic rift”. I argue that declines in wetland and floodplain habitat, groundwater availability, and water quality are all symptomatic of this hydrologic rift. The dams of the Central Valley Project also blocked the majority of cold-water tributary habitat in California, preventing salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. The subsequent extirpation of Chinook salmon from the McCloud River is of particular importance to the Winnemem Wintu, who consider salmon a relative. The Shasta Dam raise maintains the hydrologic rift, further dispossesses the Winnemem Wintu, and contributes to extractive water policies which threaten endangered salmon populations and disproportionately impact Indigenous communities. The profits of agribusiness in the Central Valley today are predicated upon the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the elimination of Indigenous ecologies in California.Environmental Studie
Enacting Transbutch: Queer Narratives Beyond Essentialism
No full textWhat, how, and who is transbutch? In this thesis, I examine memoirs and personal essays that define and defy boundaries between “butch" and “transmasculine" subjectivity –– and investigate my own queer experience in the process –– in order to counter the myth of an irreparable trans/butch divide. Deemed by some to be “border wars,” conflicts between transness and butchness are emblematic of the contested (hi)stories on which the identities are founded: namely, white supremacy, colonialism, transmedicalism, and lesbian separatism/trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Ensuing identity-battles –– which have increased with increased access to biomedical transition –– rely on a teleological approach to identity, and, I argue, may only be ameliorated by prioritizing experiential multiplicity and political affinity over fixed, essential truth. Through engagement with a variety of personal narratives by authors such as S. Bear Bergman, Ivan Coyote, Rae Spoon, and blogger MainelyButch, I counter the understanding of identity as intrinsic and immutable, showing instead the dynamism of transbutch life, its stretchiness as a personal and community signifier, and its constant re-definition by its occupants.Critical Social Though
Configuration Space Non-Fundamentalism: An Ontological Structure
No full textThe purpose of this thesis is to explore ontological interpretations of quantum mechanics and present a new ontological structure, which will be called Configuration Space non-Fundamentalism. The structure assumes a 3 x 10^80-dimensional universe, in which reside a non-fundamental, 3 x 10^80-dimensional wave function field and fundamental three-dimensional entities. It will be motivated in the context of other ontological interpretations as one of the most straightforward interpretations of quantum mechanics. I intend for these motivations to show that Configuration Space non-Fundamentalism is worthy of further consideration and specification.Philosoph
