‘Natural piety’ and sentiment: children, landscape and religion in the paintings of William Collins, R.A. (1787-1847)

Very little has been written about the work of the painter William Collins, R.A. (1787-1847) despite the fact that his contemporaries considered him to be one of the leading artists of his time. Most of his paintings are unknown to modern scholarship, with the result that an assessment of his significance for nineteenth-century British art has never been properly undertaken. Whilst a number of his contemporaries, such as David Wilkie, William Mulready, Charles Lock Eastlake, William Dyce and John Rogers Herbert have been the subject of detailed examination, and their contributions recognised, Collins has not. This thesis fills that gap in art historical scholarship of the period, first by identifying as many of Collins’s paintings as possible, and then by undertaking a close reading and detailed visual analysis of them. It establishes the links between his painting and the social, literary and religious cross-currents of his time, and demonstrates that Collins was actively involved in the fields of genre, landscape and coastal painting, and that in all these fields he gave children an unusual agency. Between 1838 and 1843, during the first phase of the Oxford Movement, he produced a series of paintings which reflected major Tractarian pre-occupations. During that same period, towards the end of his life, he painted a number of biblical subjects which demonstrate that he was at the forefront of attempts to establish a distinct Protestant approach to religious art. Many features found in his approach were adopted a few years later by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who knew the Collins family well. I conclude that the currently understood histories of nineteenth-century British art need re-evaluation, so as to include Collins’s significant contributions to landscape painting, the portrayal of children, paintings of the coast, and religious art of the period. I also make the case for regarding Collins as a Pre-Raphaelite precursor

Essays on the economic valuation of wildfires

This thesis studies changes and differences in safety preferences as revealed by the housing market through the capitalisation of wildfire risk into property prices. To explain changes or differences in property prices, we implement the hedonic price method using high-quality geographic information system data on utility-bearing attributes specific to the property and its location. For this purpose, we focus on Western Australia during 2010-2019, a region of high wildfire risk with recent policy changes. CHAPTER 1 studies the near-miss effect of wildfires, i.e., the impact of a wildfire disaster on the area free from damage but subject to information effects. These information effects may alter households’ risk perception depending on their experience during the event. The wildfire disaster that we analyse is the Waroona Fire of 2016. To identify the near-miss effect, we rely on the use of difference-in-differences and a multidimensional near-miss area defined by proximity to the burn scar and receiving warnings during the fire event. Our findings suggest that the proximity treatment effect is positive due to a risk reduction effect from burnt fuel that dominates over any disamenity impacts. On the other hand, the warning treatment effect is negative, suggesting an increase in risk perception due to vulnerability feelings. CHAPTER 2 studies the introduction of wildfire risk maps in 2015, known in Western Australia as ‘bushfire prone area’ maps. These maps were received with surprise by residents and areas mapped as ‘risky’ faced more stringent planning and building regulations. Taking advantage of the sharp boundaries that divide designated from non-designated areas, we use a regression discontinuity design to investigate the price differential for designated properties. We find that properties within bushfire prone areas are sold at a lower price, and results suggest that this discount is moreover driven by a pure information shock that increases risk perceptions, rather than by any predetermined risk perceptions or the more stringent planning and building regulations that apply to new builds. CHAPTER 3 studies preferences for prescribed fires by accounting for its exposure in terms of number of fires and area burnt. Prescribed fires are used by land managers to reduce the likelihood of uncontrollable wildfires, but generate disamenity impacts, such as smoke haze and road closures. These fires also face strong opposition from conservationists. Using property fixed effects and controlling for wildfire exposure, we find a positive preference for prescribed fires, and stronger results for more recent fires, which we attribute to the depreciating nature of risk reducing interventions over time and/or to availability heuristics due to recent fires being easier to retrieve. Our results are also stronger when we use the number of fires, than when we use area burnt, suggesting households pay more attention to the frequency component of risk, rather than consequence. Additionally, properties with no wildfire exposure are sold at a price significantly higher, suggesting perhaps that households’ demand for prescribed fires is higher in the absence of the risk reduction effect of wildfires. Our findings also suggest that the use of property fixed effects is important for an appropriate incorporation of time-constant attributes. Overall, our findings suggest that risk perception updates are capitalised into the housing market, particularly in areas that are wildfire prone, as that of Western Australia; meaning that policy makers do have the potential to alter people’s beliefs about risk. Amid an increasing risk of wildfires across the globe, much more research is needed on identifying misperceptions on risk, tools for correction, and households’ preferences for forest management practices

The Kura-Araxes culture in Azerbaijan and its wider regional context in the Caucasus

The Kura-Araxes Culture (hereafter KAC) is one of the most distinctive and long-lived archaeological complexes of the ancient Near East, which existed roughly between 3500-2500 BC, covering an astonishingly wide geographical areas during the Early Bronze Age (hereafter EBA). Despite increasing investigations and studies of the KAC communities in the Caucasus region, our knowledge of Azerbaijan is still fragmentary. The primary objective of this study was to focus, for the first time, on the comprehensive study of the case study area, Azerbaijan, in order to develop a deep understanding of the life of KAC communities during the EBA. The second objective was to evaluate Azerbaijan’s place in the broader picture of the KAC and to develop a wider interpretation of the culture that will be interrogated and reconsidered broadly in the Caucasus and in the wider extent of the ‘KAC world’ for future research. To meet these objectives, a comprehensive Gazetteer was created to provide a detailed account of every known KAC site in the contemporary borders of Azerbaijan. This will enable scholars to engage with material previously inaccessible. More importantly, this comprehensive study of the KAC in English will be widely available as an international resource for the scholars of Azerbaijan and beyond. The understanding of the life of KAC communities in the region is mainly restricted to ceramic assemblages. This study addresses this gap and is the first to examine existing fragmented records surrounding the settlement pattern and the nature of settlement structures, funerary practices, and building tradition in Azerbaijan. This work interrogates the notion of KAC within this wider dataset contrary to general statements asserted by earlier scholars. This data approach was used to understand the narrative method of the chronological development of the culture, through the implication of homogeneity-heterogeneity features, traditional peculiarities of local variants, and the values and worldviews of these communities. This study contributes to the understanding of a broader picture of the culture and presents a more representative narrative of KAC communities in Azerbaijan. The research found that KAC in Azerbaijan had a sense of unity, as demonstrated by some shared collection of artefacts and features, to the rest of the KAC regions in the Caucasus. Interestingly, it was also found that alongside a similar set of commonalities, there are some distinctive traits that are unique to these communities living in the region

Milton's Hellenism

This thesis investigates the Hellenism of the English poet John Milton from his student writings at Cambridge through to Paradise Lost. It explores Milton’s engagement with classical, Hellenistic, Byzantine, and Early Modern Greek texts and it considers Milton’s reading of Greek scholarship and interactions with Greek scholars and Hellenic scholarship. Chapter 1, ‘Milton’s Cambridge Greek’, consists of two sections: ‘Protestant Hellenism at Milton’s Cambridge: A Case Study of James Duport’s Greek Paraphrase of the Book of Job, Threnothriambos (1637)’ and ‘Greek and the “Lady of Christ’s College”: Latin–Greek Code-Switching in Milton ‘Prolusion VI’’. Chapter 2, ‘Milton Among the Hellenists in England and Italy’ considers the role that Greek played in Milton’s correspondence and poetic exchanges with Charles Diodati and Lucas Holstenius; it also considers the nature of Milton’s own Hellenic research at libraries in Rome and Florence during his travels in Italy from 1638–39. Chapter 3 considers the political and polemical roles that Greek texts played for Milton from the mid-1640s to 1660 and consists of three sections: ‘Marshall’s Ignorant Hand: Milton’s Greek Epigram and the 1645 Poems Frontispiece and the First Edition of Langbaine’s Longinus (1636)’; ‘O Soul of Sir John Cheek: Milton and the Legacy of Sixteenth-Century Greek Humanism’; and ‘John Milton, Leonard Philaras, and Early Modern Advocacy for Greece’s Liberation from the Ottoman Empire’. The final, fourth chapter explores the influence of Greek texts—ranging from the Homeric epics and the fragmentary Epic Cycle through to Byzantine and Early Modern Greek texts—upon Milton’s design of Books 1 and 2 of Paradise Lost

Digital twins and intelligence: A symbiotic framework

In the evolving landscape of intelligent cyber-physical systems, the concept of Digital Twins (DTs) emerges as a pivotal paradigm. The DT represents a symbiotic relationship between a virtual model and its physical counterpart, offering insights and control for the physical system. When combining intelligence with DTs, research is still inadequate in considering intelligence manifested in both the real-world system and the DT. The foundational motivation stems from the increasing prevalence of autonomy and intelligence in modern systems, which often operate within intricate and dynamic environments. Systems in this context can be designed to be computationally self-aware, but may suffer from limited computational resources, which restricts their level of intelligence. DTs can offload their computational burden to offer more informed analysis to overcome the restriction. However, as self-aware systems accumulate knowledge and exhibit intelligence, the role of DTs in enhancing their capabilities becomes a compelling question. The central inquiry guiding this research is: How should an intelligent DT be designed to facilitate an intelligent system which is already endowed with computational self-awareness? This thesis proposes a novel notion of mutual intelligence enrichment, which enables runtime knowledge of the DT and the system to be utilised by each other to boost more adaptive intelligent behaviours. This thesis proposes a novel holistic reference architecture to address the problem with mechanisms in different dimensions: cognitive capabilities of the DT, physical-to-virtual model update, and virtual-to-physical system adaptation. This reference architecture leverages principles from self-awareness and Dynamic Data-Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS) to address the challenges of model equivalence maintenance, adaptive runtime trade-off analysis, and explainability for human-in-the-loop. The major benefit is that by levering the architecture, equivalence and adaptation can be conducted from a knowledge perspective with minimum human intervention. Also, it can enable explainability if humans are involved in the decision loop. Evaluation in different application domains shows the efficiency and validity of the proposed approaches

A thematic Catalogue of British String Quartets of the early Twentieth Century and an account of the some of their contexts: 1890-1950

Few string quartets were composed in Britain before the late nineteenth century, but from that time until the end of World War 2, the string quartet was one of the most crucial and vibrant genres in British music. The genre developed dramatically on account of promotion at public concerts, concerts at musical institutions, musical competitions, commissions, and the publication industries. This resulted in many British composers (including immigrants) writing string quartets, totalling approximately 600. The thesis documents, describes and contextualises the string-quartet genre in Britain in the early twentieth century. A thematic catalogue provides basic information such as the full titles of pieces (with a work number, where applicable), year of composition and, if applicable, date of first (or first known) performances (live or broadcast), information on recordings of the work, the year of publication and the name of the publisher). Subsequent chapters provide context for the catalogue by investigating institutional history and string quartet repertoires that were performed in public and at musical institutions in London during the early twentieth century, as well as radio broadcasts. Overall the thesis focuses on quantitative approaches and broad trends in the repertory rather than sustained analysis or criticism of pieces by well-known composers, and avoids implicit judgements about value in relation to musical style

Discovery of selective saccharide receptors via Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry

The diagnosis of various diseases and pathological conditions can be accomplished by screening and detecting glycans in cells. Certain glycans serve as excellent biomarkers, being related to cell malfunctioning, while other structurally similar glycans perform completely different functions and are naturally present in healthy cells. Despite the theoretical feasibility of using glycans as biomarkers for early disease detection, our current inability to discriminate between them limits their use. One promising approach to distinguishing between glycans is targeting their dissimilarities in saccharide chains. However, designing selective receptors for saccharides is challenging due to the complexity of these molecules. Their vast diversity, the fact that they exist in many interconvertible forms, their lack of recognisable functional groups, or the fact that they are normally heavily solvated in aqueous environments have made the design of receptors for saccharides a challenge that has kept the scientific community busy for the last 35 years. Although there have been ground-breaking discoveries in the field, improvements are needed to enhance our disease detection and risk stratification tools. To address this challenge, we employed a technique known as Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry (DCC). DCC enables the self-formation and self-selection of the best possible receptor for a given target from a pool or library of potentially good ligands. DCC has been effective for creating receptors for biomolecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, but its use for discovering sugar receptors is less explored. In this work, we filled this gap by implementing DCC for screening common saccharides (glucose, galactose, mannose, and fructose) using small, simple, and inexpensive building blocks. Our results indicated that molecule 2DD, which consists of a benzene ring with 2 units of amino acid aspartic acid derivatives connected in positions 1 and 3, is the best receptor in a library of very similar structures for the saccharides glucose, galactose, and mannose. For fructose, molecule 1P, a benzene ring linked to just one unit of the amino acid phenylaldehyde, was appointed as the best receptor. The differential behaviour of fructose can provide insight into the relatively unknown processes behind molecular recognition of sugars. Molecules 2DD and 1P, as well as some other library members as negative controls, were then synthesised for further testing and DCC results were then validated by Isothermal Titration Calorimetry (ITC) and NMR techniques, proving the effectiveness of DCC as a molecular recognition tool for the creation of receptors for saccharides. Moreover, molecule 1P was found to have a high binding constant (K$_{a}$ = 1762 M$^{-1}$) and selectivity (50-100 times over other sugars) for fructose, which is surprisingly good considering the simplicity of the receptor. A much more challenging approach was attempted by employing short peptides as scaffolds in DCC experiments. The benefits of using peptides are numerous but can be summarised in three bullet points: customisability, flexibility, and easiness in their synthesis. Unfortunately, we encountered many difficulties for the complete functionalisation of the peptides within the Dynamic Combinatorial Library (DCL) and this approach did not yield the desired results before the research project came to an end. However, we believe in its potential and the knowledge that we gained on the topic helped to stablish the foundations on which new research will be carried out in the near future within the research group. In summary, this thesis reports the development of a rapid methodology for the discovery of selective receptors for monosaccharides, employing a library of simple and inexpensive starting building blocks. While this was a proof-of-concept study, it can be scalable to larger library sizes and to target more complex biomolecules, becoming a useful tool that could accelerate the discovery of new molecules with biomedical applications

Dinuclear Lanthanide(III) complexes for light emitting surfaces and plasmonic nanomaterials

Lanthanide(III) luminescence is extremely valuable for the development of optical devices. The long luminescence lifetimes, high photostability and narrow and characteristic emission peaks of lanthanides(III) are accompanied by low molar absorption coefficients, demanding sensitisation from light harvesting units via the antenna effect. In addition to careful ligand design, nanostructured plasmonic materials can enhance lanthanide(III) luminescence and overcome some of the most common limitations of luminescent materials and particularly near infrared (NIR) emission, such as poor signal to noise ratios and low quantum yields and brightness. Here, we present novel surface active bis β-diketonatelanthanide(III) complexes for the fabrication of visible and NIR emitting materials. The incorporation of thioacetate units in the ligand scaffold enables the complexes to be anchored on metallic substrates. The characteristic visible and NIR luminescence is retained upon coating on gold (Au) surfaces, and the preparation of a handheld sensing device is demonstrated as a response of the Eu(III) surfaces to F- coordination. Incorporation of the complexes to plasmonic substrates is determined to be an excellent approach for the enhancement of both visible and NIR luminescence. Plasmonic Au (pGold) surfaces, in particular, lead to exceptional resolution and intensity of NIR Nd(III) and Yb(III) emission, driving the progress of lanthanide(III) NIR light to advanced applications. Finally, the complexes are anchored on Au nanoparticles (AuNPs), producing highly emissive H2O dispersed nanomaterials. An alternative approach for the preparation of surface active bis β-diketonates is demonstrated by coordination of functionalised 1,10-phenanthroline units, also optimising the luminescent output of both the complex in solution and on AuNPs

Inhuman, all too Inhuman: Lyotard, Nihilism and Film

‘Inhuman, all too Inhuman: Lyotard, Nihilism and Film’ is a practice-led piece of research which seeks to develop Jean-François Lyotard’s thinking, namely his notions of the inhuman, acinemas and the libidinal in the realm of film through an audio-visual methodology. In turn, this research wishes to question the viability of film as a site of resistance against what Lyotard terms the inhuman, as well as its positioning in relation to the textual. Significantly, the function of this written component is not to provide a commentary or analysis of my audio-visual research, but rather to complement this and further interrogate its concerns by other means. Moreover, this work also wishes to examine audio-visual approaches for pedagogy, in turn deterritorializing the boundaries of creative and artistic practice, philosophy and academic research

Development and application of 3D X-ray diffraction for the study of phase transformations in metallic materials

Many steel alloy types, both currently in use and under development, exploit a deformation-induced phase transformation to achieve a combined high strength and ductility. As deformation is applied to these alloys, a metastable retained austenite phase transforms to martensite. This process acts as a significant carrier of plasticity, increasing the work-hardening rate and therefore the ductility. The "stability", or resistance against martensitic transformation, of the austenite phase is the main parameter that governs the martensitic transformation rate and therefore the work-hardening behaviour of the steel. In the last few decades, the stability of an individual austenite grain has been shown to depend on a number of microstructural properties, such as the size of the grain, its orientation relative to the loading axis, the alloy chemistry, and the configuration of the grain's immediate crystallographic neighbourhood. A good understanding of how exactly these properties modify austenite grain stability is crucial to the development of accurate models of deformation-induced phenomena, which themselves directly contribute to the design of new and improved alloys that better exploit said phenomena. In the past, austenite grain stability has usually been evaluated for a steel sample either through phase-averaged behaviour, where the stability of the phase overall is characterised, or on an individual grain level, where typically only a few grains are considered. This is primarily due to the difficulties involved with measuring the martensitic transformation in situ at a per-grain level for a large number of grains simultaneously. The recent development of far-field Three-Dimensional X-Ray Diffraction (3DXRD) has enabled such measurements on a range of polycrystalline materials, capturing the grain-level position, orientation and strain tensor for many thousands of grains in situ. However, the 3DXRD technique poses a number of significant challenges related to data analysis and post-processing, both crucial steps that must be carefully implemented to enable detailed measurements of complicated polycrystal samples. In this study, 3DXRD was implemented at the I12 Joint Engineering, Environmental, and Processing (JEEP) Beamline at the Diamond Light Source X-ray synchrotron. Then, the capabilities of the technique were explored by examining how a microstructurally "simple" single phase ferritic steel responds to in-situ tensile deformation on a per-grain level. A number of micromechanical phenomena were investigated, including a small (but statistically significant) grain neighbourhood effect, where the stress state of a central grain was found to depend on the orientation of its immediate neighbourhood grains, a finding never before seen for large numbers of grains in a cubic polycrystal. During this 3DXRD implementation, a sophisticated automated data analysis and post-processing pipeline was developed, that enabled rapid exploration of such micromechanical effects. With 3DXRD implemented and a data analysis pipeline developed, a novel metastable stainless steel alloy system was devised that enabled the exploration of the martensitic transformation at very low applied strains, as 3DXRD is typically limited to ~2% maximum strain. This alloy system was extensively characterised non-destructively in three dimensions with laboratory electron-based and X-ray based techniques, and was used to evaluate both the performance of multi-phase laboratory-based Diffraction Contrast Tomography (DCT), as well as a novel registration algorithm that accurately located two-dimensional planes measured with Electron Back-Scatter Diffraction (EBSD) within the three-dimensional DCT dataset. Finally, the deformation response of the alloy was measured in-situ with 3DXRD at the ID11 beamline of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, coupled with in-situ EBSD scans using an in-chamber tensile stage. Substantial martensite transformations were found even within the ~2% maximum strain window, proving the alloy design was successful and enabling extensive in-situ analyses of austenite grain stability in the bulk material with 3DXRD. Austenite grain stability was found to be influenced by grain size, orientation, and local neighbourhood. Larger grains, grains oriented with {100} close to the loading axis, and grains with more ferrite/martensite-dense neighbourhoods were found to have reduced stability against deformation. The minimum strain work criterion model was also evaluated against the experimental data — it was found to correctly predict the orientation of martensite that formed in the majority of grains, given the parent orientation and macroscopic applied load. Grains where the model failed tended to have reduced levels of stress just before forming martensite, which was attributed to the use of the global stress state by the model as opposed to more granular measurements of the immediate stress field around a grain