Sweet Briar, 1800-1900: Palladian Plantation House, Italianate Villa, Aesthetic Retreat

Sweet Briar House is one of the best documented sites in Virginia, with sources ranging from architectural drawings and extensive archives to original furnishings. Sweet Briar House was purchased by Elijah Fletcher, a prominent figure in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1830. Thirty years later it passed into the possession of his daughter Indiana Fletcher Williams, and remained her home until her death in 1900. In her will, Williams left instructions for the founding of Sweet Briar Institute, an educational institution for women that exists today as Sweet Briar College. This dissertation examines Sweet Briar House in three distinct phases, while advancing three theses. The first thesis proposes that the double portico motif introduced by Palladio at the Villa Cornaro in the sixteenth century became the fundamental motif of Palladianism in Virginia architecture, generating a line of offspring that proliferated in the eighteenth century and beyond. The Palladian plantation (Sweet Briar House I, c. 1800) featured this double portico. In 1851, following the return of the Fletcher children from an extended Grand Tour of Europe, the house was remodeled as an Italianate villa (Sweet Briar House II, 1851-52). The second thesis advances the contention that by renovating their Palladian house into an asymmetrical Italianate villa, the Fletcher family implemented an ideal solution between the balanced façade that characterized the Palladian Sweet Briar House I and the fashion for the Picturesque that dominated American building in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1876, the Williams family traveled to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where visitors were presented with an unimaginable array of artistic possibilities from countless eras and nations, exactly the conditions that the Aesthetic Movement needed to flourish in America. The third thesis maintains that the Williams family’s decision to transform Sweet Briar House into an Aesthetic Movement retreat was inspired by their reaction to the Centennial, and in particular by their appreciation for the Japanese objects presented there

Critical flux of Gum Arabic:implications for fouling and fractionation performance of membranes

A flux-stepping method was used to determine the critical flux of 2 wt% gum arabic using flat sheet polysulfone membranes. These were found to be 27 L m-2 h-1 , 10 L m-2 h-1 and 22 L m-2 h-1 for 0.1, 0.5 and 0.8 μm polysulfone membranes, respectively. Increasing the cross flow velocity was found to raise the critical flux, although the effect diminished at higher velocities. These values were then used to assess the fouling and the fractionation performance of the three membranes above and below their critical fluxes

Neutralising immunity to omicron sublineages BQ.1.1, XBB, and XBB.1.5 in healthy adults is boosted by bivalent BA.1-containing mRNA vaccination and previous Omicron infection

The global COVID-19 landscape is increasingly complex; emerging new variants rapidly cause waves of infection in people with variably induced immunity. Most individuals now have so-called hybrid immunity from both infection and vaccination. However, sequential infecting variants, induction of immunity, and subsequent waning are interlinked, and immune protection against new variants is unclear

Innovative methods of community engagement: towards a low carbon climate resilient future

The proceedings of the Innovative Methods of Community Engagement: Toward a Low Carbon, Climate Resilient Future workshop have been developed by the Imagining2050 team in UCC and the Secretariat to the National Dialogue on Climate Action (NDCA). The NDCA also funded the workshop running costs. The proceedings offer a set of recommendations and insights into leveraging different community engagement approaches and methodologies in the area of climate action. They draw from interdisciplinary knowledge and experiences of researchers for identifying, mobilizing and mediating communities. The work presented below derives from a workshop held in the Environmental Research Institute in UCC on the 17th January 2019. These proceedings are complementary to an earlier workshop also funded by the NDCA and run by MaREI in UCC, titled ‘How do we Engage Communities in Climate Action? – Practical Learnings from the Coal Face’. The earlier workshop looked more closely at community development groups and other non-statutory organizations doing work in the area of climate change

Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create