Sex, Culture, and the Politics of Fashion in Stuart England

This dissertation is the first full-length study to analyze the politicization of dress and material objects, exploring the manner in which fashion served as a site for political discourse and agency, during the seventeenth century, specifically from 1603–1702, an era characterized by profound political, religious, and social turmoil as well as increased international trade and luxury consumption. This dissertation demonstrates how fashion, which encompassed clothing, accessories, hairstyling, and cosmetics, was an important facet of political culture within Stuart England and, furthermore, was absolutely fundamental to how the English understood themselves, others, and the turbulent world they lived in. I argue that dress often figured, in both a rhetorical and material sense, at the center of political debates during the Stuart period, particularly in regards to issues of foreign influence, the threat of Catholicism, regicide, the problem of succession, “party” politics, and conceptions of “Englishness.” This study analyzes a variety of primary sources including cheap printed works, royal household records, state papers, personal correspondence and diaries, as well as extant objects and court portraiture, in order to reveal how political and material culture were deeply entwined. While current histories of early modern dress emphasize the continuities of fashion during this period, this dissertation offers a reinterpretation of this traditional perspective but demonstrating how, while some styles and garments certainly changed over time, the particular political attitudes associated with such garb, such as anti-French and anti-Catholic sentiment, remained constant threads within the rich tapestry of Stuart politics. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to not simply the cultural and political history of Stuart England, but also important scholarship on the political agency of early modern women, seventeenth-century notions of “whiteness” and “blackness,” the development of Britain’s trade empire, and the concept of an English national identity

Alien Registration Card- Heidelbauer, Emilie M. (Bath, Sagadahoc County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_cards/1035/thumbnail.jp

The dynamics of gene expression changes in a mouse model of oral tumorigenesis may help refine prevention and treatment strategies in patients with oral cancer.

A better understanding of the dynamics of molecular changes occurring during the early stages of oral tumorigenesis may help refine prevention and treatment strategies. We generated genome-wide expression profiles of microdissected normal mucosa, hyperplasia, dysplasia and tumors derived from the 4-NQO mouse model of oral tumorigenesis. Genes differentially expressed between tumor and normal mucosa defined the "tumor gene set" (TGS), including 4 non-overlapping gene subsets that characterize the dynamics of gene expression changes through different stages of disease progression. The majority of gene expression changes occurred early or progressively. The relevance of these mouse gene sets to human disease was tested in multiple datasets including the TCGA and the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer project. The TGS was able to discriminate oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) from normal oral mucosa in 3 independent datasets. The OSCC samples enriched in the mouse TGS displayed high frequency of CASP8 mutations, 11q13.3 amplifications and low frequency of PIK3CA mutations. Early changes observed in the 4-NQO model were associated with a trend toward a shorter oral cancer-free survival in patients with oral preneoplasia that was not seen in multivariate analysis. Progressive changes observed in the 4-NQO model were associated with an increased sensitivity to 4 different MEK inhibitors in a panel of 51 squamous cell carcinoma cell lines of the areodigestive tract. In conclusion, the dynamics of molecular changes in the 4-NQO model reveal that MEK inhibition may be relevant to prevention and treatment of a specific molecularly-defined subgroup of OSCC