Coptic Orthodox Christianity: religious transformation in the time of Neoliberalism

While the Coptic Orthodox Church celebrates a unique historical trajectory, contemporary Copts\u27 conceptualization of religious discourses reflects a transformation impacted by political and economic global forces. The international prevailing ideological paradigm of neoliberalism is highlighted by the shift from governments into individuals through economic and political practices. This thesis illustrates the transformation using an example of a Coptic charity organization redefining itself to be a non-governmental organization (NGO) in response to the dominant paradigm of neoliberalism. The organization is a microcosm reflecting global financial and political forces as well as members\u27 religious beliefs as they relate to these global forces. This project highlights the narratives of the members of the organization and the church clergy

Anticipatory anti-colonial writing in R.K. Narayan's Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

This article uses the term “anticipatory anti-colonial writing” to discuss the workings of time in R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. Both these first novels were published in 1935 with the support of British literary personalities (Graham Greene and E.M. Forster respectively) and both feature young protagonists who, in contrasting ways, are engaged in Indian resistance to colonial rule. This study examines the difference between Narayan’s local, though ironical, resistance to the homogenizing temporal demands of empire and Anand’s awkwardly modernist, socially committed vision. I argue that a form of anticipation that explicitly looks forward to decolonization via new and transnational literary forms is a crucial feature of Untouchable that is not found in Swami and Friends, despite the latter’s anti-colonial elements. Untouchable was intended to be a “bridge between the Ganges and the Thames” and anticipates postcolonial negotiations of time that critique global inequalities and rely upon the multidirectional global connections forged by modernism

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Modernism in a Global Context (introduction)

Exploring the transnational dimension of literary modernism and its increasing centrality to our understanding of 20th-century literary culture, Modernism in a Global Context surveys the key issues and debates central to the 'global turn' in contemporary Modernist Studies. Topics covered include: - Transnational literary exchange - Imperialism and Modernism - Cosmopolitanism and postcolonial literatures - Global literary institutions - from the Little Magazine to the Nobel Prize - Mass media - photography, cinema, and radio broadcasting in the modernist age See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/modernism-in-a-global-context-9781472569639/#sthash.ZA3EsC8K.dpu

Cities of affluence and anger: Urbanism and social class in twentieth century British literature.

This dissertation uses literary theory, cultural studies, and human geography to show how social space informs our understanding of narrative form in order to argue that narrative must occupy a place as well as plot a story. By reading urban fiction from the last century, it demonstrates that the modern spatial reorganization of Britain's cities has changed the social meanings attached to narrative. It argues there is a strong connection between literary form and urban geography. Cities provide more than a setting; they participate in the creation of narrative structure. The first chapter studies Howards End and Brideshead Revisited to explore the diminishing role of pastoral literature in the twentieth century. The simple stories in these novels conceal a sophisticated, metafictional plotting device: by narrating the demise of landed families, these texts also historicize the declining significance of the country-house novel in contemporary literature. The following two chapters analyze domestic fiction to explain the textual representation of urban change. The second chapter argues that the novels of the Angry Young Men in the 1950s refashion the domestic narrative as a way to articulate a hyperbolically masculine, working class political consciousness. This style of working class masculinity was enabled by the material geography of postwar urbanism. Chapter three uses The Golden Notebook to interrogate British domesticity from a postcolonial perspective. In response to Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing writes the metropole as the locus of madness, subjecting the colonial center to the scrutiny it once reserved for the periphery. Lessing deploys her intimate knowledge of British social life to satirize and undermine the trope of domesticity in order to destabilize our understanding of colonialism. This dissertation concludes with a reading of The Satanic Verses and postcolonial literature in England. It proposes the term metropolitan postcolonialism to examine how postcolonial immigration has adapted and transformed metropolitan urban space and narrative techniques. This dissertation reconsiders the role of urbanism in the creation of modern fictional form. It argues urban space gives British and postcolonial narratives a cultural and structural language through which they can dramatize the conditions of modern social life.Ph.D.African literatureAsian literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127822/2/3029356.pd

Development and evaluation of ActSeq: A targeted next-generation sequencing panel for clinical oncology use

Purpose: The demand for high-throughput genetic profiling of somatic mutations in cancer tissues is growing. We sought to establish a targeted next generation sequencing (NGS) panel test for clinical oncology practice. Methods: Customized probes were designed to capture exonic regions of 141 genes selected for the panel, which was aimed for the detection of clinically actionable genetic variations in cancer, including KRAS, NRAS, BRAF, ALK, ROS1, KIT and EGFR. The size of entire targeted regions is 0.8 Mb. Library preparation used NEBNext Ultra II FS kit coupled with target enrichment. Paired-end sequencing was run on Illumina NextSeq 500 at a read length of 150 nt. A bioinformatics workflow focusing on single nucleotide variant and short insertions and deletions (SNV/indel) discovery was established using open source, in-house and commercial software tools. Standard reference DNA samples were used in testing the sensitivity and precision and limit of detection in variant calling. Results: The general performance of the panel was observed in pilot runs. Average total reads per sample ranged from 30 million to 48 million, 73% ~82% unique reads. All runs had more than 99% average mapping rate. Mean target coverage ranged from 727x to 879x. Depth of coverage at 50x or more reached 87% of targeted region and 60% of targeted region received 500x or more coverage depth. Using OncoSpan HD827 DNA, which bears 144 variants (SNV/indel) from 80 genes that are within the targeted region on the panel, our somatic variant calling pipeline reached 97% sensitivity and 100% precision respectively, with near 48 million reads. High concordance with orthogonal approaches in variant detection was further verified with 7 cancer cell lines and 45 clinical specimens. Conclusion: We developed a NGS panel with a focus on clinically actionable gene mutations and validated the performance in library construction, sequencing and variant calling. High concordance with reference materials and orthogonal mutation detection was observed