Pictures and the Presentation of Gender in Rob Lloyd Jones’s Beowulf

This paper analyzes Rob Lloyd Jones’s picture book Beowulf, illustrated by Victor Tavares, and explores how the relationship between text and pictures creates gendered expectations and understanding of monstrosity and heroism by focusing on the characters of Beowulf (the male hero), Grendel (the male antagonist), and Grendel’s Mother (the female antagonist who lacks a hero equivalent). This paper examines this Beowulf re-telling under the lens of children’s literature critic Perry Nodelman’s theory of the relationship between text and pictures; described as collaborative and supportive, the text makes the pictures more assertive while the pictures extend the details of the text. Together, pictures and text create a more specific narrative and experience for readers than either is capable of alone. Nodelman notes how one of the main functions of pictures books is to provide readers, namely young children, with greater understanding of how the world around them works, and this working of things includes understanding of the human body. Using this theory, this paper examines the expectations of gendered bodily experience in this children’s picture book, demonstrating how masculinity exists along a flexible border that allows the hero and male antagonist to cross over from hero to monster and vice versa through the physical similarities between them; in contrast, femininity exists within strict confines as either powerful and dangerous monster that must be destroyed, or silent and passive props in the background. This particular pictorial re-telling of Beowulf defines the expectations of gendered bodies, with men participating in more flexible roles including king, hero, and monster, whereas women’s roles are not as fluid and confined to wife, waitress, or monster

The Dogs of War: 1861

Re-examining Southern Commitment to War “The dogs of war, writes Emory Thomas in this provocative little book (a “nonfiction novella, he calls it, “Clio laconic ), “once loosed, seldom go where we want them to. Once slipped, they run wild (92). Thomas is, of course, a prolific schola...

A study of social case work treatments utilized to help a client formulate a solution to his problem based on intake interviews.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Cooperation Enhances Robustness of Coexistence in Spatially Structured Consortia

Designing synthetic microbial consortia is an emerging area in synthetic biology and a major goal is to realize stable and robust coexistence of multiple species. Cooperation and competition are fundamental intra/interspecies interactions that shape population level behaviors, yet it is not well-understood how these interactions affect the stability and robustness of coexistence. In this paper, we show that communities with cooperative interactions are more robust to population disturbance, e.g., depletion by antibiotics, by forming intermixed spatial patterns. Meanwhile, competition leads to population spatial heterogeneity and more fragile coexistence in communities. Using reaction-diffusion and nonlocal PDE models and simulations of a two-species E. coli consortium, we demonstrate that cooperation is more beneficial than competition in maintaining coexistence in spatially structured consortia, but not in well-mixed environments. This also suggests a tradeoff between constructing heterogeneous communities with localized functions and maintaining robust coexistence. The results provide general strategies for engineering spatially structured consortia by designing interspecies interactions and suggest the importance of cooperation for biodiversity in microbial community

The Enigmatic South: Toward Civil War and Its Legacies

A Tribute to the Career and Scholarship of William J. Cooper, Jr. In more ways than one, William J. Cooper, Jr., stands tall among historians of the nineteenth century South. In this collection of essays, well-edited by Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., Cooper’s former students and colleagues express t...

Internal tides and tidal cycles of vertical mixing in western Long Island Sound

In estuaries, tidal period variations in the rate of vertical mixing have been observed to result from various causes: in Liverpool Bay and the York River, they have been attributed to tidal straining of the along-channel density gradient modulating stratification; in the Hudson River they arise from tidal modulation of the height of the tidal current bottom boundary layer (BBL). Along continental shelves, tidal period fluctuations in mixing have been observed to result from the dissipation of internal waves (IWs). Western Long Island Sound (WLIS) moored instrument records indicate that large near-bottom increases in dissolved oxygen (DO) and heat and a decrease in salt occur during the middle of the flood tide: an analysis of water mass signatures indicates that the transport involved is vertical and not horizontal. Temperature data from a vertical thermistor array deployed in the WLIS for 16 days in August 2009 clearly show a tidal cycle of IW activity creating a mean thermocline depression at midflood of approximately 25% of the water depth with individual IW thermocline depressions of as much as 50% of the water depth. Contemporaneous ADCP measurements show increases in shear due to IWs during the flood. Near-bottom internal wave activity is maximal at and after midflood and is correlated with near-bottom temperature and DO tendencies at both tidal and subtidal scales. We conclude that internal tides are an important vertical mixing mechanism in the WLIS through both increased shear from IWs and displacement of the pycnocline into the region of high shear in the BBL

Control of bacterial population density with population feedback and molecular sequestration

Genetic engineering technology has become sophisticated enough to allow precise manipulation of bacterial genetic material. Engineering efforts with these technologies have created modified bacteria for various medical, industrial, and environmental purposes, but organisms designed for specific functions require improvements in stability, longevity, or efficiency of function. Most bacteria live in multispecies communities, whose composition may be closely linked to the effect the community has on the environment. Bacterial engineering efforts will benefit from building communities with regulated compositions, which will enable more stable and powerful community functions. We present a design of a synthetic two member bacterial community capable of maintaining its composition at a defined ratio of [cell type 1] : [cell type 2]. We have constructed the genetic motif that will act in each cell in the two member community, containing an AHL-based negative feedback loop that activates ccdB toxin, which caps population density with increasing feedback strength. It also contains one of two ccdB sequestration modules, either the ccdA protein antitoxin, or an RNA device which prevents transcription and translation of ccdB mRNA, that rescues capped population density with induction. We compare absorbance and colony counting methods of estimating bacterial population density, finding that absorbance-based methods overestimate viable population density when ccdB toxin is used to control population density. Prior modeling results show that two cell types containing this genetic circuit motif that reciprocally activate the other's ccdB sequestration device will establish a steady state ratio of cell types. Experimental testing and tuning the full two member community will help us improve our modeling of multi-member bacterial communities, learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of our design for community composition control, and identify general principles of design of compositionally-regulated microbial communities