ROBERT BURNS AND FRIENDS essays by W. Ormiston Roy Fellows presented to G. Ross Roy

Robert Burns & Friends essays by W. Ormiston Roy Fellows presented to G. Ross Roy edited by Patrick Scott and Kenneth Simpson This volume of essays about the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) pays tribute to the distinguished Burns scholar G. Ross Roy. Subjects covered include writers who influenced Burns; aspects of the writing of Burns and that of his friends and contemporaries; and Burns\u27s influence on later writers. The volume also includes essays on Ross Roy\u27s own accomplishments and on the Burns collection he built (now at the University of South Carolina), together with a checklist of his published writings. G. Ross Roy, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, founded the journal Studies in Scottish Literature in 1963, and as its editor for nearly fifty years he has had a central role in establishing international academic recognition for the field. His own scholarly work includes the standard Letters of Robert Burns (2 vols., Clarendon Press, 1985). His contributions to Scottish literature have earned him honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh (2002) and Glasgow (2009). The contributors are all former W. Ormiston Roy Visiting Fellows at the University of South Carolina. This book is also available in a print edition (ISBN: 978-1439270974) through the usual on-line vendors. It is not available for direct purchase from the editors or the University of South Carolina

Concrete stories, decomposing fictions: Body parts and body politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

This essay reads the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018) to explore the “concrete stories” and “infrastructural narratives” devised by the US military in support of its occupation of Baghdad. By stitching together a city and society littered with composing and decomposing fictions, Saadawi’s novel reveals how biopolitical governance produces, contra the hegemonic US war story of security consolidation and societal stabilization, pervasive insecurity instead. Saadawi’s “decomposing fictions”, as I call them, operate on three homologous terrains: the (de)composition of the city; the (de)composition of the body; and the (de)composition of the narrative itself. Through this three-tired conflation, Saadawi shows how body parts are biopolitical, and how narratives actively and materially reshape human bodies and urban infrastructures. The essay therefore argues that the novel aligns with a critical posthumanist perspective, one that allows for a more rigorous consideration of narrative systems (including fictions) as constitutive of and impactful upon human and non-human bodies and urban infrastructures than other concepts, such as “planned violence”, have so far allowed. By theorizing a more complex relationship between narrative form and the built environment in the contexts of militarized colonial and biopolitical urban governance, the essay shows how Saadawi’s novel not only challenges the “imaginative geographies” of the colonial present, but its material infrastructures as well

Forgotten Plotlanders: Learning from the survival of lost informal housing in the UK.

Colin Ward’s discourses on the arcadian landscape of ‘plotlander’ housing are unique documentations of the anarchistic birth, life, and death of the last informal housing communities in the UK. Today the forgotten history of ‘plotlander’ housing documented by Ward can be re-read in the context of both the apparently never-ending ‘housing crisis’ in the UK, and the increasing awareness of the potential value of learning from comparable informal housing from the Global South. This papers observations of a previously unknown and forgotten plotlander site offers a chance to begin a new conversation regarding the positive potential of informal and alternative housing models in the UK and wider Westernised world

Appropriations, delimitations, and discussions in communal space: a multiscale characterization of social housing in Guayaquil (1940-1970)

Guayaquil, antigua ciudad colonial y portuaria con la mayor población del Ecuador, se presenta como un caso de estudio pertinente para analizar los proyectos modernos de vivienda colectiva cuando se desarrollaron numerosos programas habitacionales de producción estatal que planteaban un modelo de ciudad diferente al modelo de desarrollo urbano disperso actual. La investigación aborda las transformaciones que se han producido en el espacio colectivo de estos conjuntos habitacionales como respuesta a las dinámicas presentes de segregación social y fragmentación espacial. Estos procesos vienen motivados por una acelerada pérdida de colectividad en favor de un individualismo excluyente que se protege de una creciente violencia material y simbólicaGuayaquil, an old colonial city and port that is host to the largest population in Ecuador, can be used as a relevant case study to analyze modern social housing projects that were constructed in a particular period in which a great number of State-funded housing programs were developed; these framed a city-model that was different to the current disperse urban development model. This research addresses the transformations that have come about in the communal space within these housing programs as a response to dynamics that are part of social segregation and spatial fragmentation. These processes have been brought on by an accelerated loss of communal space to exclusive individualism, which tries to avoid an increasing material and symbolic violence.Sin financiaciónNo data (2016)UE

Efficacy of checkpoint inhibition after CAR-T failure in aggressive B-cell lymphomas: Outcomes from 15 U.S. institutions

Checkpoint inhibitor (CPI) therapy with anti-PD-1 antibodies has been associated with mixed outcomes in small cohorts of aggressive B-cell lymphoma patients following CAR T-cell therapy failure. To more definitively define CPI therapy efficacy in this population, we retrospectively evaluated clinical outcomes in a large cohort of 96 patients with aggressive B-cell lymphomas receiving CPI therapy after CAR-T failure across 15 U.S. academic centers. Most patients (53%) had DLBCL, were treated with axicabtagene ciloleucel (53%), relapsed early (≤180 days) after CAR-T (83%), and received pembrolizumab (49%) or nivolumab (43%). CPI therapy was associated with an overall response rate of 19% and a complete response rate of 10%. Median duration of response was 221 days. Median progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) were 54 and 159 days, respectively. Outcomes to CPI therapy were significantly improved in patients with primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma. PFS (128 versus 51 days) and OS (387 versus 131 days) were significantly longer in patients with late (>180 days) versus early (≤180 days) relapse after CAR-T. Grade ≥3 adverse events occurred in 19% of CPI-treated patients. Most patients (83%) died, commonly due to progressive disease. Only 5% had durable responses to CPI therapy. In the largest cohort of aggressive B-cell lymphoma patients treated with CPI therapy after CAR-T relapse, our results reveal poor outcomes, particularly among those relapsing early after CAR-T. In conclusion, CPI therapy is not an effective salvage strategy for most patients after CAR-T, where alternative approaches are needed to improve post-CAR-T outcomes