Corporeal Violence in Early Modern Revenge Tragedies

In the four early modern revenge tragedies I study, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the ubiquitous depictions of corporeal violence underscore the authors’ skepticism of the human tendency to infuse bodies – physical manifestations of both agency and vulnerability – with symbolism. The revengers in these plays try to avenge the death of a loved one whose disfigured body remains unburied and often continues to occupy a place on stage, but their efforts to infuse corpses with meaning instead reveal the revengers’ perverse obsession with mutilation as spectacle. In Chapter one, I show how in The Spanish Tragedy Thomas Kyd portrays the characters’ assertions of body-soul unity to be arbitrary attempts to justify self-serving motives. Although Hieronimo treats Horatio’s dead body as a signifier of his own emotions, he displays it, alongside the bodies of his enemies, as just another rotting corpse. In Chapter two, I explore how in Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare questions the efficacy of rituals for maintaining social order by depicting how the play’s characters manipulate rituals intended to celebrate peace as opportunities to exact vengeance; Titus demands human sacrifice as not just an accompanying element, but a central motive of rituals ostensibly intended to signify commemoration. In Chapter three, I read The Revenger’s Tragedy as illustrating Thomas Middleton’s characterization of the depiction of corporeal mutilation as an overused, generic convention; the play’s revenger, Vindice, attributes multiple, constantly shifting, meanings to the rotting skull of his lover, which he uses as a murder weapon. In Chapter four I argue that in The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster destabilizes spectators’ interpretive capacities; within this play’s unconventional dramatic structure, the main characters use somatic imagery to associate bodily dismemberment with moral disintegration. Corpses, the tangible remains of once vigorous, able-bodied relatives, serve as central components of respectful commemoration or as mementos of vengeance, yet these dead, often gruesomely mutilated bodies also invite repulsion or perverse curiosity. Thus, rather than honoring the deceased, revengers objectify corpses as frightening spectacles or even use them as weapons

The use of digit ratios as markers for perinatal androgen action

Since the ratio of the second-to-fourth finger length was first proposed as a marker for prenatal androgen action in 1998, over 100 studies have been published that have either further tested the association between the digit ratio and prenatal androgens, or employed digit ratios as a marker to investigate the association between prenatal androgens and a variety of outcomes, including behavior, fertility, and disease risks. Despite the clear demand for an adult marker of prenatal androgen action and increased use of digit ratios as such a marker, its validity remains controversial. This review (1) evaluates current evidence for the relationship between digit ratios and prenatal androgens (using experimentation with animal models, amniotic testosterone, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia case-control studies), (2) describes opportunities for future validation tests, and (3) compares the potential advantages and disadvantages of digit ratio measures with more established methods for studying the effects of prenatal androgens

Domesticated animals and human infectious diseases of zoonotic origins: Domestication time matters

The rate of emergence for emerging infectious diseases has increased dramatically over the last century, and research findings have implicated wildlife as an importance source of novel pathogens. However, the role played by domestic animals as amplifiers of pathogens emerging from the wild could also be significant, influencing the human infectious disease transmission cycle. The impact of domestic hosts on human disease emergence should therefore be ascertained. Here, using three independent datasets we showed positive relationships between the time since domestication of the major domesticated mammals and the total number of parasites or infectious diseases they shared with humans. We used network analysis, to better visualize the overall interactions between humans and domestic animals (and amongst animals) and estimate which hosts are potential sources of parasites/pathogens for humans (and for all other hosts) by investigating the network architecture. We used centrality, a measure of the connection amongst each host species (humans and domestic animals) in the network, through the sharing of parasites/pathogens, where a central host (i.e. high value of centrality) is the one that is infected by many parasites/pathogens that infect many other hosts in the network. We showed that domesticated hosts that were associated a long time ago with humans are also the central ones in the network and those that favor parasites/pathogens transmission not only to humans but also to all other domesticated animals. These results urge further investigation of the diversity and origin of the infectious diseases of domesticated animals in their domestication centres and the dispersal routes associated with human activities. Such work may help us to better understand how domesticated animals have bridged the epidemiological gap between humans and wildlife. (Résumé d'auteur

Dysmorphic

This is an immersive audio-visual performance in el Hemispheric theater that explores cognitive science through music and video art; using the interpretation of electrical brainwave data recorded from human minds.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-production-technology/1088/thumbnail.jp

Flock-level risk factors for scrapie in Great Britain: analysis of a 2002 anonymous postal survey

BACKGROUND: In November 2002, an anonymous postal survey of sheep farmers in Great Britain (GB) was conducted to identify factors associated with the flock-level occurrence of scrapie. This survey was undertaken to update an earlier postal survey in 1998, and was the first occasion in which a large-scale postal survey had been repeated. RESULTS: The results of the 2002 survey indicated that scrapie was more likely to occur in certain geographic regions; in purebred compared to commercial flocks; in larger flocks; in flocks which lambed in group pens compared to those which lambed in individual pens; in flocks which always lambed in the same location compared to those which did not; and in farms which kept certain breeds of sheep. In addition to these factors, the likelihood of the disease occurring in homebred animals was higher in flocks which bred a greater proportion of replacement animals or which bought-in lambs. Finally, within-flock transmission following exposure was more likely to occur in hill flocks compared to other farm types; in flocks which bred a greater proportion of replacement animals; and in farms which kept a certain crossbreed of ewe. CONCLUSION: The risk factors identified from the 1998 and 2002 anonymous postal surveys in Great Britain were similar. However, differences between the surveys were identified in the influence of region and of purchasing behaviour on the risk of scrapie. These differences are most likely a consequence of changes in farmer awareness and the impact of the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease epidemic, respectively

The time-course of a scrapie outbreak

BACKGROUND: Because the incubation period of scrapie has a strong host genetic component and a dose-response relationship, it is possible that changes will occur during an outbreak, especially in the genotypes of cases, age-at-onset of disease and, perhaps, the clinical signs displayed. We investigated these factors for a large outbreak of natural scrapie, which yielded sufficient data to detect temporal trends. RESULTS: Cases occurred mostly in two genotypes, VRQ/VRQ and VRQ/ARQ, with those early in the outbreak more likely to be of the VRQ/VRQ genotype. As the epidemic progressed, the age-at-onset of disease increased, which reflected changes in the genotypes of cases rather than changes in the age-at-onset within genotypes. Clinical signs of cases changed over the course of the outbreak. As the epidemic progressed VRQ/VRQ and VRQ/ARQ sheep were more likely to be reported with behavioural changes, while VRQ/VRQ sheep only were less likely to be reported with loss of condition. CONCLUSION: This study of one of the largest scrapie outbreaks in the UK allowed investigation of the effect of PrP genotype on other epidemiological parameters. Our analysis indicated that, although age-at-onset and clinical signs changed over time, the observed changes were largely, but not exclusively, driven by the time course of the PrP genotypes of cases

Database of host-pathogen and related species interactions, and their global distribution

Interactions between species, particularly where one is likely to be a pathogen of the other, as well as the geographical distribution of species, have been systematically extracted from various web-based, free-access sources, and assembled with the accompanying evidence into a single database. The database attempts to answer questions such as what are all the pathogens of a host, and what are all the hosts of a pathogen, what are all the countries where a pathogen was found, and what are all the pathogens found in a country. Two datasets were extracted from the database, focussing on species interactions and species distribution, based on evidence published between 1950–2012. The quality of their evidence was checked and verified against well-known, alternative, datasets of pathogens infecting humans, domestic animals and wild mammals. The presented datasets provide a valuable resource for researchers of infectious diseases of humans and animals, including zoonoses