Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture

Emily J. Orlando is a contributing author, “Picturing Lily: Body Art in The House of Mirth”. In Edith Wharton’s works, references to architecture, interior decoration, painting, sculpture, and fashion abound. As these essays demonstrate, art and objects are for Wharton evidence of cultural belief and reflect the values, assumptions, and customs of the burgeoning consumer culture in which she lived and about which she wrote. Furthermore, her meditations about issues of architecture, design, and decoration serve as important commentaries on her vision of the literary arts. In The Decoration of Houses she notes that furniture and bric-à-brac are often crowded into a room in order to compensate for a lack of architectural composition in the treatment of the walls, and that unless an ornamental object adequately expresses an artistic conception it is better removed from the room. These aesthetic standards apply equally to her construction of narratives and are evidence of a sensibility that counters typical understandings of Wharton as a novelist of manners and place her instead as an important figure in the development of American literary modernism. Essays in this collection address issues such as parallels between her characters and the houses they occupy; dress as a metaphor for the flux of critical fashion; the marketing of Wharton\u27s work to a growing female readership ; her relationship to mass culture industries such as advertising, theater, and cinema; the tableaux vivant both as set piece and as fictional strategy; the representation of female bodies as objets d’art; and her characters’ attempts at self-definition through the acquisition and consumption of material goods. All of Wharton’s major novels—The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, and Twilight Sleep—as well as her short stories, criticism, and essays are explored. --Publisher descriptionhttps://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/english-books/1003/thumbnail.jp

New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender,and Literary Discourse

Emily J. Orlando is a contributing author, “‘Feminine Calibans’ and ‘Dark Madonnas of the Grave’: The Imaging of Black Women in the New Negro Renaissance.” This volume of essays, privileging mostly new scholars in the field of Harlem Renaissance studies, is a representative sampling of the kind of literary scholarship and continuing study needed for this period, also often referred to as the New Negro Renaissance. As a body, the collection recognizes the evolving literary discourse that reflects interdisciplinarity and fluidity among boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, and pedagogy. Aimed at scholars, college teachers, upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and those with special affection and interest in the era, these essays are divided into three sections: exploring the modernist project through Harlem Renaissance writers\u27 views of art, using empire and gender as focal points; critiquing the politics of color and race, sexuality and hybridity; and examining the pedagogical and technical aspects of poetry, fiction, and other art forms. The essays on empire and gender are very different, showing the dialogic quality of the era itself. However, both feature Alain Locke and The New Negro, first published in 1925. The first argues that Locke engages in the rhetoric of empire as he advances notions that, as the superior race, African Americans can enhance African art while using it to improve their status in America. The second compares visual images of women in Locke\u27s book to illustrations by Gwendolyn Bennett and Lois Mailou Jones, to explore women\u27s and men\u27s depictions of each other during the era. Taken together, the second section of essays, on Dorothy West, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman,and Countee Cullen, treat multiple migrations, from social, economic, and racial passing to sexual and homoerotic identification. The third section includes essays about Langston Hughes and teaching the Harlem Renaissance through literature and the arts. While one essay views Hughes as a source through which to teach composition, the other uses a technological and jazz lens to examine Hughes\u27s poem, The Weary Blues . The final essay advocates a more integrative approach, teaching the era as an interdisciplinary, collaborative movement involving literature and the arts, and thereby emphasizing the ways the artists themselves saw, lived, and contributed to the cultural life of their time. --Publisher descriptionhttps://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/english-books/1004/thumbnail.jp

Performance of chemically modified reduced graphene oxide (CMrGO) in electrodynamic dust shield (EDS) applications

Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) technology is a dust mitigation strategy that is commonly studied for applications such as photovoltaics or thermal radiators where soiling of the surfaces can reduce performance. The goal of the current work was to test the performance of a patterned nanocomposite EDS system produced through spray-coating and melt infiltration of chemically modified reduced graphene oxide (CMrGO) traces with thermoplastic high-density polyethylene (HDPE). The EDS performance was tested for a dusting of lunar regolith simulant under high vacuum conditions (~10-6 Torr) using both 2-phase and 3-phase configurations. Uncapped (bare) devices showed efficient dust removal at moderate voltages (1000 V) for both 2-phase and 3-phase designs, but the performance of the devices degraded after several sequential tests due to erosion of the traces caused by electric discharges. Further tests carried out while illuminating the dust surface with a UV excimer lamp showed that the EDS voltage needed to reach the maximum cleanliness was reduced by almost 50% for the 2-phase devices (500 V minimum for rough and 1000 V for smooth), while the 3-phase devices were unaffected by the application of UV. Capping the CMrGO traces with low-density polyethylene (LDPE) eliminated breakdown of the materials and device degradation, but larger voltages (3000 V) coupled with UV illumination were required to remove the grains from the capped devices.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure

Cloned, CD117 Selected Human Amniotic Fluid Stem Cells Are Capable of Modulating the Immune Response

Amniotic fluid stem (AFS) cells are broadly multipotent, can be expanded extensively in culture, are not tumorigenic and can be readily cryopreserved for cell banking. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) show immunomodulatory activity and secrete a wide spectrum of cytokines and chemokines that suppress inflammatory responses, block mixed lymphocyte reactions (MLR) and other immune reactions, and have proven therapeutic against conditions such as graft-versus-host disease. AFS cells resemble MSCs in many respects including surface marker expression and differentiation potential. We therefore hypothesized that AFS cells may exhibit similar immunomodulatory capabilities. We present data to demonstrate that direct contact with AFS cells inhibits lymphocyte activation. In addition, we show that cell-free supernatants derived from AFS cells primed with total blood monocytes or IL-1β, a cytokine released by monocytes and essential in mediation of the inflammatory response, also inhibited lymphocyte activation. Further investigation of AFS cell-free supernatants by protein array revealed secretion of multiple factors in common with MSCs that are known to be involved in immune regulation including growth related oncogene (GRO) and monocyte chemotactic protein (MCP) family members as well as interleukin-6 (IL-6). AFS cells activated by PBMCs released several additional cytokines as compared to BM-MSCs, including macrophage inflammatory protein-3α (MIP-3α), MIP-1α and Activin. AFS cells also released higher levels of MCP-1 and lower levels of MCP-2 compared to BM-MSCs in response to IL-1β activation. This suggests that there may be some AFS-specific mechanisms of inhibition of lymphocyte activation. Our results indicate that AFS cells are able to suppress inflammatory responses in vitro and that soluble factors are an essential component in the communication between lymphocytes and AFS cells. Their extensive self-renewal capacity, possibility for banking and absence of tumorigenicity may make AFS cells a superior source of stable, well characterized “off the shelf” immunomodulatory cells for a variety of immunotherapies

Molecular Pathways Underlying Adaptive Repair of the Injured Kidney: Novel Donation After Cardiac Death and Acute Kidney Injury Platforms

International audienceObjective: To test the hypothesis that gene expression profiling in peripheral blood from patients who have undergone kidney transplantation (KT) will provide mechanistic insights regarding graft repair and regeneration.Background: Renal grafts obtained from living donors (LD) typically function immediately, whereas organs from donation after cardiac death (DCD) or acute kidney injury (AKI) donors may experience delayed function with eventual recovery. Thus, recipients of LD, DCD, and AKI kidneys were studied to provide a more complete understanding of the molecular basis for renal recovery.Methods: Peripheral blood was collected from LD and DCD/AKI recipients before transplant and throughout the first 30 days thereafter. Total RNA was isolated and assayed on whole genome microarrays.Results: Comparison of longitudinal gene expression between LD and AKI/DCD revealed 2 clusters, representing 141 differentially expressed transcripts. A subset of 11 transcripts was found to be differentially expressed in AKI/DCD versus LD. In all recipients, the most robust gene expression changes were observed in the first day after transplantation. After day 1, gene expression profiles differed depending upon the source of the graft. In patients receiving LD grafts, the expression of most genes did not remain markedly elevated beyond the first day post-KT. In the AKI/DCD groups, elevations in gene expression were maintained for at least 5 days post-KT. In all recipients, the pattern of coordinate gene overexpression subsided by 28 to 30 days.Conclusions: Gene expression in peripheral blood of AKI/DCD recipients offers a novel platform to understand the potential mechanisms and timing of kidney repair and regeneration after transplantation

Double Digest RADseq: An Inexpensive Method for De Novo SNP Discovery and Genotyping in Model and Non-Model Species

The ability to efficiently and accurately determine genotypes is a keystone technology in modern genetics, crucial to studies ranging from clinical diagnostics, to genotype-phenotype association, to reconstruction of ancestry and the detection of selection. To date, high capacity, low cost genotyping has been largely achieved via “SNP chip” microarray-based platforms which require substantial prior knowledge of both genome sequence and variability, and once designed are suitable only for those targeted variable nucleotide sites. This method introduces substantial ascertainment bias and inherently precludes detection of rare or population-specific variants, a major source of information for both population history and genotype-phenotype association. Recent developments in reduced-representation genome sequencing experiments on massively parallel sequencers (commonly referred to as RAD-tag or RADseq) have brought direct sequencing to the problem of population genotyping, but increased cost and procedural and analytical complexity have limited their widespread adoption. Here, we describe a complete laboratory protocol, including a custom combinatorial indexing method, and accompanying software tools to facilitate genotyping across large numbers (hundreds or more) of individuals for a range of markers (hundreds to hundreds of thousands). Our method requires no prior genomic knowledge and achieves per-site and per-individual costs below that of current SNP chip technology, while requiring similar hands-on time investment, comparable amounts of input DNA, and downstream analysis times on the order of hours. Finally, we provide empirical results from the application of this method to both genotyping in a laboratory cross and in wild populations. Because of its flexibility, this modified RADseq approach promises to be applicable to a diversity of biological questions in a wide range of organisms

Functional annotation of human long noncoding RNAs via molecular phenotyping

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) constitute the majority of transcripts in the mammalian genomes, and yet, their functions remain largely unknown. As part of the FANTOM6 project, we systematically knocked down the expression of 285 lncRNAs in human dermal fibroblasts and quantified cellular growth, morphological changes, and transcriptomic responses using Capped Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE). Antisense oligonucleotides targeting the same lncRNAs exhibited global concordance, and the molecular phenotype, measured by CAGE, recapitulated the observed cellular phenotypes while providing additional insights on the affected genes and pathways. Here, we disseminate the largest-todate lncRNA knockdown data set with molecular phenotyping (over 1000 CAGE deep-sequencing libraries) for further exploration and highlight functional roles for ZNF213-AS1 and lnc-KHDC3L-2.Peer reviewe