Anticipation: Sailing into Conference

rrnerly Pasadena College (Est. 1902), the spiritual, academic and cultural community that would become Point Loma Nazarene University moved to San Diego from Pasadena, California in 1973. Spanish for Hill, the word Loma is both an apt description of the site on which the University rests and an indication of the cultural influence of the Spanish on the region. Located on cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, PLNU is graced by ocean views at nearly every turn

Thanks

Please join me in thanking Diane for her service to ACL and for the product she has so ably assisted in bringing to the Association 3 times a year for almost a decade

Editorial

August 30 of this year was Heritage Day for my institution. This marks one of three days each year (the others being Baccalaureate and Commencement) on which the entire University faculty come together before the staff, student, and parents dressed in full academic regalia

Exciting Changes are Coming to The Christian Librarian

Back in 1996 I came on board the TCL team with a dream. My hope was to make TCL a peer reviewed publication. Now, many years later, I am excited to say this dream will soon become a reality! Beginning in 2009, TCL will carry peer reviewed content

Editorial

For those of us serving in the academic community a new year has just begun - the fall semester or quarter is upon us. Students have returned to campus and summer-quiet library halls are now ringing with stage whispers, book drops filling with materials rediscovered on unpacking day

The trauma aesthetic: (re)mediating absence, emptiness and nation in post-9/11 American film and literature

This thesis proposes a concept of the trauma aesthetic in order to make sense of the ways in which particular texts have responded to the events of 9/11 as an intensely mediated and vicariously experienced cultural trauma. A central argument within existing studies of 9/11 and its cultural impact is that, in the immediate aftermath at least, the dominant interpretation of the events often relied on crude and simplistic notions of national identity and American exceptionalism. Drawing on a variety of the cultural, political and aesthetic discourses which have emerged in post-9/11 studies, this thesis argues that the trauma aesthetic (re)mediates the cultural narrative of 9/11 in more complex and nuanced ways. The thesis examines four novels: Falling Man (Don DeLillo, 2007), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005), Man in the Dark (Paul Auster, 2008) and The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2006), and four films: A History of Violence (d. David Cronenberg, 2005), In the Valley of Elah (d. Paul Haggis, 2007), 25th Hour (d. Spike Lee, 2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (d. Michel Gondry, 2004). All of these texts respond to the trauma of 9/11 either directly or indirectly and explore similar themes of masculinity, culpability and the nature of traumatic experience. My analysis identifies a series of metaphors, common to all of these texts, which are used to (re)mediate the sense of absence and emptiness integral to the experience of 9/11 and the sense of vulnerability which it inflicted upon American national identity. These include: falling, timelessness, placelessness and the absent body. By drawing on and adapting existing trauma theories from scholars such as Cathy Caruth and Kali Tal the thesis proposes the trauma aesthetic as a new critical tool for the understanding of post-9/11 film and literature

Quantitative diffusion MRI with application to multiple sclerosis

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a uniquely non-invasive probe of biological tissue properties, increasingly able to provide access to ever more intricate structural and microstructural tissue information. Imaging biomarkers that reveal pathological alterations can help advance our knowledge of complex neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis (MS), but depend on both high quality image data and robust post-processing pipelines. The overarching aim of this thesis was to develop methods to improve the characterisation of brain tissue structure and microstructure using dMRI. Two distinct avenues were explored. In the first approach, network science and graph theory were used to identify core human brain networks with improved sensitivity to subtle pathological damage. A novel consensus subnetwork was derived using graph partitioning techniques to select nodes based on independent measures of centrality, and was better able to explain cognitive impairment in relapsing-remitting MS patients than either full brain or default mode networks. The influence of edge weighting scheme on graph characteristics was explored in a separate study, which contributes to the connectomics field by demonstrating how study outcomes can be affected by an aspect of network design often overlooked. The second avenue investigated the influence of image artefacts and noise on the accuracy and precision of microstructural tissue parameters. Correction methods for the echo planar imaging (EPI) Nyquist ghost artefact were systematically evaluated for the first time in high b-value dMRI, and the outcomes were used to develop a new 2D phase-corrected reconstruction framework with simultaneous channel-wise noise reduction appropriate for dMRI. The technique was demonstrated to alleviate biases associated with Nyquist ghosting and image noise in dMRI biomarkers, but has broader applications in other imaging protocols that utilise the EPI readout. I truly hope the research in this thesis will influence and inspire future work in the wider MR community