Fabricating an Image: How Mary Stuart, Isabella d\u27Este, and Other Women of the Renaissance Used Dress to Assert Agency

Women are rarely accorded prominent roles in the grand narrative of history. More often than not, men are the principal characters, and the shadow they cast over the timeline of our past is so ubiquitous it eclipses the stories of most women. As figures caught in the shadows, women’s individual personalities and actions have often been obscured by the personalities and actions of the men they have lived alongside. For this reason, historians are consistently faced with the challenge of extricating the lives of women from the events recorded by men in the written documents that typically constitute history. One way to meet this challenge is to move away from our principal reliance on written documents and records, and instead focus on the objects that women have left behind. Objects of dress are particularly fruitful areas of such inquiry, and few periods placed as much significance on dress as the Renaissance. This paper, then, is a study of female dress during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in both Northern and Southern Europe. Here, “dress” functions as an umbrella term that encapsulates any decorative object used to modify the body. This definition includes items that are not necessarily visible on the body, such as perfume, and items that are not always attached to the body but developed out of dress practices, such as embroidery. I will analyze these accessories and various types of clothing in an effort to understand how women asserted their identities in a society that sought to stultify them. The historian Yassana Croizat has noted, “a systematic study of how Renaissance women invented, circulated, and used fashions to consolidate their authority has yet to be made.” This paper attempts to take the first steps towards such a study. In the following pages, I will evidence that women used dress as a weapon with which they could dismantle the barriers society confined them within. Dress afforded women the unique opportunity to construct self-images of their own making that were not informed by the desires and needs of the men they lived along side. Furthermore, dress not only allowed women to construct their own self images, but also gave them the opportunity to circulate those images within spaces that were otherwise inaccessible to them. Women like Isabella d’Este were limited in their ability to travel and Mary Stuart was imprisoned; yet during their lifetimes they retained astonishing amounts of power and continue to be relevant historical figures today

Smiles and challenges: an ethnographically-oriented study into the experiences of a particular group of Thai post-graduate students in UK higher education

This ethnographically-oriented study was initiated when Thai post-graduate scholarship students reported a variety of academic, medical and social problems to staff working at an education office which monitors the welfare of Thai students studying in the UK. This study is particularly timely as there was little existing research into the experiences of Thai students studying outside Thailand. Drawing on Holliday’s (1999) notion of ‘small cultures’, the study highlights challenges faced by a group of Thai students as they study for a one-year Master’s degree in the UK during 2011-2012. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and classroom observations carried out, with four Thai scholarship Master’s students studying at different UK universities. To expand the breadth of the study, a questionnaire survey of sixty-four Thai scholarship Master’s students studying at universities across the UK was administered. Additional background data were obtained from university teachers by means of semi-structured interviews. A picture emerges of the complex challenges and pressures faced by overseas students on a one-year degree programme as they seek to adapt to norms and expectations in the UK. The study highlights the individuality of international students, and resists generalisations about national groups. The study proposes implications for the support of international students at universities in the UK

The STRIP instrument of the Large Scale Polarization Explorer: microwave eyes to map the Galactic polarized foregrounds

In this paper we discuss the latest developments of the STRIP instrument of the “Large Scale Polarization Explorer” (LSPE) experiment. LSPE is a novel project that combines ground-based (STRIP) and balloon-borne (SWIPE) polarization measurements of the microwave sky on large angular scales to attempt a detection of the “B-modes” of the Cosmic Microwave Background polarization. STRIP will observe approximately 25% of the Northern sky from the “Observatorio del Teide” in Tenerife, using an array of forty-nine coherent polarimeters at 43 GHz, coupled to a 1.5 m fully rotating crossed-Dragone telescope. A second frequency channel with six-elements at 95 GHz will be exploited as an atmospheric monitor. At present, most of the hardware of the STRIP instrument has been developed and tested at sub-system level. System-level characterization, starting in July 2018, will lead STRIP to be shipped and installed at the observation site within the end of the year. The on-site verification and calibration of the whole instrument will prepare STRIP for a 2-years campaign for the observation of the CMB polarization

Librarians as Teachers: Reframing our Professional Development

Professional development for teaching roles is a big issue for librarians, who often have little formal teacher education and feel underprepared for their work as educators. Professional organizations provide valuable support through journals, conferences, and other programs and resources, but librarians struggle with managing their professional learning alongside the day-to-day demands of their jobs. In 2016, the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Ireland launched a new framework to support professional development for all staff who teach in higher education, which breaks new ground in targeting everyone involved in teaching and facilitating learning (not just academics), and covering teacher development holistically, putting the Self at the center of a process that stresses issues that resonate with teaching librarians, such as professional identity and values, communication and dialogue, digital capacity, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and evidence-based reflection. In 2017, the Forum funded three Irish academic libraries to field test the Framework and evaluate its use by library staff. The conference workshop provides an opportunity for participants to learn about project experiences, reconsider their own professional development in light of the Framework, and compare its potential for libraries with other tools commonly used by teaching librarians

CCR4-bearing T cells participate in autoimmune diabetes.

Chemokine receptor expression is exquisitely regulated on T cell subsets during the course of their migration to inflammatory sites. In the present study we demonstrate that CCR4 expression marks a pathogenic population of autoimmune T cells. CCR4 was found exclusively on memory CD4(+) T cells during the progression of disease in NOD mice. Cells expressing the CCR4 ligand TARC (thymus- and activation-regulated chemokine) were detected within infiltrated islets from prediabetic mice. Interestingly, neutralization of macrophage-derived chemokine (MDC) with Ab caused a significant reduction of CCR4-positive T cells within the pancreatic infiltrates and inhibited the development of insulitis and diabetes. Furthermore, enhanced recruitment of CCR4-bearing cells in NOD mice resulting from transgenic expression of MDC resulted in acceleration of clinical disease. Cumulatively, the results demonstrate that CCR4-bearing T cells participate in the development of such tissue-driven autoimmune reactions

Uncomplicated Monochorionic Diamniotic Twins and the Timing of Delivery

Cleary-Goldman and d'Alton discuss the implications of a new study in PLoS Medicine examining the risk of fetal death in uncomplicated monochorionic diamnotic twin pregnancies

The STRIP instrument of the Large Scale Polarization Explorer: microwave eyes to map the Galactic polarized foregrounds

In this paper we discuss the latest developments of the STRIP instrument of the “Large Scale Polarization Explorer” (LSPE) experiment. LSPE is a novel project that combines ground-based (STRIP) and balloon-borne (SWIPE) polarization measurements of the microwave sky on large angular scales to attempt a detection of the “B-modes” of the Cosmic Microwave Background polarization. STRIP will observe approximately 25% of the Northern sky from the “Observatorio del Teide” in Tenerife, using an array of forty-nine coherent polarimeters at 43 GHz, coupled to a 1.5 m fully rotating crossed-Dragone telescope. A second frequency channel with six-elements at 95 GHz will be exploited as an atmospheric monitor. At present, most of the hardware of the STRIP instrument has been developed and tested at sub-system level. System-level characterization, starting in July 2018, will lead STRIP to be shipped and installed at the observation site within the end of the year. The on-site verification and calibration of the whole instrument will prepare STRIP for a 2-years campaign for the observation of the CMB polarization