Theoretical studies of the electronic structure of small metal clusters

Theoretical studies of the electronic structure of metal clusters, in particular clusters of Group IIA and IIB atoms were conducted. Early in the project it became clear that electron correlation involving d orbitals plays a more important role in the binding of these clusters than had been previously anticipated. This necessitated that computer codes for calculating two electron integrals and for constructing the resulting CI Hamiltonions be replaced with newer, more efficient procedures. Program modification, interfacing and testing were performed. Results of both plans are reported

Spotless Lilies and Foul Smelling Weeds: Architecture and Moral Cleanliness in Victorian Magdalen Convents

I have undertaken a detailed analysis of the architecture of Victorian magdalen convents as part of my broader research into religious houses in Britain, built between the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the present day. This is a building type that has been overlooked by architectural historians at a heavy cost - as communities have dwindled, unlisted houses have been redeveloped and demolished at a rapid pace. A root cause of this research gap has been the failure by historians to interrogate assumptions about this complex architecture and look beneath the skin. My own experience of researching religious houses has required considerable self-reflection as I continue to encounter and step beyond the frontiers of my thought processes and imagination. I began my doctoral research on the role of women in convent building with the intention of highlighting women’s historical role in the built environment and with a view to constructing a feminist account of nuns as designers and builders. I embarked on the research with a set of pre-conceptions about convent architecture - buildings that were created by women and for the exclusive use of women under largely autonomous conditions. These assumptions were quickly challenged by the primary sources - what I had taken to be evidence of empowerment was revealed to be a paradoxical picture of women frequently using their authority to etch oppressive ideologies into their architecture. My work on magdalen convents in particular has revealed the extraordinary ways that women shaped their buildings - seeking inspiration in unexpected places and appropriating secular philosophies. The cornerstone of my research has been the voices, both contemporary and historical, of the women who made these sites - their words have provided rich ways of understanding the theology and culture of women’s religious communities and cast new light on their unique architecture

Biaxial constitutive equation development

In developing the constitutive equations an interdisciplinary approach is being pursued. Specifically, both metallurgical and continuum mechanics considerations are recognized in the formulation. Experiments will be utilized to both explore general qualitative features of the material behavior that needs to be modeled and to provide a means of assessing the validity of the equations being developed. The model under development explicitly recognizes crystallographic slip on the individual slip systems. This makes possible direct representation of specific slip system phenomena. The present constitutive formulation takes the anisotropic creep theory and incorporates two state variables into the model to account for the effect of prior inelastic deformation history on the current rate-dependent response of the material

Between the Sacred and Secular: Faith, Space and Place in the Twenty-First Century

In his 1954 poem, “Church Going,” Phillip Larkin anticipated the end of religion and the ruination of Britain’s churches. “What remains,” Larkin asked “when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” In one respect, Larkin was right: the decline of traditional worship in the West did produce scores of redundant churches. But he was also wrong: the tendency to view abandoned churches as proof that ultimately “belief must die,” misses the myriad ways in which faith has, in fact, simply reconfigured and produced new spaces. Such weaknesses in the Western-centric disenchantment model have been recognized in the social sciences, where scholars are increasingly looking toward the built environment to understand new alignments in religion and society. However, the field remains somewhat overlooked by architectural theorists and historians. This article explores religious practices from an architectural perspective, offering an overview of faith, space and place in the twenty-first century

'Artists Hidden From Human Gaze': Visual Culture and Mysticism in the Nineteenth Century Convent

This article offers a reading of nineteenth-century Roman Catholic theology through the sacred art produced by and for women religious. The practices and devotions that the article explores, however, are not those that drew from the institutional Church but rather from the legacies of mysticism, many of which were shaped in women’s religious communities. Scholars have proposed that mysticism was stripped of its intellectual legitimacy and relegated to the margins of theology by post-Enlightenment rationalism, thereby consigning female religious experience to the politically impotent private sphere. The article suggests, however, that, although the literature of women’s mysticism entered a period of decline from the end of the Counter-Reformation, an authoritative female tradition, expressed in visual and material culture, continued into the nineteenth century and beyond. The art that emerged from convents reflected the increasing visibility of women in the Roman Catholic Church and the burgeoning of folkloric devotional practices and iconography. This article considers two paintings as evidence that, by the nineteenth century, the aporias1 of Christian theology were consciously articulated by women religious though the art that they made: works which, in turn, shaped the creed and culture of the institutional Church. In so doing, the article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of religion