The Wandering Collection: The India Museum and Dialogues on Empire

Prince Albert’s positive response to the Great Exhibition of 1851 spawned several new museums in the South Kensington area, including the India Office’s India Museum. Scholars for the past century and a half have extensively studied all of these museums. Many of the museums that opened in the wake of this event were museums that revolved around the concept of education as discussed in Bruce Robertson’s 2004 article “The South Kensington Museum in Context: An Alternative History.” Robertson’s article is one of many that focuses on the creation of a museum and the roles that the director and staff played in that creation. Like many other historians, Robertson looks at a museum, in this case the South Kensington Museum, without looking at the wider context in which it was founded. Many of these histories do not include empire as a factor in the creation and day-to-day operations of these institutions. Those scholarly explorations which do involve empire such as the Smithsonian’s Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display tend to focus more on post-colonial representations of other cultures, such as the 1986 exhibition of Indian Art at the Grand Palais in Paris. In contrast, this paper examines the cultural dialogues regarding empire that took place between the educated British public and the Government through the collections of the India Museum. By tracing the collections of the India Museum between 1869 and 1883, it is evident that the British Government and the British people used cultural centers such as the former India Museum as a structure through which the perception of empire could be discussed, changed, and molded to fit changing conceptions of British national identity. In many ways, during this period British perception of empire changed from one sustained by trade to one sustained by culture. By utilizing the internal documents found in museum archives in London, this thesis is able the follow the internal, bureaucratic debates that occurred within this museum and how those debates correlated with larger events. This paper is divided into three chapters. The first chapter examines the trade background and focus of the India Museum as it came under the purview of the India Office, as well as how some in the British public received that background and focus. The second chapter explores how changes were made to the India Museum during the mid-1870s in response to public criticisms, including a move from the India Office building to a new home in South Kensington. The final chapter traces the India Museum’s collections through their dispersal to the South Kensington Museum and the ways in which that dispersal reflected shifting perceptions of empire from a solely financial institution to one with a variety of functions.Bachelor of Art

Sensitivity of the IceCube Upgrade to Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations

IceCube DeepCore, the existing low-energy extension of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, was designed to lower the neutrino detection energy threshold to the GeV range. A new extension, called the IceCube Upgrade, will consist of seven additional strings installed within the DeepCore fiducial volume. The new modules will have spacings of about 20 m horizontally and 3 m vertically, compared to about 40-70 m horizontally and 7 m vertically in DeepCore. It will be deployed in the polar season of 2025/26. This additional hardware features new types of optical modules with multi-PMT configurations, as well as calibration devices. This upgrade will more than triple the number of PMT channels with respect to current IceCube, and will significantly enhance its capabilities in the GeV energy range. However, the increased channel count also poses new computational challenges for the event simulation, selection, and reconstruction. In this contribution we present updated oscillation sensitivities based on the latest advancements in simulation, event selection, and reconstruction techniques.Comment: Presented at the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2023). See arXiv:2307.13047 for all IceCube contribution

Human Hematopoietic Stem Cell Engrafted IL-15 Transgenic NSG Mice Support Robust NK Cell Responses and Sustained HIV-1 Infection.

Mice reconstituted with human immune systems are instrumental in the investigation of HIV-1 pathogenesis and therapeutics. Natural killer (NK) cells have long been recognized as a key mediator of innate anti-HIV responses. However, established humanized mouse models do not support robust human NK cell development from engrafted human hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). A major obstacle to human NK cell reconstitution is the lack of human interleukin-15 (IL-15) signaling, as murine IL-15 is a poor stimulator of the human IL-15 receptor. Here, we demonstrate that immunodeficient NOD.Cg-Prkdcscid Il2rgtm1Wjl/SzJ (NSG) mice expressing a transgene encoding human IL-15 (NSG-Tg(IL-15)) have physiological levels of human IL-15 and support long-term engraftment of human NK cells when transplanted with human umbilical-cord-blood-derived HSCs. These Hu-NSG-Tg(IL-15) mice demonstrate robust and long-term reconstitution with human immune cells, but do not develop graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), allowing for long-term studies of human NK cells. Finally, we show that these HSC engrafted mice can sustain HIV-1 infection, resulting in human NK cell responses in HIV-infected mice. We conclude that Hu-NSG-Tg(IL-15) mice are a robust novel model to study NK cell responses to HIV-1

2018-2019 Mostly Music: Johann Sebastian Bach

https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_mostlymusic/1031/thumbnail.jp

2016-2017 Mostly Music: Felix Mendelssohn

https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_mostlymusic/1026/thumbnail.jp