"Royal wench" : investigating gender and power in the Antony and Cleopatra plays of the English Renaissance

In 1592, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, published her dramatic version of the Antony and Cleopatra story, Antonius. In fairly quick succession, Samuel Daniel and Samuel Brandon published their own versions, The Tragedie of Cleopatra (1594) and The Tragicomeodi of the Vertuous Octavia (1598), of the ancient and tragic tale of love and politics. This study is an investigation into how these particular plays, using the same source story, illustrate the complex issues of gender and power in early modern England. In particular, I focus on how each writer's construction of the figures of Cleopatra and Antony illuminates how Renaissance cultural constructions of gender and power were made even more complex with the presence of Elizabeth I on the throne. Pembroke's Antonius seeks to subvert the cultural definitions of gender and power. Daniel uses his play to undermine the subversion of gender roles that Pembroke presents by returning to the figures of Antony and Cleopatra the traits with which they were invested in early modern culture. Brandon also resists the alternate reading of gender and power found in Antonius by presenting a positive vision of female power, Octavia, who reasserts the cultural definitions of gender and power. Brandon also explores more intensely the issues of power itself; that is, he moves from issues of gender and power to the issue of a ruler as a private and public person regardless of gender. My study also examines how changes in the power structure affect the use of the Antony and Cleopatra story. William Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra (1606-1608) and Thomas May's The Tragedy of Cleopatra: Queen of Aegypt (1626), and John Dryden's All For Love (1678), all written after the death of Elizabeth I, reveal that the ancient source story continued to be a relevant text for political investigation regardless of the gender of the monarch. By examining the ways in which these plays interact with the cultural constructions of gender and power and how they interact with each other, this study illustrates the complex relationship of literature and culture as well as literature with literature

Discutindo a educação ambiental no cotidiano escolar: desenvolvimento de projetos na escola formação inicial e continuada de professores

A presente pesquisa buscou discutir como a Educação Ambiental (EA) vem sendo trabalhada, no Ensino Fundamental e como os docentes desta escola compreendem e vem inserindo a EA no cotidiano escolar., em uma escola estadual do município de Tangará da Serra/MT, Brasil. Para tanto, realizou-se entrevistas com os professores que fazem parte de um projeto interdisciplinar de EA na escola pesquisada. Verificou-se que o projeto da escola não vem conseguindo alcançar os objetivos propostos por: desconhecimento do mesmo, pelos professores; formação deficiente dos professores, não entendimento da EA como processo de ensino-aprendizagem, falta de recursos didáticos, planejamento inadequado das atividades. A partir dessa constatação, procurou-se debater a impossibilidade de tratar do tema fora do trabalho interdisciplinar, bem como, e principalmente, a importância de um estudo mais aprofundado de EA, vinculando teoria e prática, tanto na formação docente, como em projetos escolares, a fim de fugir do tradicional vínculo “EA e ecologia, lixo e horta”.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

Money talks : economics, discourse and identity in three Renaissance comedies

This purpose of this study is to examine how the theatre of the late fifteen hundreds and early sixteen hundreds was used to voice for its audience the rising concerns of locating identity in an economic urban setting. This was increasingly difficult because the traditional markers of social stratification were becoming much more ambiguous. In particular, this study will focus on three Renaissance comedies that highlight the issues of identity in the city; the plays included are William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Thomas Middleton's Michaelmas Term. The key to understanding the issues of locating identity in the city is language. The use of both the oral and written codes of language in the plays included will be examined in order to shed some light on the overall dramatic discourse of each play. In other words, this study will examine how each individual playwright (in)forms his characters with a specific discourse which is then used to guide the audience to the social discourse that the play produces. The use of language by the playwrights instigates a dialogue with the audience that emphasizes the role that language plays in establishing identity. Furthermore each playwright creates a world of competing discourses that in turn illustrates how identity in the 'real' or actual culture can be discerned. In the plays discussed the identity of each character is revealed by the discourse they espouse; what each character represents is marked by the relationship of individual discourse to the discourse of the play itself. In each case the discourse that is used to create and establish identity is interconnected to economic activity. The discourses of identity in these plays are based on economics. It is the aim of this study to propose that each playwright sees the ambiguity of identity in the urban setting as one of the central issues with which the audience watching has to contend. Through such an examination, this study will attempt to offer an insight into the larger discourse of identity in the socially and economically fluid culture of sixteenth-century London

Search for narrow resonances using the dijet mass spectrum in pp collisions at s√=8 TeV

Results are presented of a search for the production of new particles decaying to pairs of partons (quarks, antiquarks, or gluons), in the dijet mass spectrum in proton-proton collisions at s√=8  TeV. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 4.0  fb−1, collected with the CMS detector at the LHC in 2012. No significant evidence for narrow resonance production is observed. Upper limits are set at the 95% confidence level on the production cross section of hypothetical new particles decaying to quark-quark, quark-gluon, or gluon-gluon final states. These limits are then translated into lower limits on the masses of new resonances in specific scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. The limits reach up to 4.8 TeV, depending on the model, and extend previous exclusions from similar searches performed at lower collision energies. For the first time mass limits are set for the Randall–Sundrum graviton model in the dijet channel

Search for long-lived particles in events with photons and missing energy in proton\u2013proton collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV

Results are presented from a search for long-lived neutralinos decaying into a photon and an invisible particle, a signature associated with gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking in supersymmetric models. The analysis is based on a 4.9 inverse femtobarn sample of proton-proton collisions at 1as = 7 TeV, collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. The missing transverse energy and the time of arrival of the photon at the electromagnetic calorimeter are used to search for an excess of events over the expected background. No significant excess is observed, and lower limits at the 95% confidence level are obtained on the mass of the lightest neutralino, m(neutralino) > 220 GeV (for c tau 6000 mm (for m(neutralino) < 150 GeV)

Search for heavy resonances in the W/Z-tagged dijet mass spectrum in pp collisions at 7 TeV

A search has been made for massive resonances decaying into a quark and a vector boson, qW or qZ, or a pair of vector bosons, WW, WZ, or ZZ, where each vector boson decays to hadronic final states. This search is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb 121 of proton\u2013proton collisions collected in the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2011 at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. For sufficiently heavy resonances the decay products of each vector boson are merged into a single jet, and the event effectively has a dijet topology. The background from QCD dijet events is reduced using recently developed techniques that resolve jet substructure. A 95% CL lower limit is set on the mass of excited quark resonances decaying into qW (qZ) at 2.38 TeV (2.15 TeV) and upper limits are set on the cross section for resonances decaying to qW, qZ, WW, WZ, or ZZ final states

Transverse momentum and pseudorapidity distributions of charged hadrons in pp collisions at (s)\sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 2.36 TeV

Measurements of inclusive charged-hadron transverse-momentum and pseudorapidity distributions are presented for proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 2.36 TeV. The data were collected with the CMS detector during the LHC commissioning in December 2009. For non-single-diffractive interactions, the average charged-hadron transverse momentum is measured to be 0.46 +/- 0.01 (stat.) +/- 0.01 (syst.) GeV/c at 0.9 TeV and 0.50 +/- 0.01 (stat.) +/- 0.01 (syst.) GeV/c at 2.36 TeV, for pseudorapidities between -2.4 and +2.4. At these energies, the measured pseudorapidity densities in the central region, dN(charged)/d(eta) for |eta| < 0.5, are 3.48 +/- 0.02 (stat.) +/- 0.13 (syst.) and 4.47 +/- 0.04 (stat.) +/- 0.16 (syst.), respectively. The results at 0.9 TeV are in agreement with previous measurements and confirm the expectation of near equal hadron production in p-pbar and pp collisions. The results at 2.36 TeV represent the highest-energy measurements at a particle collider to date