Recreating the Past: Aachen and the Problem of the Architectural "Copy"

This thesis explores the formal, historiographic and critical issues of similitude and the problem of historical memory through Charlemagne's chapel at Aachen and buildings associated with it. In my study, I seek to understand some of the levels on which reference to and appropriation of Aachen reflect the historical, political and cultural moment unique to each of five selected interpretations and how, in these examples, the perception of Aachen provided an image through which contemporary concerns ad meanings could be expressed. The issue, therefore, is not so much what Aachen was like, physically or even ideologically, at the time it was built, but how the chapel was perceived in later times, and, importantly, what the terms of that image were and how that image made the chapel a viable touchstone for later references - often ambiguously termed "copies." These buildings can be seen not simply as subordinate to Aachen, but as works that incorporate an image of Aachen for their own ends; through this incorporation, Aachen can be seen as actually subject to them for its own survival. My study raises the question of what it can mean to remember Aachen and the corollary issue of what it can mean to be like Aachen. My chosen examples underscore that while the chapel remained a potent image, the perception of Aachen as a work of the past as well as the criteria for likeness are changeable and tied to time and circumstance

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Restoring Charlemagne’s chapel: historical consciousness, material culture, and transforming images of Aachen in the 1840s

The 1840s offer crystallizing images of Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen that continue to resonate. In this decade, the Carolingian building, restored in words and images by scholars, made an auspicious debut within the coalescing discipline of art history. Simultaneously, the well-known restoration of the extant medieval chapel, which began in the 1850s, found sure footing as the chapel’s columnar screen, which Napoleon had removed, was reinserted. While these co-existing, interrelated restoration movements – focused on the chapel’s dilapidated state and notions of its importance as an imperial, Christian, and German work – diverged in methods and results after mid-century, they remain central to understanding both the chapel in scholarship and the extraordinary monument in the town centre of Aachen today