"Fit Cradle of the Reviving Art": An inquiry into the the Evolving Material Reality of the Murals in the Camposanto of Pisa from the Perspective of their British Reception from the 17th to the 19th century

The Camposanto of Pisa is an extraordinarily complex and evocative monument, which has captured the imagination of pilgrims, both religious and secular, for centuries. The late Medieval and early Renaissance wall paintings that line the perimeter of the portico surrounding a vast inner courtyard, are unparalleled in early Italian art, not only for their striking variety of composition and narrative complexity, but also for the sheer grandeur of their proportion. However, the passage of time has scarred the structure of the Camposanto and inflicted terrible damage on its wall paintings. This thesis explores the material reality of the Camposanto as experienced over three centuries through the eyes of British travelers. In order to situate the Camposanto mural cycle within an historical and cultural context, the first chapter provides an overview of the construction and decoration of the monument. Notably, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), the Italian Humanist often recognized as the father of art history, included numerous descriptions of the Camposanto murals in his highly influential text Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori. Accordingly, the second chapter provides an analysis of Vasari’s descriptions and reflects upon the influence that the Renaissance author may have had upon the subsequent British reception of the Camposanto murals. The third chapter utilizes three centuries of travel writing in order to investigate the aesthetic impact of the Camposanto mural cycle upon British tourists from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century.

The Financialization of Food: An Inquiry into the 2008-2011 Food Price Spikes

This dissertation investigates the question: has financial speculation contributed to global food price volatility since the mid 2000s? I problematize the mainstream academic literature on the 2008-2011 food price spikes as being dominated by neoclassical economic perspectives and offer new conceptual and empirical insights into the relationship between financial speculation and food. Presented in three journal style manuscripts, manuscript one uses circuits of capital to conceptualize the link between financial speculators in the global north and populations in the global south. Manuscript two argues that what makes commodity index speculation (aka ‘index funds’ or index swaps) novel is that it provides institutional investors with what Clapp (2014) calls “financial distance” from the biopolitical implications of food speculation. Finally, manuscript three combines Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and ‘the intellectual’ with the concept of performativity to investigate the ideological role that public intellectuals and the rhetorical actor the market play in the proliferation and governance of commodity index speculation. The first two manuscripts take an empirically mixed method approach by combining regression analysis with discourse analysis, while the third relies on interview data and discourse analysis. The findings show that financial speculation by index swap dealers and hedge funds did indeed significantly contribute to the price volatility of food commodities between June 2006 and December 2014. The results from the interview data affirm these findings. The discourse analysis of the interview data shows that public intellectuals and rhetorical characters such as ‘the market’ play powerful roles in shaping how food speculation is promoted, regulated and normalized. The significance of the findings is three-fold. First, the empirical findings show that a link does exist between financial speculation and food price volatility. Second, the findings indicate that the post-2008 CFTC and the Dodd-Frank reforms are unlikely to reduce financial speculation or the price volatility that it causes. Third, the findings suggest that institutional investors (such as pension funds) should think critically about how they use commodity index speculation as a way of generating financial earnings.

PROLINE-BASED CHIRAL STATIONARY PHASES: INSIGHTS INTO THE MECHANISM OF CHIRAL SELECTIVITY

Proline (Pro) is a unique amino acid that has been examined previously as a potential chiral selector for high-performance liquid chromatography. In recent years, a new class of promising Pro based enantioselective stationary phases has been studied and the longer peptides were found to be competitive with commercial chiral stationary phases (CSPs). Here, we aim to perform a comprehensive examination of a t-butoxycarbonyl- (t-Boc-) terminated monoproline selector. This selector was grafted through an amide linkage to an aminopropyl siloxane-terminated Si (111) wafer and to a silicon atomic force microscopy tip. To ensure a flat, homogeneous overlayer of selectors suitable for force spectrometric measurements, the prepared surfaces were characterized using XPS, AFM and contact angle measurements. Chemical force spectrometry (CFS) has been used to examine the chiral discrimination in our monoproline CSP by measuring the interaction forces between two D- or L-monoproline monolayers in water and in the presence of a series of amino acids in solution to explore the degree to which binding of amino acids impacts self-selectivity. Chemical force titration (CFT) has been used to observe the influence of variations in pH on the binding interaction of proline modified chiral surfaces. Here we aim to explore the connection between side-chain hydrophobicity and differences in the nature of the binding between different ionic forms of amino acids and the t-Boc-Pro interface, and thereby to gain insight into the mechanism of chiral selectivity. The CFS results show several trends for different proline selector/amino acid combinations and indicate that the binding characteristics of amino acid to the proline surface is strongly dependent on the amino acid side chain where hydrophilic side chain amino acids exhibit a selectivity opposite to that seen for those with hydrophobic side chains. The CFT studies also provide valuable insights into interactions between the proline selector and the amino acids under a wide range of pH conditions, indicating that protonated amine groups of alanine and serine are closely involved in the binding mechanism to proline surfaces. On the other hand, the presence of the second carboxylic group in aspartic acid plays an important role while interacting with proline.