Career choice in medicine

Background: Career Choice in Medicine is an important and problematic topic. Medical education has been framed as professional identity development, yet career choice has not been viewed as a matter of identity. My primary aim was to offer new insights by exploring career choice using Figured Worlds theory, a socio-cultural theory of identity. Graduate retention is a challenge for many countries, including Ireland. My secondary aim was to address a gap in the data on postgraduate trainees in Ireland and to use the Irish case to illustrate points transferable to other contexts. Methodology & Methods: This was a predominantly qualitative Mixed Methods programme of research. My qualitative studies were oriented towards social constructionism. I collated existing data from the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) and HSE-MET to describe trainees and their career paths. I surveyed Basic Specialist Training trainees (n=333) about their career plans. I surveyed new trainees (n=527) about their expectations of training and all RCPI trainees about their experiences of training (n=1246). I conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 medical students and doctors. A subgroup (n=6) provided longitudinal data. Figured Worlds theory and Gee’s discourse tools were used for analysis. Results: I have used the case of medical training and career choice in Ireland to explain how social, political and cultural context, and day to day experiences in the cultural world of medicine, shaped doctors’ career choices. My qualitative findings described a unifying model of career choice, consisting of priming, exposure, positioning and open-endedness, which can guide the design of interventions to shape and support career choice. Conclusion: My original contribution has been to demonstrate the fruitfulness of framing career choice in terms of identity development. This represents a turn in the conversation about career choice, which brings new starting points and moves the dialogue forward.

Reflections on Children

In the Fall 2004, while preparing my dissertation project “Reflections on children,” I realized that whether art songs, operatic arias or scenes, the classical repertory offers a wide variety of masterpieces regarding all aspects of children’s life. My first dissertation recital is called “Journeys” and was performed on December 6th 2004 at 8:00pm in the Tawes Recital Hall. Change is the only inevitable condition in life and as such, it has been thought-provoking to many poets and composers. The narrator in Mahler’s Wayfarer Songs experiences the pain of love for the first time and emerges transformed into an adult. The narrator in Barber’s Knoxville is an adult looking back at his journey in an attempt to understand himself. The mothers in Britten’s Charm of Lullabies each make every effort to accept the changes in their own life after the birth of her baby. Finally, both Brahms’ songs are about risks and losses. “Destinies” is the title of the second dissertation recital as it attempts to capture the dark fate of Mignon and of Rückert/Mahler’s children. It was performed on April 8th 2005 in the Tawes Recital Hall. Mignon’s grief is portrayed through songs full of sadness and hopelessness in mourning of a long lost childhood. Rückert wrote 425 Kindertotenlieder in memory of his children’s deaths over a period of twenty years and Mahler orchestrated five of them. Mahler’s choices deal with light and darkness, symbolizing eternal life and hope versus despair and death, in both the literal and the literary sense. Finally, the third dissertation recital called “Blessings” was performed on May 19th 2005 in the Tawes Recital Hall. It relies on the evocation of moods and scenes created by a variety of composers and poets. Poulenc’s La Courte Paille are brief works in the style of a child’s song with unrelated and unexpected images juxtaposed, creating a sense of inner monologues. John Greer’s House of Tomorrow, Guastavino’s Cradle Songs and the rest of the composers offer wonderful pieces of immense power and expression in their directness and sensitive contour.

The Oud Across Arabic Culture

This study is a compilation and compendium of information on the oud, the most important instrument in Arabic classical music. It has grown out of my own long-time involvement in studying and playing the oud, and in particular out of my interest in the lack of sources and knowledge available to the vast majority of oud players and researchers, as well as for the readers. My own path started from an intensive study of the oud, which included exposure to several treaties; some housed in museums around the globe, and some only available in the Arabic language. The study combines archival research (including Arabic poetry and pre-Islamic Era and medieval treaties), symbolism, new archaeological discoveries, field interviews, and analysis of existing scholarship, and draws on my professional performance experience for detailed stylistic analysis of the oud's performance practice and its historical development. The study consists of participant observation, personal performance, and interviews conducted in person, via telephone, and/or via e-mail, according to the choice of the performers. The performers have been selected from networks of musicians who perform regularly at lounges, concert halls, and private events. These performers have been chosen according to their musical knowledge, technical skill, experience, and activity in Arabic music and oud performance. Chapter one deals with the purpose of this study and the methods of investigation, as well as giving a brief overview of the history of the oud. In addition, there will be an introduction to the Arabic musical system (mâqâm), which is primarily based on the mechanics and sound production of the oud. Chapter two deals with the oud in Arabic sources: the first source is Arabic poetry in the pre-Islamic Era. The second source is Arabic poetry in the medieval era, in which I found a significant number of poets who allude to the oud, providing accurate descriptions of the player, singers, and the scenes within the contexts of oud performance. The third source is the Arab scholars' intensive treatises with meticulous accounts of the instrument's apparatii, including descriptions and measurements of the parts, strings, and tuning. While chapter three deals with the classification, the development of the oud, chapter four deals with topics such as: the symbolism of the oud and its relation to cosmology, astronomy, mathematics and anatomy. In most of the pertinent Arabic writings, philosophers mention a significant correlation between the oud and the other sciences. Chapter five deals with recreating the performance practice of the oud. A case study of the oud performers focuses on their style, technique, training, and personal experiences. Topics such as improvisation and ornamentation, the oud in the Arabic musical ensemble, the social uses and functions, and gender in musical performance practices will be included in detailed analysis. Other important topics will be analyzed such as traditional vs. modern technique, and the repertoire of the oud. Specifically, in regard to technique, the study outline the style of the music, the role of the oud in Arabic ensembles, the function of the oud in music composition, and the form of the ensembles in Arabic performance and practice.

Age Effects in Cultural Life Scripts.

Life scripts are culturally shared expectations about the timing of life events in an idealized life course. Because they are cultural semantic knowledge, they should be known by all adult age groups including those who have not lived through all events in the life script, but this has not been tested previously. Young, middle-aged and older adults from the Netherlands were therefore asked in this online study to imagine an ordinary Dutch infant and to name the seven most important events that were likely to take place in the life of this prototypical child. Participants subsequently answered questions about at what ages these events were expected to occur and about their prevalence, importance and valence. We found that the cultural life script was similar for young, middle-aged and older adults and for adults with different educational attainment.

The reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of the best football players of all time: Pelé, Cruijff or Maradona?

The reminiscence bump is the tendency to recall more autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood than from adjacent lifetime periods. In this online study, the robustness of the reminiscence bump was examined by looking at participants' judgements about the quality of football players. Dutch participants (N = 619) were asked who they thought the five best players of all time were. The participants could select the names from a list or enter the names when their favourite players were not on the list. Johan Cruijff, Pelé, and Diego Maradona were the three most often mentioned players. Participants frequently named football players who reached the midpoint of their career when the participants were adolescents (mode = 17). The results indicate that the reminiscence bump can also be identified outside the autobiographical memory domain.

CANCIONES ARGENTINAS (SONGS OFARGENTINA): A RECORDING PROJECT

This Dissertation Project comprises recordings of Argentine art songs. The discs are approximately 40-60 minutes in length and consist of songs from the traditional art-song repertoire for voice and piano. This project is particularly appropriate because of the very limited number of recordings of Argentine songs, which are notable both not only for their high quality but for their accessibility of performance for voice teachers, students, and professional singers alike. Art songs in the Spanish language are a welcome resource, and the poetry included in this project is of an outstanding quality. Some of the poets set to music are Gabriela Mistral (a poet laureate of Chile and the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), Pablo Neruda (also a Nobel laureate), Luis Cernuda, and Leon Benar6s. The lyrics of some songs are based on traditional sources, and the melodies and rhythms of all are representative of South American-indigenous and European­ immigrant cultures. The composers represented here will be familiar to some listeners but more than likely unfamiliar to most. Yet Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) is considered to be the greatest of all Argentine composers. Alberto Williams (1862-1952) is known as the father of the Nationalist School of composition in Argentina, and Carlos Lopez Buchardo (1881-1963) is a most influential composer and pedagogue after whom the national Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aries is named. Two composers who remain relatively unknown outside of South America, Abraham Jurafsky (1906- 1993) and Julio Perceval (1903-1963) are also represented in this project. A complete compact disc is devoted to the works of Carlos Guastavino. Known as the "Argentine Schubert", Guastavino has over 250 songs to his credit. Chiefly a composer for piano and voice, his recent death (October 2000) makes a recording of his works especially appropriate. This project also includes a written component, a supportive dissertation briefly describing the history of the Argentine art song and the lives and influences of the composers and poets represented in the studio recordings. The CD recordings are held in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University of Maryland.

Immune response to B. pertussis infection and vaccine in infants

info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Tennyson among the novelists

Until now, the study of literary allusion has focused on allusions made by poets to other poets. In Tennyson Among the Novelists, John Morton presents the first book-length account of the presence of a poet’s work in works of prose fiction. As well as shedding new light on the poems of Tennyson and their reception history, Morton covers a wide variety of novelists including Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, and Andrew O’Hagan, offering a fresh look at their approach to writing. Morton shows how Tennyson’s poetry, despite its frequent depreciation by critics, has survived as a vivifying presence in the novel from the Victorian period to the present day.

The missing link between information and action: hastenings and delays as universal reactions to performance feedback

This chapter focuses on what the key decision makers in organizations decide after having received information on the current state of the organizational performance. Because of strong attributions to success and failure, it is impossible to predict in advance which concrete actions will occur. We can however find out what kinds of actions are decided upon by means of an organizational learning model that focuses on the hastenings and delays after performance feedback. As an illustration, the responses to performance signals by trainers and club owners in Dutch soccer clubs are analyzed.

Regional climate change and harmful algal blooms in the northeast Atlantic

We investigated long-term spatial variability in a number of Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) in the northeast Atlantic and North Sea using data from the Continuous Plankton Recorder. Over the last four decades, some dinoflagellate taxa showed pronounced variation in the south and east of the North Sea, with the most significant increases being restricted to the adjacent waters off Norway. There was also a general decrease along the eastern coast of the United Kingdom. The most prominent feature in the interannual bloom frequencies over the last four decades was the anomalously high values recorded in the late 1980s in the northern and central North Sea areas. The only mesoscale area in the northeast Atlantic to show a significant increase in bloom formation over the last decade was the Norwegian coastal region. The changing spatial patterns of HAB taxa and the frequency of bloom formation are discussed in relation to regional climate change, in particular, changes in temperature, salinity, and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Areas highly vulnerable to the effects of regional climate change on HABs are Norwegian coastal waters and the Skagerrak. Other vulnerable areas include Danish coastal waters, and to a lesser extent, the German and Dutch Bight and the northern Irish Sea. Quite apart from eutrophication, our results give a preview of what might happen to certain HAB genera under changing climatic conditions in temperate environments and their responses to variability of climate oscillations such as the NAO.

Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne

This monograph examines a selection of Vincent Bourne's Latin verse in its classical, neo-Latin and vernacular contexts, with particular attention to the theme of identity (and differing forms of identity). Its aim is to initiate the resurrection from silence of an author whose self-fashioning is achieved by investigating the identity of the self in relation to the other and by foregrounding multiple attempts to fashion other selves.

From Back Cover of published book:

Through close and perceptive analysis of Bourne's negotiation of poetic identity, Haan argues in new ways for the blend of classicism and Romanticism informing his marginalized status. As such, the book promises to revive scholarship on Bourne, and to be of use to students and scholars of Latin as well as vernacular verse.
Carla Mazzio, Professor of English, University of Chicago.


Estelle Haan is the UK's most eminent neo-Latinist. Her books with the APS on Milton (From Academia to Amicitia, Transactions 88, part 6) and Addison (Vergilius Redivivus, Transactions 95, part 2) are both important contributions to our knowledge of those authors, and their scholarship is presented in a way that accommodates the growing number of specialists who do not read Latin. Much of the content of this study is entirely new, and it is written in a way that will make it accessible to non-Latinists. The connections with English-language poets that Professor Haan adduces page after page will be a very considerable resource for students of vernacular poetry.
Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Literature, University of Leicester.


I have long thought that a modern study of Vincent Bourne was very much needed, and am greatly pleased that one has now been written. Estelle Haan offers a thoughtful and sensitive study that has remarkable depth. She capitalizes on the familiarity with other eighteenth-century English poets about whom she has previously written (Cowper, Gray, and most recently Addison) and she makes use of contempoary literary theory without becoming dependent on any single approach or disfiguring her writing with critical jargon. This work will, one hopes, provoke further research into Bourne and his poetry.
Dana F. Sutton, Professor Emeritus of Classics, The University of California, Irvine.

Euroscepticism in the Netherlands: Stirrings of Dissent

Recent years have seen the emergence of a markedly more critical discourse in the Netherlands as regards European integration. Concerns over both the size of the net national contribution to the European Union budget and the implications for the country of EU enlargement have given rise to high-profile public debates. An explicitly articulated discourse of national interest, centred on but not limited to the Liberal VVD, has become a staple of political debate. At the same time, movements with clearly Eurosceptic agendas (the Pim Fortuyn List and the Socialist Party) have enjoyed unparalleled levels of electoral success. Although not of significant electoral salience, 'Europe' has nevertheless emerged as an issue in Dutch politics. The present article examines these stirrings of dissent in an EU member state which had long been regarded as one of the most enthusiastic supporters of further integration.

Sporting with the Classics: The Latin Poetry of William Dillingham

Sporting with the Classics: The Latin Poetry of William Dillingham (2010) (back cover)

Dana Sutton, University of California:
‘The great merit of Estelle Haan's study is that she is willing to take Dillingham seriously as a poet. Her reproduction of his work, together with an English translation and very detailed studies of his individual poems have the combined effect of rescuing an interesting poet from near-total oblivion. This, in my opinion, is the finest thing a neo-Latin scholar can do, and Haan accomplishes her task with the same skill, sensitivity, and eloquence that have distinguished her studies of other neo-Latin poets of this period (Joseph Addison and Vincent Bourne). It is impossible not to react to this volume with extreme respect and appreciation’.

Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester:
‘Nothing substantial has ever been published on Dillingham, but with this volume we have a new corpus of poetry that intersects with the work of many other seventeenth-century neo-Latin and vernacular poets. Professor Haan’s scholarship is here (as always) placed at the service of the poet, and she leads the reader gently through the work of a new poet. Professor Haan is the most eminent and able neo-Latinist of her generation, and her scholarship never fails; sometimes it dazzles as in the chapters on the hangman's stone and on Renaissance topiary. Her research is always up-to-date, and her translations have a gracefulness that other laborers in the vineyard can only envy’.