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This thesis looks at the life and works of Sir Walter Ralegh. Specifically, this study will look at Ralegh's History of the World and its influence on two men, Oliver Cromwell and James Graham, Marquis of Montrose. This study will look at the impact this work may have had on the lives of these two men through their letters and public lives. Necessarily this study will look mainly at the primary sources of these men including the letters and speeches of Cromwell as compiled by Thomas Carlyle and the Memoirs of Montrose, compiled and edited by Mark Napier. Obviously Ralegh's History of the World will also be a significant part of my research. This study concludes that Sir Walter Ralegh's Historyhad an emphatic impact on the lives of both Cromwell and Montrose, who took strikingly different paths in life.

Both within and outside of the academy, most commentary treats neural engineering, and the “crisis of agency” it allegedly introduces, as something new. Yet my dissertation shows that technologies to modulate and record brain activity have been (1) a key factor in the creation of the discipline of neuroscience, (2) a central concern in the development of liberal ideologies of personhood and freedom, and (3) a critical feature of the what scholars have recently termed the “data economy” or “surveillance capitalism.” My work makes these arguments by offering the first monograph length scholarly study of neural engineering, documenting the rise, fall, and reappearance of brain implant technology. Techniques to stimulate and record the human brain were at the core of the creation of the discipline of neuroscience, and after 1951, long-term brain implant systems were used for research in dozens of human patients. The public backlash against brain engineering was enormous, allying both conservatives and New Left in the latter half of the 1960s, and by the late 1970s the once thriving research field had disappeared. But brain implants were not gone for good: in 2013, President Obama announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative to map the brain with a wireless brain implant called Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) hailed as its flagship technology. While brain implants in the 1970s seemed to threaten the existence of an autonomous self on which both the free market and democracy were premised, brain implants in the era of big data promise dazzling economic value. The global brain stimulation market is projected to be worth $6.2 billion by 2022, much of it underwritten by US military funding, with data monopolists like Alphabet and Facebook vying with Elon Musk to establish brain implant labs. In contrast to prevalent commentary that takes brain implants to have introduced a crisis of the agentic human, I argue that neural engineering’s reappearance has been made possible by permutations in liberal ideologies of “freedom” and “the human”; changes which I argue are conditioned by rise of post-industrial or “data” capitalism. As a critical account of the neurosciences, the story my dissertation tells differs from the many accounts of “neurosubjectivity” currently influential in STS, which date changes in liberal conceptions of the human to the ascent of neuroscience in the 1990s. Instead, the work shows how the politics of “freedom” in the latter half of the twentieth century came to be defined against neural engineering as a foil. It documents how debates about brain implants played a central role in constructing key liberal political concerns; among them bioethics, privacy law, and the legal construction of the body as private property. These changes directly undergirded the subsequent development of the neurosciences, chiefly the Reagan-era fusion of the US academy with the biotech industry. In this way, the project shows that the 1970s defeat of neural engineering ramified into the necessary conditions for its re-emergence at the cutting edge of “data capitalism.” Ethnographic research for the project began in 2014, and I spent a total of 34 months in four labs in the US and France developing DBS for psychiatric disorder. 14 of those months were in a lab whose project was funded by DARPA, the experimental sciences branch of the US military. Archival research was conducted at 20 institutions. The dissertation begins in the 1930s by charting the network of neurophysiologists who would constitute the brain as an electrical organ. These neurophysiologists would form the first organization to call its object “neuroscience,” the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO), funded by UNESCO in 1958 to bring together Soviet and Western neurophysiologists. IBRO’s aim was to construct a universal science of the brain, one that could resist the deforming hand of the US military state’s control of science. But IBRO would be defeated by the militarization of neuroscience in the late 1960s, and its progressive imagination for neural engineering would become a bête noir for the 1970s politics of freedom. The second section offers an intellectual history of the response to neural engineering 1951-76, from midcentury panics about “totalitarian” mind control to the New Left’s mobilization against “psychiatric technocracy.” I recount the key role of brain implant research in the 1972-76 Congressional hearings that would produce the fields of bioethics and medical privacy law, while causing neural engineering to disappear. The “reinvention” of DBS hinged on its application to movement disorders like Parkinson’s in the 1980s, which allowed scientists to frame the technology as one that restored, rather than violated, individual agency. The final section begins with 2005 research “breakthrough” that began investigating—“for the first time”— brain stimulation for psychiatric disorder. Drawing on my ethnographic work, the last section follows DBS research from clinical trials to biotech startups, mapping emerging conceptions and practices of selfhood, agency, and value production. I show how these practices of scientific experimentation rely on liberal contractual forms: an agentic “self” who “consents” to experimental procedures, even while the data produced by these experiments are reframing key concepts like “decisions,” “agency,” and “ownership.” I argue that this turn toward the data-productive brain does not signal the end of a politics of free will; rather, the new forms of “surveillance” capitalism enabled by brain implant research rely on strategically invoking the agentic liberal subject through legal forms like the contract and bioethical “consent.”

Historiography is the writing of history based on the examination of sources and synthesizing these sources into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods. Historiography is not the study of history but rather provides a tool to analyze each written account of a historical event. The concepts of historiography are traditionally reserved for the study of factual based history and not for fictional events or people. However, just as history seems to evolve over time, authors also revise their fiction work. If history is adapted and changed over time to fulfill the historian’s desires, can fictional works also be adapted to better fulfill the author’s intentions through the process of rewrites? Historiography allows us to understand that history is adapted and changed over time. Can the ideas of historiography be applied to fictional stories in order to understand why an author rewrites and revisits older works? How can a theatre practitioner understand and develop the most comprehensive version of a fictional text? Can he apply the same techniques used to deconstruct a historical event? Through a case study using William Inge’s classic play Picnic I explored the possibility of using historiography as a tool for theater practitioners in developing new dramatic texts that synthesize various scripts into one new comprehensive text. Through this case study I developed a framework which allows the theatre practitioner to apply the ideas of historiography to the analysis of a collection of fictional works by the same author in order to create a new text, showcasing the effectiveness of applying four cruxes of historiography to fictional texts.

<p> The historiography surrounding the Irish in Canada has generally adopted an American framework that has equated Irishness with Catholicism, thereby creating a very one dimensional picture of what it meant to be Irish in nineteenth century 'Amerikey'. Although historians have shown that the greatest emigrant outpouring for this period was not only an Irish one, but also a Protestant one, relatively little has been done to understand that group on its own terms. Where solid work does exist on Irish Protestant groups in Canada, rarely does one hear them speak in their own words. Rather, where and how quickly they settled, the singular importance of kin networks and the peculiarity of certain institutions is detailed. Little has been done with respect to understanding Irish Protestant identity: how they viewed their new world upon arrival and more importantly, how they would now and later view themselves. Indeed, the question 'Whatever Happened to the Irish?' was answered: Irish Protestants despite the strength of their numbers and their institutions, simply acculturated willingly and quickly into a larger, more encompassing 'British' identity. The assumption has followed that Irish Protestants were never very Irish in the first place. On the contrary, this thesis argues that far from simply fading away, a recognizably Irish Protestant culture - one that identified itself as the Irish nation - overcame early nineteenth century prejudice against 'things Irish' and eventually came to predominate many a local landscape in Ontario. Relying heavily on emigrant letters, this thesis emphasizes an Irish Protestant discourse that enjoyed a distinction and longevity that has yet to be recognized. It also maintains that Irish Catholicism was an integral component to the expression of that identity. Irish Protestants in Ontario remained distinctively Irish for a period longer than their countrymen in Ontario and their co-religionists in the homeland. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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