Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4307. Adviser: Peter Fritzsche. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 241-255) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This study traces the development of violoncello bowing technique in France, Austria and Germany between the years 1785-1839. Using evidence obtained from contemporary violoncello methods, periodical reviews, iconographic materials, diaries, letters, musical manuscripts, first-edition performance repertoire, and first-hand research at the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institute and University of California at Berkeley, the technical methodology of each school is examined. By this process, diverse qualities in the playing manner of J. P. Duport, J. L. Duport, Janson, Tricklir, Breval, J. H. Levasseur, Lamare, Hus-Desforges, Baudiot, Norblin, Vaslin and Franchomme, and that of A. Kraft, Ritter, Romberg, N. Kraft, Dotzauer, Lincke, Bohrer, Merk and Kummer are discernible. Such divergences in bowing technique form the basis of dissimilarities present in French and Austro-German violoncello performance of 1785-1839, a circumstance occasioned by a variety of contributing factors. These issues are segregated for investigation. Following the Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2 provide background information regarding the development of the instrument, bow, and bowing techniques before 1785. Chapter 3 discusses design modifications that occurred to the instrument and bow between 1785 and 1839. Chapters 4 and 5 present the biographies of each of the violoncellists examined, while Chapter 6 discusses the influence of performers from the French violin school and the musician interaction brought about by the French Revolution and subsequent wars. Analysis of the varying performance characteristics of the French and Austro-German schools begins with Chapter 7, this chapter and Chapter 8 surveying the performance methodology of each of the violoncellists included in this study. Chapters 9 and 10 assess the consequential relationship of performance technique to performance repertoire and Chapter 11 summarizes the findings of the accomplished research. These findings detail differences in the performance methodology of the French, Austrian and German violoncello schools in the period 1785-1839. The variants evinced include the manner in which the bow and instrument were held, the type of bowing techniques incorporated into the performance repertoire of each nationality and the method of their execution, the way in which the violoncello's varying sonorities were exploited, and the regard for sound quality and volume by performers of each school. / Subscription resource available via Digital Dissertations only.

On March 9, 1995, Canadian officials on fisheries patrol vessels fired warning shots, then boarded and seized the Spanish trawler Estai. Fishing on the Nose of the Grand Banks, but beyond Canada's 200-mile fishing zone, the Estai had been using an illegal net and had resisted previous boarding attempts. The European Union (EU) strongly objected to what it cast as a violation of international law. The objective of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Estai incident and its implications for Canadian fisheries policy and Canada's relations with the EU. The Estai seizure and subsequent "Turbot War" formed an important chapter in Canada's diplomatic history, arousing national feeling while souring relations with the EU, at least in the short term. However, this action against foreign overfishing helped bring about much needed changes regarding international fish conservation. Agreements came into place with the EU and other NAFO members allowing for full observer coverage on vessels and other improvements. As well, the Turbot War fostered the emergence of the new United Nations Fisheries Agreement dealing with conservation, pollution reduction, and the right of member states to inspect another country's vessels to ensure compliance with internationally-agreed rules of regional fishing. Even so, problems resurfaced in the workings of NAFO, and fish stocks have seen only limited recovery.

Meaningful mediums is a study of the political economy of writing in the first Ottoman city to develop a sustained urban print culture. Cairo’s writing economy comprised the longstanding manuscript industry, the governmental printing industry from the 1820s, and the for-profit private press printing industry from the 1850s. I investigate these industries’ functions, interactions, and reputations to explore why Cairene printing developed and how contemporaries ascribed meaning to textual production during this period of flux. This study relies on the texts themselves to generate the history of their production. I aggregate the names, dates, and other information contained within their openings, contents, and colophons to chart the work of their producers and vendors for the first time. I then contextualize this information through contemporary iconographic and descriptive depictions of Cairene texts. My sources are drawn from libraries and private collections in America, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France. They include formal and ephemeral manuscripts and printings. Against narratives that invoke printing as a catalyst for modernity, I argue that printing was simply a tool. Its adoption increased because it was useful for different actors like the state, private entrepreneurs, and scholars who employed it to respond to specific political, economic, and intellectual needs. My argument reverses the causality of modernization narratives, in that I establish that printing was the result of practical demands instead of the origin of new demands. As a tool, printing was deployed by Cairenes flexibly. Some used it to appropriate western norms, including the idea that printing is a civilizing force. Others used it to enact manuscript tradition. The history of this process is important to social practices, like the creation of new professions. But it is also important to historical legacy. Nationalism, Enlightenment, and civil society are assigned their origins and proof in Cairene printings from the 1870s and 1880s. Yet this narrative of the Middle East’s generic print modernity draws from the expectation for printings to engender public discourse and galvanize society, instead of from the words that these texts actually contain or an understanding of who made and consumed them and why. To counter the prevailing idea that printing is fixed and universal in its value and effects, Meaningful mediums examines printing as both a social and economic practice, and itself a space for ideas. It therefore emphasizes the significance of human agency, local context, constraints, and continuity during a period of momentous technological, textual, and cultural change. In conclusion, this study documents Cairenes’ incorporation of printing into their political economy of writing and revises the widely held notion that this process was an agent of social change, a marker of modernity and colonial restructuring, and a foreign disruptor of local textual tradition. / Middle Eastern Studies Committee

This dissertation examines Piero Gobetti’s activity as a student of Russian language and culture, and proposes that it be understood as a formative phase in a larger process of self-construction, through which Gobetti attempted to incarnate the ideal figure of the Genius. Gobetti, an icon of the Italian antifascist resistance, has long been known to have nurtured a particular interest in Russian culture, but the details of his engagement with Russian language, literature and history have generally been left aside in discussions of his accomplishments, or presented as a response to the October revolution. Examination of Gobetti’s personal library, his published writings and correspondence, and the personal papers and correspondence left by his wife, Ada, reveals that Gobetti’s interest in Russia and Russian culture began before the October revolution, however, sparked by the discovery of literary heroes in whom he could see himself reflected. From these beginnings the dissertation traces the development of Gobetti’s Russian studies through language learning, literary translation and criticism to the historical study of the Russian revolutionary tradition, and proposes that the stages of Gobetti’s pursuit of the Russian spirit were driven by a search for images of genius which contributed, in turn, to a larger process of imaginative self-construction. Viewed in this light, Gobetti’s Russian studies appear integral to his life and work, and open a new perspective on his achievements and his heroic myth. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation argues for the importance of knowledge production for understanding the relationship between the Russian Empire, the Qing Dynasty, and European actors, from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It focuses specifically on intelligence-gathering, including espionage, as a genre of intellectual work situated in state institutions, oriented toward pragmatic goals, and produced by and for an audience of largely anonymous bureaucrats. It relies on archival sources from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Rome, as well as published materials. The dissertation begins by investigating how seventeenth-century Siberians compiled information about China, and how maps and documents were transmitted first to Moscow and then to Western Europe to be republished for wider audiences. It then examines the post-Petrine shift to more specialized forms of intelligence-gathering, focusing on industrial espionage in the Moscow-Beijing trade caravan. As the dissertation shows, the changing priorities of the Russian intelligence gathering apparatus shaped and often crippled the ability of Russian Qing experts to address wider audiences. On the mid-eighteenth-century Russo-Qing border, the dissertation follows the building of a robust Russian intelligence network in Qing Mongolia amid unprecedented inter-imperial tension, and its ultimate failure to achieve desired geopolitical ends. These intelligence failures are then shown to provide a compelling new explanation for the collapse of European imperial attempts at diplomacy in East Asia in the last third of the eighteenth century. Finally, the dissertation concludes by showing how, by means of strategic forgetting, intelligence was reconstructed into academic sinology during the reign of Alexander I. / History

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This dissertation project examines the role of identity, the politics of identity contestation and domestic political structures as part of the mechanisms and processes that may be involved in the decisions that states make regarding disengagement from their colonial and territorial possessions. Specifically, it focuses on the following questions: Why do intransigent states back down on previously entrenched territorial policies? And why, even when states decide to disengage from their territories, are some of these processes peaceful while others are scenes of prolonged, bloody and violent struggles? Focusing on Britain and its reaction to Indian calls for independence from 1929-1935, and Indonesia's withdrawal from East Timor in 1999, this project argues that the processes and mechanisms involved in identity construction, maintenance and change can play an important role in how states approach the issue of territorial disengagement. At the same time, it also argues that the structure of a state's domestic political system may also affect the way in which disengagement takes places. Based on its empirical findings, this dissertation also argues that identities are constructed at both the domestic as well as the international levels, and against an Other, and through narratives. Further, identities do not acquire 'substance' once they have been constructed. Rather they are continually constituted by processes, relations and practices as identities are defined, recognized and validated in an actor's interaction with and in relationship to others. Finally, identity does not only influence human actions through enabling or constraining actions but also through the need to perform who we are or who we say we want to be.