Master of Arts / Department of English / Daniel A. Hoyt / This project is the opening chapters of a novel in which two brothers, Txanton and Riddley, are split from each other in post-apocalyptic Kansas. The Commune of Eternal Light has been their family’s peaceful home for more than a hundred years but is crushed by a fascist army that considers killing the only way to survive in civilization’s aftermath. In this destruction, Txanton sees his father’s murder, while Riddley watches his mother’s death. After the separation, Txanton, along with several other boys from the Commune, becomes part of the very army that destroyed his family, and he is visited by the ghost of his great-great grandfather who begins telling his personal story along with the tale of the downfall of the world. Riddley, meanwhile, wanders a picaresque path in which he sees cannibals, zombies, witches, a cowboy, and other ghosts. Both boys struggle with the brutality of the wasteland they are thrust into and try to cope with the memories of their peaceful home and the deaths of their family and friends. Told in chapters that jump back-and-forth between the two brothers, the novel parallels their challenges in a close third-person narrative.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Daniel A. Hoyt / This project is the first three chapters of a young adult novel, The Muses. Lily Bellows is singled out in infancy to become one of the Muses, humans given supernatural powers through enchanted golden masks. The six Muses (Faith, Wisdom, Pride, Obedience, Courage, and Desire) are telepathically linked to Illyria’s king so that he is better able to manage his emotions and thus rule more efficiently. Lily is destined to be the Muse of Faith, but her parents fake her death and keep her abilities secret until she heals her village of a deadly plague and the Muses consequently return for her. As Lily struggles to master fighting arts, healing skills, and the ability to manipulate emotions, she must also befriend the moody Prince Connor who will one day share her consciousness, and she must untangle the complicated feelings she has for Connor’s illegitimate brother, Ronan. While Lily’s fellow Muse initiates have been training since infancy, Lily joins them as a teenager, and she finds it nearly impossible to give up her family, her dreams and her individuality so she can make Prince Connor into a better king. When she has the chance to break the oath she swore to serve her country as its Muse of Faith, she must choose between power and individuality and determine whether she must submit to her destiny or create her own.

Fiction Novel

Wells Oliver, a mathematician, and his partner Malin move to Kythera, a remote Greek island, from Canada and Sweden, their respective countries of origin. In doing so, they hope to transform their lives in a way that will allow them to focus on their budding love affair, but they are also running away from obligations and people they are trying to leave behind. On Kythera, they realize that even in the most distant locales, the past is never far below the surface.

This is an original work. It is a full length novel. The main character is Zeso Eliza Greylin.

N/A

Thesis advisor: Mary Ann Glynn / My dissertation examines changes in audience sensemaking by the public and media about Apple’s novel product, iPad. My study begins on December 28, 2009, one-month before the introduction of the iPad by Apple and ends with the anniversary of its retail availability on April 2, 2011, shortly after the launch of the second-generation iPad. Using primarily qualitative methods, I analyze archival data including online forums and news articles to understand audience sensemaking as it unfolds. I investigate how sensemaking by the two audiences a) changes over time, b) changes with different types of material interaction with the product, c) incorporates the use of functional and symbolic frames in their public discourse about the iPad, and d) changes based on the public role of the audience. In doing so, I advance explanations as to how meanings about novel products stabilize. More broadly, I elaborate how nascent product categories can emerge by focusing on the cultural-cognitive processes that undergird product classification systems. As a result, I offer novel pathways for product category emergence. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

Thesis advisor: Maia M. McAleavey / “Singular Plots” challenges the commonplace that the marriage plot defines the nineteenth-century British novel by uncovering the plot of vocational singleness. In this plot, a heroine renounces marriage and seeks another occupation – caring for parents or siblings; participating in philanthropy, business, or art. “Singular Plots” traces the history of representations of single women, arguing that unmarried women were often represented as plotless in the early century, while around mid-century the vocational plot coalesced in novels including Brontë’s Villette, Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, and Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain. In order to uncover vocational plots that exist alongside and against marriage plots, I advocate a method of reading called “analeptic reading” in which readers pivot from the final pages back to the more radical center and outward past the end – a process that expands our notion of which moments in a plot can be definitive. The project joins recent work by scholars including Sharon Marcus and Talia Schaffer to challenge and expand our understanding of the role of the marriage plot in nineteenth-century literature. “Singular Plots” uncovers single women as a group with uniquely and instructively particular relationships to gender, marriage, work, and the form of the novel itself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

<div><p><i>It’s very easy to take more than nothing – Lewis Carroll</i></p></div><i><br></i>

Antibody engineering is an innovative field of research that has generated a wide range of novel antibody-based formats that both exploit and improve natural antibody properties. Novel format antibodies have the potential to offer significant advantages over natural antibodies when used as biopharmaceuticals, however these non-natural structures often pose a great challenge to the host cell used for their manufacture. Protein expression is a highly regulated process, and quality control mechanisms at each stage can result in a block, or "bottleneck" in expression. This can impact product yield, cost of goods and entry into the clinical pipeline. The molecular determinants that govern novel-format expression in host cells are poorly defined, however there is growing evidence that limited variations in both nucleotide and amino acid sequence can have a severe impact on antibody expression. Therefore this Thesis aims to investigate the consequences of sequence variation on the expression of a novel antibody format (mAbdAb) in mammalian host cells in order to determine the molecular mechanisms that govern their expression. A diverse panel of mAbdAbs with sequence variations limited to the dAb domain were generated through phage display and cloning technologies. It was determined that amino acid variations located within the CDRs of the dAb results in a range of expression titres in both transient HEK and stable CHO expression platforms. In vitro translation of mAbdAb heavy chain proteins in rabbit reticulocyte lysates (RRL) showed no difference in expression between sequence variants, therefore cell-free translation was suggested as a potential expression platform. Examination of each stage of expression in stable CHO cells revealed that the amount of mRNA was not limiting to expression and distinct expression profiles were observed at the protein level. The majority of mAbdAb constructs showed little evidence of intracellular heavy chain polypeptide which was not altered through chemical inhibition of proteolytic degradation pathways, indicating that degradation was not responsible for poor expression. This led to the hypothesis that low titres were related to how the CHO cell utilises the heavy chain message.