<p> This thesis presents the new investigations on the disturbance decoupling problem (DDP) for the geometric control of max-plus linear systems, which are used to model discrete event systems such as transportation networks, queuing systems, and communication networks. The classical DDP concept in the geometric control theory means that the controlled outputs will not be changed by any disturbances. In practical manufacturing systems, solving for the DDP would require further delays on the output parts than the existing delays caused by the system breakdown, which will be less practical in real applications. The new proposed modified disturbance decoupling problem (MDDP) in this thesis ensures that the controlled output signals will not be delayed more than the existing delays caused by the disturbances in order to achieve the just-in-time optimal control. Furthermore, this thesis presents the integration of output feedback and open-loop control strategies to solve for the MDDP, as well as for the DDP. The main results of this thesis are illustrated by using timed event graph models of a high throughput screening system in drug discovery and a railway transport network.</p>

This investigation began as frustration - frustration, during my attempts at translating Harry Martinson's poetry at being unable to find adequate English equivalents for most of his compounds. The frustration developed into curiosity about the nature of the compounds and their use. The thesis is the result of that curiosity. I have studied the compounds from both linguistic and stylistic points of view. One chapter concerns numbers. Very nearly 4,500 (some 3,500 different) noun compounds have been excerpted from almost 92,000 words of Harry Martinson's published poetry. In addition, some thousand compounds have been excerpted from the manuscript poems in the Harry Martinson archive in Uppsala University Library. Whereas every attempt has been made to be accurate in word-counts and calculations, comparisons across tables may reveal minor discrepancies. Manually calculated figures do not always exactly match the numbers indicated by computer calculations. This may be a result of human error, whether in the manual calculations or in the typing in of the data, but it may also be caused by such factors as compounds appearing in prose passages and section titles (included in some calculations, not in others) or in poems included in more than one collection. In small-scale manual calculations, allowance can be made for such factors, but it is not usually possible to foresee all the repercussions of such adjustments on all other calculations and tables. I am confident that the discrepancies are in no case of a magnitude to affect the conclusions drawn from the figures.

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<p> This project report examines four solo-songs by Jean Sibelius and offers an analysis of the style of his Finnish nationalism. The paper presents two types of nationalism, and delves into the type of nationalism to which Sibelius's solo-songs belong. A brief history of Finland and the Finnish nationalist movement is discussed, in addition to the importance of the Kalevala to the Finnish nationalist movement. Musical descriptions of the poetry and songs "Demanten pa marssn&ouml;n," "Flickan kom ifr&aring;m sin &auml;lsklings mote," "Var det en dr&ouml;m?" and "Svarta rosor" are presented, and an acceptable performance practice for Sibelius's solo-songs is considered. </p>

This work examines Swedish literature published during the 2000s in the context of larger debates about individual and collective belonging in Scandinavia. In each of three chapters, I describe a broad thematic domain in which I situate and compare works of poetry, prose and plays by authors such as Jonas Khemiri, Alejandro Wenger, Johannes Anyuru and Marjaneh Bakhtiari. In the first chapter, I examine the domain of Homogeneity/ Heterogeneity, describing a transition from monolithic to multiple, overlapping belongings. The second chapter concerns the domain of Transparency/ Opacity, and the legibility or opaqueness of bodies, language and clothing as markers of identity. The third and final domain, Center/Periphery, contains articulations of the public sphere at two different extremes of Swedish geography: the historic center city and the post-war suburbs. In my conclusion, I summarize how these literary works have both reflected and refracted discussions of national belonging in a time of global migration and increased cultural diversity in Northern Europe.

Nordic right wing populism began in Denmark with the requisite growth in the political and societal power of the Danish People’s Party during the Liberal-Conservative coalition government from 2001 to 2011. As the number of immigrants and asylum-seekers from Middle Eastern countries continues to grow, the “other,” the definition of which is a perceived threat against an ill-defined “people,” is increasingly understood by the Danish People’s Party as Muslim immigrants and their descendants. This thesis will use both a wide array of literature and evidence from an original research project using a Danish Prison as a loose microcosm for Danish society. The research traces the influence of the Danish People’s Party on public policy. This thesis will conclude that blatant Islamophobia has seeped into the following sectors of Danish policy: the media, social services and the refugee and asylum system. Denmark, while being an internationally revered example of good governance, represents the dangerous proliferation of illiberalism in the modern, small welfare state in response to globalization.

The goal of this project is to understand the realities of how magic was perceived during a Christianized Iceland, specifically during the medieval era when sagas and poems were recorded in Iceland. I accomplish this through literary analysis in conjunction with previous research on runic inscriptions and Old Norse mythology. I reveal that there is much more to be uncovered about the realities of paganism in medieval Iceland, and that the authors of Icelandic sagas had a large misunderstanding of pre-Christian paganism and magic. This argument is manifested through close readings of major Icelandic works, such as Hávamál, Volsunga saga, and Egils saga, coupled with other, minor works. In the first chapter, through understanding the usage of literary devices like metaphor and irony, I look at the inaccurate ways runes were portrayed in Hávamál and Egils saga as a means to separate Iceland from paganism while still retaining their cultural relevance. In chapter two, through the usage of queer theory, I elaborate on how characters in Hávamál, Egils saga, and Volsunga saga perpetuate negative stereotypes about practitioners of magic. Through these discoveries, this thesis calls into question the views of Icelandic saga writers as misunderstanding pagan magic, and further diversifies the discourse around medieval Icelandic literature as a whole. This project is done in hopes to educate Norse neo-pagans on the nuances surrounding the literature they hold so close to their pagan practices.

The decision to institute Area Studies in German universities in 1917, was born out of a perceived need to widen the intellectual horizon of the public and academia alike. At Greifswald University this ambitious reform programme saw the foundation of a Nordic Institute, charged with interdisciplinary studies of contemporary Northern Europe. Its interdisciplinarity and implicit role in public diplomacy made the Nordic Institute, and the institutions that succeeded it, an anomaly within the university, until the institute was fundamentally reformed in the early 1990s. The study explores the institutional development of the institute under five different political regimes – Kaiserreich, Weimar Republic, Third Reich, GDR and FRG. It does so through the lens of scholars as utility-seeking actors, manoeuvring between the confines of an academic environment and the possibilities afforded by the institute’s political task. It becomes apparent that the top-down institution of interdisciplinary scholarship produced a number of conflicts between the disciplinarily organized career path on theone hand, and scholars’ investment in broader regional research on the other. Personal conflicts in a confined and competitive environment, and a persistent shortage of funding provided further incentives for scholars to overcome perceived limitations of the academic sphere by offering their cooperation to the political field. Individual attempts to capitalize on a reciprocal exchange of resources with the political field remained a feature under all political regimes, but the opportunity to do so successfully depended on the receptiveness of the political field. Cooperation, where it was established, also proved to be difficult, with the interests of political and academic actors often diverging, and the political side’s interest becoming dominant. The study examines the underlying motivations of scholars to seek assistance from outside the academic field, but also the problems connected with that approach, and demonstrates the specific problems faced by Area Studies in a German context.

In the contemporary art-historical vision, Mikhail Larionov is renowned as the author and the main figure in the polemical discourse of Neoprimitivism and the inventor of the Rayonism style. These aspects, although crucial to his career, are far from exhausting the artist’s legacy. During his most industrious period, from 1910 to 1915, he was equally, if not more, engaged in the development of new forms of art than in the practice of painting; in fact, the conventional cornerstone of the high art in the era of Modernism – a painting – lost its central position and receded to the status of the peripheral phenomenon in his artistic practice. When considering his position as a central figure in the events of the 1910-1915 in Russia, Larionov’s ambivalence as an artist implies hesitation about the picture of gestalt homogeneity of Modernist discourse (with a painting as the hierarchical apex of high art in the Modernist era) in Russia of the early decades of the twentieth century. While historical evaluation privileges the painting over the non-painting practice of the artist, there is sufficient evidence testifying to the need to consider them as equal and synergetic.

abstract: This study examines the ways in which translators writing in two contemporary medieval languages, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle English, approached the complicated doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary. At its core this project is dedicated to understanding the spread and development of an idea in two contemporary vernacular cultures and focuses on the transmission of that idea from the debates of Latin clerical culture into Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature written for an increasingly varied audience made up of monastics, secular clergy, and the laity. The project argues that Middle English and Old-Norse Icelandic writing about the bodily Assumption of Mary challenges misconceptions that vernacular translations and compositions concerned with Marian doctrine represent the popular concerns of the laity as opposed to the academic language, or high Mariology, of the clergy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014