Charles Stewart Parnell was James Joyce's most significant political influence to a degree that has yet to be fully acknowledged or explored. This thesis proposes a "theory of Parnell" in Joyce's works up to the end of Ulysses, arguing that close attention to Parnell's evolution points to a significant shift in the evolution of Joyce's literary forms. In Joyce's juvenilia, political writings, and early fiction, Parnell always appears with a heroic, even Messianic, cast, which the most significant moments in the fiction pair with a strict adherence to dramatic forms. However, significant moments in both "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lay the groundwork for stylistic and representative transformations in Ulysses. In that novel, the myth of Parnell is deflated, even as Joyce appropriates its most essential qualities in the development of his panoply of styles. Episodes from "Telemachus" to "Wandering Rocks" critically examine the myth of Parnell even as they link it with the constraints of dramatic forms. Later episodes, most notably "Cyclops," "Circe," and "Eumaeus" attempt to make use of elements of "Parnellite" style, training a community of readers in acts of collective imagination that keep the Parnellite spirit alive by moving away from a strict focus on his historical specificity.

This dissertation traces the arc of Isabella Stewart Gardner's professional development through her photographic and archival practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Gardner's museum in Boston is well known, she destroyed evidence pertinent to her curatorial agenda. To recover these methods, this project surveys Gardner's involvement with photography through two of her earliest travel albums, all fifteen of her illustrated guest books, and five albums of the evolving galleries in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The process of photographic album making supported strategies of research, collection, installation, and preservation that Gardner would use as a patron and institutional leader. Gardner's albums illuminate her actions not only as a collector of travel photography by Antonio Beato, Francis Frith, Pascal Sebah, and others, but also as a snapshot photographer and a commissioner of professional architectural photography in Boston. Her multivalent photographic practices reveal the ways in which she used albums and photography to realize her professional ambitions. Collecting, creating, arranging, and displaying photographs were not sentimental pastimes for Gardner, but processes intrinsic to the formation of her identity as a cosmopolitan innovator and civic leader. The first chapter analyzes the handwritten narrative, watercolor paintings, and commercial photography of Egyptian antiquities in Gardner's 1874-1875 "Egypt Diary" to discover the earliest origins for her actions as a collector. The second chapter analyzes the photographic assemblages of Gothic architecture in Gardner's 1879 travel albums of England to show how that journey influenced her design of the galleries and garden at Fenway Court. The third chapter reads Gardner's guest books as socially networked photographic objects to demonstrate their role in cultivating institutional supporters and shaping the cultural mission of her museum. The fourth chapter establishes the importance of reproductive technologies in the assembling of Gardner's collection of art and the pivotal role of architectural photography in the preservation of her civic bequest. The case studies within this dissertation form a comprehensive examination of Gardner's photographic engagements and the importance of photography in the formation and preservation of her institutional legacy. / 2023-12-31T00:00:00Z

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) was born an Englishman but adopted Germany as his home. Chamberlain was a publicist for "fin de siecle" ideas about art and politics which were tempered by both late nineteenth century Imperialism and by World War One. As an old man he endorsed Adolf Hitler and has been credited as an important synthesizer for the ideology of National Socialism. This study examines Chanber1ain' s life in terms of his involvement with art and politics. It utilizes his work as a popularizer and his conversion into an exponent of Deutschturn to discuss broad social questions. While it is acknowledge that Chamberlain was an important figure in the Gerrrany of his day, this study attempts to place him and his idol, Richard Wagner, in the larger context of intellectual and cultural history. Insofar as Chamberlain was a "rootless" intellectual, he was a paradigm. Accordingly, he is useful in considering the problems faced by intellectuals in the modem age of nationalism, technology, mass culture and alienation. The works consulted were primarily Chamberlain's own publications and a variety of secondary accounts. other research leads have been noted, but these would have to be pursued in Europe. Most of Chamberlain's life up to 1914 has been discussed by recent scholars. This study concludes that the period from World War One needs more research to account for the complex relationship between Chamberlain and the Bayreuth Kulturkreis, and National Socialism and modern society.

No description available.

Contributions to a knowledge of Latter-day Saint Church history can not only be made from a study of the lives of its great leaders, but such contributions can also be made from a study of some of the local leaders of the Church. Benjamin Franklin Stewart was one of these leaders who gained only local and temporary acclaim. Yet he contributed a life of service to his Church.

This thesis contains the design, implementation, and testing of an original, small-scaled two degree-of-freedom telescope mount and a medium-scaled three degree-of-freedom telescope mount inspired by the six degree-of-freedom Stewart-Gough platform telescope mount. The end product is intended to achieve research-standard resolution of targeted sky coverage for binary star research. The scaled prototype was carried through concept design, manufacturing, software development, and testing. The mount software development and electronic design is applicable to a full-scale mount as the drivers have been designed to be easily adapted to different actuator configurations. It is recommended that this design be implemented into a telescope in the one to two meter range for economic practicality.

No abstract was provided. / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy

No description available.

This body of work presents methods for the optimization, analysis, and control of mixed serial-parallel structures known as SP-Stacks. A SP-Stack is a series of Stewart Platforms (SPs) linked via their top and bottom plates to create a serial chain of parallel mechanisms. SP-Stacks are unique in their bridging of the benefits of parallel architectures (high rigidity, strength, and precision) and serial architectures (reach and manipulability), at the cost of being extremely overactuated. SP-Stacks are also difficult to provide kinematic solutions for, as neither forward nor inverse kinematics of a system are closed form. The first work presented focuses on presenting algorithms and optimization functions pertaining to the kinematic configuration of a SP-Stack. It first presents two methods of fast inverse kinematics (IK) for the SP-Stack which do not take forces into account. The outputs of those more simplistic solvers as used as initial conditions for a Nonlinear Program (NLP) algorithm which optimizes the internal configuration of a SP-Stack such that the end effector (EE) plate remains at the desired location, and the maximal force experienced on any actuator is minimized. The second work presented focuses on hardware testing some of the constituent algorithms and conclusions drawn from the first paper and determining methods of compensating for, in software, detected defects in hardware and hardware measurement systems. This work also demonstrates a different form of force-optimization - compliance control (CC), which is executed on both a single SP responding to external forces, and a 2 SP-Stack responding to regular internal perturbation. Conclusions drawn from these works are useful for stacks of an arbitrary number of SPs, can be extended to other mixed-kinematic systems, and advance the capabilities of these systems to be useful contributors in field robotics. / Master of Science / A stewart platform (SP) is a type of robot which consists of two plates interconnected by six linear actuators in parallel, which allow the robot to either translate or rotate about any axis in space. SPs are limited in their ability to move, as their parallel construction limits their workspace. In order to counteract this, SPs can be stacked on top of one another, creating a SP-Stack. The SP-Stack is capable of using its status as a mixed serial-parallel system to move in a significantly larger area (an advantage derived by the serial component of its architecture) and retain extraordinary rigidity and strength (an advantage from its parallel architecture). As each SP has 6 Degrees of Freedom (6DoF), enabling the previously described free-space motion, a SP-Stack possesses 6n DoF, making it overactuated. An overactuated system has multiple internal configurations which allow for a desired end effector configuration. The body of work presented herein focuses on manipulating the overactuation of SP-Stacks to achieve desirable results such as finding configurations which are most resistant to external loading (optimization of actuator forces) or algorithms which allow SP-Stacks to comply with external loading (compliance control (CC)). The first work presented herein focuses on determining an optimal configuration for a 4 SP-Stack such that the maximum force experienced by any one of its linear actuators is minimized, given a known external force. This work also presents two methods of generating initial configurations for the SP-Stack which are fed into the optimization algorithm which produces the final solution, as well as providing details on the constraints which govern the movement and validity of configurations for the system. The second work presented expands on the work done in the first, moving into hardware testing for verification of algorithms which calculate forces experienced by the linear actuators. The hardware testing showcases some errors that can be introduced by low fidelity hardware, along with methodologies for counteracting those errors. Finally, the second work introduces CC, the ability for a robot to move itself to adapt to incoming forces, and applies it to a physical 2 SP-Stack as a demonstrator.

This study analyzes 2008 presidential election coverage on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report to determine how they confront the tension between the genres of news and entertainment. To this point, much of the scholarly work on political entertainment news has focused on examining its effects on viewers' political attitudes and knowledge. A rhetorical analysis reveals the actual messages they convey and the strategies they employ to discuss contemporary American politics. Through comedic devices such as satire and parody, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report offer a venue for social commentary and criticisms of power at a time when traditional venues are dissipating, and these shows provide a place for serious political discourse that encourages dialogue that promotes civic engagement. / Master of Arts