The relationship between imperialism and nationalism has often been portrayed by theorists of nationalism and post colonial discourse theorists as antagonistic. Anti-democratic, aggressive empires impose their will on subject peoples who, in response, form nationalist movements in opposition to this imperialism. These movements, it is claimed, assert the nation’s right to self-determination and independence. Whilst this was undoubtedly the case in a number of anti-colonial movements, examples can be found that refute the apparently antagonistic relationship between nationalism and imperialism. Nationalism does not always advocate independence from states or empires. Imperialism can be a vehicle for a national mission or can strengthen minority nations. In certain contexts, these two anti-thetical concepts can be reconciled. The thesis investigates the reconciliation of nationalism and imperialism using the concept of imperial nationalism. This concept is used to denote a variety of nationalism that proposes reform of the state/imperial government for the benefit of the nation whilst simultaneously emphasising the benefits of the reform of the empire. An important element of the nationalist discourse will be the maintenance of the imperial connection as beneficial for the nation. A comparative historical analysis of nationalist groups in nineteenth century Scotland and Canada is used to highlight the relationship between nationalism and imperialism in the discourse of nationalist groups. Both Scotland and Canada held relatively privileged positions within the British Empire. Yet Scottish and British Canadian nationalist groups argued the existing systems for governing their respective nations were illegitimate. In Scotland, the Scottish Home Rule Association argued for a Scottish Parliament, focusing on the extent to which the United Kingdom state was unable to cope with the work created by the four home nations and the Empire. An important aspect of home rule for Scotland, however, was its extension to the other home nations and the opportunity it would present of reforming the Imperial Parliament for the benefit of the Empire, and by association Scotland. In Canada, the focus of Canada First and the Imperial Federation League in Canada was on reform of the system of Imperial governance. Canada had not been given control over relations with the United States under the British North America Act and British Canadian nationalists felt Canadian interests had not been taken into account in British dealings with the United States. The answer was to provide Canada with a voice in treaties in the short term and, in the longer term, to reform Imperial government in order to provide Canada with a voice in the affairs of the Empire as whole. The thesis investigates the extent to which these movements were nationalist, imperialist and, finally, how these two concepts were reconciled.

Changing circumstances during Late Antiquity and the Early Byzantine Period (4th-9th centuries A.D.) required Byzantine communities to make deliberate adjustments in order to survive, endure, and ultimately flourish again during the Middle Byzantine Period (10th-12th centuries). The role these communities had in decision-making can easily be overlooked, leaving instead hapless victims of insurmountable external pressures such as imperial manipulation, economic recession, Christian acculturation, or a general sense of inexorable decline. Although factors such as these played a role as each community deliberated on a complex and unique set of local concerns, the ultimate decisions each community made should not be assumed but rather investigated on the basis of both textual and archaeological evidence. The stoa is particularly well-suited for the study of reuse and therefore valuable for understanding the adaptive strategies implemented by Byzantine individuals and communities during the transition period from antiquity to the medieval period. The stoa was one of the most ubiquitous buildings of the Greco-Roman city and was highly adaptable for reuse, whether by incorporation into large structures such as churches or fortifications, or by subdivision into smaller units for uses such as housing, storage, or commercial activities. The stoa was commonly found not only in urban contexts, particularly in agorai and fora, but also at many extraurban sanctuaries. By compiling data on the reuse of stoas throughout the Byzantine Empire during the 4th - 10th centuries, four patterns of reuse can be identified: residential, economic, ecclesiastical, and defensive. Abandonment, or a lack of reuse, is a fifth pattern. These patterns of reuse provide insight into the lives of Byzantines outside of the imperial and ecclesiastic elites and inform the excavation of post-classical phases of stoas.

This thesis argues that Jerome’s polemics against Helvidius, Jovinian, and Vigilantius were tailored to boost Jerome’s status within the Christian community, and were carefully constructed pieces of abusive rhetoric, rather than the result of his famed curmudgeonly character. These treatises are studied in light of both the ancient rhetorical tradition within which Jerome was trained, and modern theories of abusive rhetoric. This thesis is demonstrated in six chapters. Chapter 1 demonstrates that past scholarship focused on ‘Jerome the man’, his self-invention, and his academic and spiritual qualities, without giving adequate attention to how Jerome used these qualities in his compositions. Chapter 2 focuses on ancient and modern theories of rhetoric in order to set out a methodology of abusive rhetoric that highlights Burkean identification. In addition, this chapter studies how rhetoric can define and challenge social hierarchies. Chapter 3 discusses Jerome’s awareness of social standing through discussion of his interactions with three of his contemporaries: Augustine, Rufinus, and Ambrose. It examines how Jerome altered his rhetoric to reflect his perception of the relative social status of his correspondents. Part 2 studies three of Jerome’s treatises in light of the conclusion of Part 1. Chapter 4 analyzes Jerome’s Adversus Helvidium, and argues that Jerome’s rhetoric serves to contrast himself with Helvidius, whose heretical, fame-seeking character illuminates Jerome as a humble and conservative Christian. It argues that Jerome’s rhetoric in this treatise aimed for episcopal authority. Chapter 5 studies Jerome’s Adversus Iovinianum and argues that the polemic sought to extend Jerome’s views on asceticism to a wider audience, and potentially secure favor for himself following his expulsion from Rome. He presents Jovinian as a deceptive sinner with a dissolute lifestyle, and himself as an authoritative savior. Although Jerome attempted to connect to the elite in the Christian community, his tract was a failure due to an inability to identify successfully with the audience on the topic of virginity. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses Jerome’s Contra Vigilantium. Jerome presents Vigilantius as a boorish Gallic innkeeper, in contrast to himself as an urbane, albeit snobbish, orthodox Christian. Jerome’s rhetoric carefully identifies himself with upper class Christians, as well as the Emperor, apostles, and martyrs, thereby claiming their agreement with his view of orthodoxy. In sum, I argue that Jerome’s rhetoric served to construct a polemical persona that he attempted to use to further his Christian career, and shape his own image. While this was not entirely successful in his own day, Jerome’s rhetoric did ultimately succeed in crafting an image of himself as an orthodox and authoritative father of the Church.

Magister Public Health - MPH / Cleft lip and/or palate deformity is the most common facial birth defect with an incidence of 1 in 600 for every live birth worldwide. Despite the availability of specialised cleft care in Nigeria, many cleft patients are not aware that CL±Ps can be repaired and, thus, present late for treatment. As a result, there is a high incidence of unoperated CL±P in the country which has a grim negative health impact on the population. Furthermore, it was noted that the family caregivers including parents and other members of the extended family are crucial in getting early care for these children with CL±P. Therefore, understanding the perception of CL±P, attitude and experience with cleft services would go a long way in reducing the problem of late presentation and under-utilisation of these services. Therefore, the aim of the study was to explore the care givers’ perception and experience in accessing cleft services at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Teaching Hospital, Sokoto, Nigeria. In this study, we employed an exploratory qualitative methodology that gave deep insights and provided clear understanding of the perceptions by caregivers of children with CL±P on the aetiology of cleft, family reactions and their experience in accessing cleft services at our hospital. Data analysis was done following verbatim transcription using thematic analysis. Ethics statement: Before commencement of the study, ethical approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Boards of the University of Western Cape and the Usmanu Danfodiyo University Teaching Hospital Health Research and Ethics Committee. Informed consent was sought from each prospective participant and the signed form appropriately documented.

Thesis advisor: Robin Fleming / The cult of the saints and emperor cult both fulfilled similar roles in their respective societies. On the surface they appear to be drastically different institutions. In reality emperor cult and saint cult were similar religious programs, which with careful examination appear to be related. The following work discusses the remarkable similarities between the cult of saints and emperor cult, including their personnel, temples, means of establishment and promotion, and even the role each cult played in the development of their societies. After careful examination of the above mentioned subjects, it is clear that the cult of the saints was largely based on emperor cult, and that despite the drastically different religious atmospheres that each cult was based in, they were similar in all but the most obvious wasy. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

This dissertation has examined the tanci fiction Jing zhong zhuan, or A Biography of Dedication and Loyalty, authored by a gentry woman writer Zhou Yingfang in the late nineteenth century. I argue that by adapting the well-known patriotic story of General Yue Fei in Chinese history, Zhou Yingfang suggests new directions in grand historical narrative in her own voice and from her own perspective. Negotiating the writing conventions of earlier legends, she turns the stereotyped masculine image of Yue Fei into a hero in both public and domestic settings. In addition, she adds many detailed episodes from Yue Fei's family life and portrays virtuous women in a chaotic historical period, paralleling the conventional narration of wars and politics. Although often (mis)read as a text that inspires nationalism, Jing zhong zhuan actually redefines significant values in late imperial China, including the importance of family and the complex relation between filial piety and political loyalty. The tanci also enriches the notions of female virtues, expanding them from chastity to beauty, learning and management skills. Employing tanci, a unique genre that is closely associated with and quite dominated by women, Zhou Yingfang demonstrates her gendered consciousness in relationship to late nineteenth-century Confucian family dynamics and her self-representation and literary engagement within grand historical narratives. My dissertation sheds light on the dynamics between women's writing and historiography, as well as on the discourses of patriotism and emerging nationalism at the turn of the twentieth-century in China.

This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger, epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of 'art-for-art's-sake' and a cult of beauty are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at stake in Swinburne and Pater's efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres. Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly, prior to a 'fall' into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic. My argument proceeds through close readings that reveal how the logic of aestheticism grows out of Swinburne's and Pater's efforts to challenge and refashion the models of religious doubt and secularism established by a previous generation of Victorian writers - Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson - and situates this shared revisionary impulse within larger debates surrounding the idea of secularisation.

In his encyclopaedic work On the Properties of Things, John Trevisa describes water as 'able'. Water is an element which has no determinate properties of its own but which takes up properties from its surroundings and, at the same time, enacts change on those surroundings. This thesis argues that the inherent flexibility or 'ableness' of water, which Trevisa and other encyclopaedic writers identify, is crucial to late-medieval understanding of the element and, in turn, informs its use in a variety of religious writings. The multivalent potential of water enables devotional writers to use references to the element to symbolise and articulate access to God whilst they simultaneously deploy it as a metaphorical limiting agent that can regulate this access. Although there has been some critical attention paid to certain kinds of water in late medieval devotional prose, this thesis contains the first holistic study of various manifestations of water. It considers the material and historical realities of water in the Middle Ages as well as representations of water in different literary genres and demonstrates the 'ableness' of water within them. These findings are then used to shed light on a specific genre: spiritual guides authored by men and addressed to women, from the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. The thesis identifies a literary language of water in late medieval devotional prose - a complex and recurrent set of images that authors draw upon to explicate Christian doctrine and portray different aspects of religious life. These images provide the organisational structure of the thesis. Three significant tropes of water are considered in light of its 'ableness': the imagined and encouraged relationship between water and the body in spiritual guidance, the importance of laundering the soul in such works, and the relationship between blood and water in Passion meditations.

Organizations have many employees that lack the technical knowledge to securely operate their machines. These users may open malicious email attachments/links or install unverified software such as P2P programs. These actions introduce significant risk to an organization's network since they allow attackers to exploit the trust and access given to a client machine. However, system administrators currently lack the control of client machines needed to prevent these security risks. A possible solution to address this issue lies in attestation. With respect to computer science, attestation is the ability of a machine to prove its current state. This capability can be used by client machines to remotely attest to their state, which can be used by other machines in the network when making trust decisions. Previous research in this area has focused on the use of a static root of trust (RoT), requiring the use of a chain of trust over the entire software stack. We would argue this approach is limited in feasibility, because it requires an understanding and evaluation of the all the previous states of a machine. With the use of late launch, a dynamic root of trust introduced in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) v1.2 specification, the required chain of trust is drastically shortened, minimizing the previous states of a machine that must be evaluated. This reduced chain of trust may allow a dynamic RoT to address the limitations of a static RoT. We are implementing a client terminal service that utilizes late launch to attest to its execution. Further, the minimal functional requirements of the service facilitate strong software verification. The goal in designing this service is not to increase the security of the network, but rather to push the functionality, and therefore the security risks and responsibilities, of client machines to the network€™s servers. In doing so, we create a platform that can more easily be administered by those individuals best equipped to do so with the expectation that this will lead to better security practices. Through the use of late launch and remote attestation in our terminal service, the system administrators have a strong guarantee the clients connecting to their system are secure and can therefore focus their efforts on securing the server architecture. This effectively addresses our motivating problem as it forces user actions to occur under the control of system administrators.

In approaching the scientific literature on the UNESCO world heritage site of Palmyra for the first time, any scholar would be immediately struck by the number of studies devoted to the Roman phase of the settlement – roughly 1st-third quarter of the 3rd century. By contrast, contributions on late antique and early Islamic Palmyra have never been numerous, reflecting both the preference granted by current scholarship to the study of Roman remains and the paucity of archaeological and written evidence at our disposal to cast light on this period. Admittedly, works on post-273 Palmyra have grown significantly in number in the last couple of decades. Yet, almost the totality of them has often been confined to the examination of items of circumstantial evidence. We still lack an organic publication that attempts a systematic overview of these works and tries to contextualise the history of the city in a broader geographic and chronological framework. Numerous questions, such as the fate of the city in the 5th century, remain to be answered; other evidence, such as the bulk of early Arabic written sources, still has to be fully explored. This dissertation presents an examination of those evidence that are useful to better understand the historical development of the settlement from the fall of Zenobia and the second Palmyrene revolt (272-273) to the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate (750). The civilian and military character of the city is investigated through the analysis of specific themes for which enough evidence is available to work with. Besides written sources and published archaeological evidence, archival material is used to cast more light on a selected number of specific items of evidence. The final output of this study is to present a comprehensive history of the post-Roman settlement to be taken as a starting point for future discussion on the topic.