Coming dissertations at Uppsala university
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London Drama in the 1580s : Materiality and Metatheatre
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-539271
Early modern English drama from the 1580s has traditionally been read through a Shakespearean lens, to its detriment. This study instead approaches the extant plays from this decade not as a precursor to a main event yet to come, but as a self-aware iteration of literary form that was in the process of confidently and creatively shaping itself. All twenty-nine plays surviving from the 1580s are read against the development of commercial theatre as an institution, in order to investigate the impact of the establishment of London’s permanent playhouses. I argue that a localised inter- and metatheatrical dramatic culture emerged in and from these playhouses in London in the 1580s.
Chapter 1 focuses on theatre history, while chapter 2 considers playgoers from demographic and historical perspectives, with a particular focus on the ways in which playwrights conceptualised playgoers and invited them to exercise their ‘judgement’. Chapter 3 features a quantitative analysis of the use of props in 1580s drama, which points to significant differences between the London-based companies and the Queen’s Men, who were charged with touring. It also offers a corrective to narratives in earlier scholarship about particularly heavy prop use in the 1580s. Chapter 4 reads stage trees as a cipher for discussions of royalty through the mobilisation of associations with performance traditions located in London. Chapter 5 considers the ways in which 1580s drama capitalised on disguise plots by examining the close links between the cloth trade and theatrical performance in plays as well as wider discourse, in an analysis which also highlights ‘glitchiness’ as a key characteristic of theatrical performance in the 1580s. Chapter 6 considers the dramaturgical opportunities offered by the new playhouses through a focus on scenes set in the gallery. It looks in particular at how three influential playwrights—Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and John Lyly—used this space for scenes characterised by metatheatre, in plays intensely interested in creation. A Coda looks forward to the early 1590s, and considers the influence of this body of plays on later drama, including Shakespeare.
By liberating these twenty-nine plays from Shakespeare’s shadow and reading across interpolated boundaries—between canonical and mostly-forgotten plays, and between indoor and outdoor drama—this study offers a picture of a theatrical culture that should be considered to be more complex and aesthetically accomplished than has hitherto been recognised.
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On the verge of extinction : A multi-proxy approach to understanding life up to the KPg-extinction in North Dakota
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-538876
This thesis presents novel contributions to palaeontology, focusing on five key research areas. First, the integration of osteohistological and geochemical analyses offers a unique method for reconstructing mass-death events, confirming growth stages, and pinpointing the seasonal timing of the KPg impact to the boreal spring. This precise timing provides crucial insights into the extinction event's selectivity.
Second, the Tanis deposit from the Late Cretaceous reveals an exceptional diversity of acipenseriform fish (sturgeons and paddlefishes). This thesis explores the diversity of paddlefishes, which surpasses that observed at any other time in their evolutionary history. The presence of paddlefishes in both the Hell Creek Formation and the Early Cretaceous China indicates a higher paddlefish diversity during the Cretaceous than previously known. Furthermore, the biogeographic distribution of these species suggests a historical relationship between East Asia and North America that predates the Cretaceous, supporting a trans-Pacific connection rather than a trans-Atlantic one.
The third chapter critically examines the paper by DePalma et al. (2021) on the seasonality of the End-Cretaceous extinction. Although their findings seem to align with those in the first chapter, serious methodological concerns arise. Specifically, the lack of transparency in their stable isotope data, combined with inconsistencies in the isotopic graphs, raises doubts about the existence of the underlying data. Additionally, the apparent use of an image from one specimen—cropped and flipped 180 degrees—then reassigned to a different specimen number, further undermines confidence in the integrity of their work. These issues suggest that the results may not be based on authentic data, calling into question the validity of their conclusions. This chapter underscores the need for rigorous standards and transparency in research to ensure replicability and reliability, emphasizing the role of peer review in advancing scientific knowledge.
The fourth chapter explores the discovery of a mosasaur tooth in the Hell Creek Formation, North Dakota, using a multi-proxy approach that includes stable isotope analyses on both carbonate and phosphate fractions of the tooth enamel, as well as strontium isotope ratios. These analyses suggest a freshwater origin, challenging the traditional view of mosasaurs as strictly marine predators. This study highlights their ecological flexibility during the Late Cretaceous and offers new insights into their adaptation to the changing environments of the Western Interior Seaway.
Finally, the thesis addresses the challenge of automated segmentation in Xray tomography, particularly in palaeontology, where contrast variations and high absorption from metallic inclusions are common. The ml4paleo software suite is introduced as a solution, offering a user-friendly interface for 2D slice-based image segmentation. Its open-source nature ensures accessibility and potential benefits across multiple scientific disciplines.
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Queer Fun in Shanghai : The Social Lives of Elderly Working-Class Chinese Men
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-538265
This thesis uses “play” as a core concept to examine the lives and subjectivities of older working-class queer men (mostly above 60 years old) in Shanghai. Play (玩wan in Chinese) is a distinctive feature of the everyday lives of the men, who spend a great deal of time with fellow queers engaged in a variety of leisure activities, such as hanging out in parks, eating together at home or restaurants, singing karaoke, and joining sight-seeing tours. Drawing on anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s theory of play as a kind of metacommunication that creates a play frame and a boundary between play and non-play, I examine how the play frame continually invoked by the men (“just for fun” or “just play”) is materialized, enacted, and transgressed.
Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai conducted between 2021 and 2022, this thesis demonstrates that queerness is centrally linked to playfulness. Playing is a process of queering through which the men actively explore alternative and ludic ways of being without any real consequences for their day-to-day lives, in which most of them are married to women. But “play” as playfulness or “just for fun” also constrains the men’s perceptions of queer identities, their relationships, and their friendships with one another.
A main argument is that unless we acknowledge the existence and perspectives of people like the men I describe in this thesis, our knowledge of queer lives will remain biased and impoverished. The old men I write about here in many ways are the opposite of the identity-based sexual rights activists who attract so much attention in the scholarly and popular literature (and who write much of that literature). The men are not oppositional, they are not activists, and they have little interest in gay rights or any kinds of sexual rights. The men’s lives reveal a form of jovial queer existence in a repressive non-Western setting. They complicate understandings about topics of importance in anthropology, such as sexual identity, aging, resistance, and vulnerability. Play is a lens that makes it difficult to view people’s actions only as either disruptions of power or enactments of power. Play highlights enjoyment, fun, and pleasure in ways that make them available to critical analysis. Play is what literary scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003:149) has called a “reparative practice”; one that “confers plenitude” on people and recognizes the complexities and surprises of their lives.