Cover image:

Coll. Dominæ Franciscæ Sidney Sussex by David Loggan (1690)

Thanks

Graduate Conference

Sidney Sussex College

2015 This Conference would not have happened without the invaluable help of the following people.

Sincere thanks must go to Dr Berry Groisman and Dr Jo Craigwood, the Graduate Tutors – whose organisation has been instrumental; Dr David Beckingham, for his contributions to the judging panel; and the Senior Tutor and the Bursar for their advice and support. Thanks are also due to Angela Parr-Burman, Marianne Oyler, and Vicky Sealy. The Hall and Kitchen staff must also be thanked for all their hard work in catering for this event.

Lastly, I would like to thank Sidney Sussex College for generously funding this conference.

Calum Robertson, MCR President

Sidney Sussex College Programme

Welcome

Graduate Conference

Saturday 28th February 2015

Welcome to the 2015 Sidney Sussex College Graduate Conference!

For the majority of Graduate students, their departments are the focus of their academic research and output. However, the Graduate Conference – and Graduate Seminar Series that runs throughout the year – offers MCR members the opportunity to communicate their research to their fellow Graduate Students and to the wider College community.

The Graduate Conference is now in its third year and, as today’s programme of talks will show, it continues to showcase the exciting and diverse research that is being conducted by Graduate students here at Sidney.

Session One & Two

Sidney Sussex Graduate Conference 2014

11:00 – 11:30

11:30 – 12:00

12:00 – 12:30

12:30 – 13:00

13:00 – 14:30

14:30 – 15:00

15:00 – 15:30

Registration & Morning Tea

Tanvir Qureshi The Self-Healing of Portland Cement with the Addition of Expansive Minerals

Tristan Griffin Newsbooks, Castles and Cultural Enquiry in the English Civil Wars: 1642-1648

Rosie Dent-Brown Consuming the Shōjo

Lunch

Dario Krpan I See Therefore I Act: Visual Perception Predicts Human Behaviour

Christian Burset A Common Law? Legal Pluralism in British Quebec and Bengal

Programme Session Three

Sidney Sussex Graduate Conference 2014

Chemical Tools for Investigating Quorum Sensing in Pathogenic Bacteria Bacteria were previously thought to be independent single-celled organisms but it is now known that many bacteria communicate and coordinate behaviour together. Instead of language they use chemicals as signals. These small signalling molecules are continually produced throughout growth and are used by receptors to determine the population density. This allows highly coordinated behaviour changes in response to cell-density and environmental changes in a phenomenon known as quorum sensing. Many different bacterial traits are under quorum sensing control, ranging from bioluminescence to defense against toxins or other microorganisms. Quorum sensing also plays an important role in the infection of a new host by pathogenic bacteria, allowing the bacteria to synchronise their attack and evade the host immune system leading to successful infection. This talk will present our current work in the development of novel chemical tools for investigating quorum sensing in pathogenic bacteria. The use of these tools to study pathogens will be described and how these studies have the potential to uncover new drug targets for combating disease and antibacterial resistance will be discussed.

Ysobel Baker Department of Chemistry

Biography Ysobel Baker obtained her MChem in Chemistry from the University of Southampton before moving to the University of Cambridge for her PhD studies. She now works at the chemistry-biology interface in the areas of quorum sensing and chemical proteomics under the supervision of Prof. David Spring in the Department of Chemistry.

15:30 – 16:00

16:00 – 16:30

16:30 – 17:00

17:00 – 17:30

17:30 – 18:30

18:30

Afternoon Tea

Ysobel Baker Chemical Tools for Investigating Quorum Sensing in Pathogenic Bacteria

Dom Weldon Politics, Paranoia and Plentiful Pizza: Fast Food in America’s Cold War

Sanna Balsari-Palsule Crouching Tiger, Hidden Introvert: The Science of Acting ‘Out of Character’

Drinks (In the Old Library)

Fork-Buffet Supper (In the Old Library)

Sanna Balsari-Palsule Department of Psychology

A Common Law? Legal Pluralism in British Quebec and Bengal England’s common law became less common in the eighteenth century. From the seventeenth century until the 1760s, most policymakers agreed that English law should govern all British subjects. By the 1780s, however, Britain had abandoned its earlier efforts to develop a unified imperial law. The Quebec Act of 1774 restored French civil law to Canada; Hindu or Islamic law governed most Indian subjects; and in England and North America, judges and legislatures used summary procedures to determine a growing range of disputes without juries, from courts martial to commercial litigation. Britain’s embrace of legal pluralism both reflected and enabled the empire’s authoritarian turn. Starting in the 1760s, a new political faction, which some historians have labeled “authoritarian Whigs,” argued that Britain should govern the newly acquired colonies of Quebec and Bengal using the law of its existing inhabitants, rather than English law. Colonies that received English law, they argued, would attract immigration and investment from Britain and other colonies, which would make them too prosperous and large to control. By withholding English law from Quebec and Bengal, in contrast, Britain could make the colonies less attractive places to settle or trade. As a result, their economies would remain more dependent on Britain. At the same time, authoritarian Whigs hoped that keeping new colonial subjects under their own, separate laws would hinder their assimilation, enabling them to be more easily controlled. The story told here matters not only for British history, but also for our broader understanding of how legal institutions develop. Economists have recently stressed the importance of institutions for economic development. But they have disagreed sharply about why good or bad institutions emerge. My research suggests an answer not emphasized in the existing literature: that good institutions—and ultimately strong political and economic development—depend heavily on political ideology.

Christian Burset Faculty of Law

Biography Christian Burset is visiting Sidney Sussex as a Fox Fellow from Yale University, where he is a Ph.D. candidate in history. His research focuses on Anglo-American legal history, particularly that of the eighteenth-century British Empire. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in history from Princeton University. Next year, he will clerk for the Hon. José Cabranes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, before returning to Yale to complete his dissertation.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Introvert: The Science of Acting ‘Out of Character’ The introvert/extravert divide is the most fundamental dimension of personality. It shapes who we are, how we act and why we behave the way we do. However, in the last decade, major methodological and conceptual shifts in personality science have raised new questions about our natures. Are we hardwired to be introverts? Can we act in ways that are contrary to our biological make-up without compromising ourselves? In this talk, the key substantive question I investigate is: What happens when we act ‘out of character’? Drawing on extensive research in personality psychology, neurobiology and my own laboratory experiments and field studies, I cover new evidence of how being extraverted (and acting extraverted) can be beneficial – and how it can be highly detrimental to our physiological and psychological health. I explore the implications of these consequences and discuss some of the strategies we can use to thrive and

succeed amid the challenges of everyday life.

Biography Sanna completed a BSc in Psychology at UCL and an MPhil in Social & Developmental Psychology at the University of Cambridge. She is now a third-year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Cambridge. Sanna's research explores the role of internal psychological factors (e.g. personality, motivations) in predicting important life outcomes. She explores these questions in the context of the workplace. She seeks to translate this data into practical ways we can lead more productive and ultimately, happier lives in the roles we occupy in everyday life.

Rosie Dent-Brown Centre for Gender Studies

Newsbooks, Castles and Cultural enquiry in the English Civil Wars: 1642-1648 Castles served a variety of important administrative, social and military functions during the medieval and early modern periods, however historians have neglected to launch a close analysis of the English castle in their last years of widespread use, during the English Civil Wars of the mid seventeenth century. This talk will examine how historians can subject newsbooks, the precursors to newspapers, to cultural analysis, and how this reveals important information about how castles were defined, used and understood by contemporaries. The royalist Mercurius Aulicus and the parliamentarian Mercurius Britannicus will both be examined, so that the differences, and similarities, between both sides use of castles in polemic and propaganda can be explored. The presentation will explain how the current definition of ‘a castle’ used by many military historians of the civil war is unsustainable, and how the newsbooks suggest that contemporary definitions of a castle embraced both traditional medieval castles and ‘fortified houses’, and that any dichotomy between the two constructed by historians is an anachronism. The value of the newsbooks as a source for analysing the activities and responsibilities of both the castle’s governor and garrison will be evaluated. This evaluation will compare the potential historical returns, largely in providing a chronologically continuous account of castles in this period, with the difficulties of using these sources for such factual information, most obviously due to their openly propagandistic nature, which often results in exaggeration or slander in the place of facts confirmable in other sources. In order to ensure that all of these arguments can be appreciated by the audience the presentation will be prefaced with a brief introduction to the methodologies employed, explaining some of the key concepts and arguments for historians of other fields and lay observers alike.

Tristan Griffin Faculty of History

Biography Tristan Griffin studied History as an undergraduate at the University of York between 2011 and 2014, before moving to Cambridge last year to undertake an MPhil in Early Modern History. His focus is upon royalism in the English Civil Wars, with his dissertation study being a cultural analysis of the royalist garrison-castles of Yorkshire between 1642 and 1648.

Consuming the Shōjo In my research I am looking at the commodification and consumption of the archetype of the shōjo (young girl) in Japanese Idol pop groups, with specific reference to the group AKB48. The shōjo is a carefully controlled, scripted and very specific cultural ideal. Pure, carefree, earnest, feminine and accessible – these are all qualities that symbolise the shōjo figure. Each member of AKB48, Japan’s most famous pop band and comprising nearly 140 members, possesses these and many other qualities in different combinations to appeal to different demographics. I will investigate how the music industry creates and controls the images of its Idol starlets and how these images are reproduced in the media. The main fan base of AKB48 comprises young girls and middle-aged men and in researching what it is that unites these two seemingly disparate groups, I hope to shed some light on contemporary gender relations in Japanese society. I will ask, what is it about this archetypal young girl that is being sold, and why is this so popular? I will first look to primary sources in the media to see how this specific fiction of girlhood is presented – how they act, sing and speak and try to draw the line between reality and an idealised archetype of ‘girl’ that they portray across these many media platforms. I look to music videos as well as other media coverage of Idols including television panel shows, news reports and documentaries and features from AKB48’s own production company. I will also examine the wide online network of AKB48 fan clubs to ask the fans themselves about the personal qualities that attract them to their favourite idols.

Biography After studying English, French and Japanese at A-level I made the move South to study BA Japanese at SOAS, University of London. There I studied everything from Medieval Japanese language to classes on ‘Music, Shamanism and Healing’ and ‘Death and The Meaning of Life’. My interest in the shōjo came about during the year I spent at Waseda University in Tokyo. During that time AKB48 really stood out to me as something that angered me, but also made me ask a lot of questions and it was this visceral reaction that prompted me to come to Cambridge to do Gender Studies.

Dario Krpan Department of Psychology

I See Therefore I Act: Visual Perception Predicts Human Behaviour How to predict behaviour? That is the question that has been capturing human imagination for thousands of years. Ancient people were mostly relying on superstitious methods such as magic, horoscope, or their own “psychic” abilities to predict events that were important for their survival, such as when the enemy army would attack. Modern psychology has recently developed a number of scientific methods for predicting human behaviour that work more successfully than the superstitious approaches employed by ancient societies. For example, measuring activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) via a brain scanner can predict people’s sunscreen use over the course of two weeks better than their self-reported intentions. However, despite the advances in the science of predicting behaviour, the following question remains: What is the simplest method of predicting behaviour that can be employed without complex technology and is not susceptible to faking? In my PhD research, I discovered that simply capturing whether people perceive objects in their environment as close or far away can be used to predict behaviours regarding these objects. For example, in a series of four experiments, I showed that people who perceive a bowl of candies to be relatively far away subsequently eat more of these candies than people who perceive the bowl as closer. I further demonstrated that visual perception of distance can predict human behaviour because it reflects the two fundamental motivational tendencies that guide the majority of everyday actions: approach and avoidance. At the graduate conference, I will present how I discovered that visual perception of distance can predict behaviour and discuss what it means for the future of behavioural science.

Biography Dario is a 4th year PhD student in social psychology under the supervision of Dr Simone Schnall at the Cambridge Embodied Cognition and Emotion Laboratory. He currently investigates the relationship between motivation and the perception of physical space. Dario has been a member of Sidney Sussex College since 2010, when he started the MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology.

Tanvir Qureshi Department of Engineering

The Self-Healing of Portland Cement with the Addition of Expansive Minerals Self-healing within certain limits in traditional Portland cement (PC) concrete (called autogenous healing) has been acknowledged for many years. This is due to the hydration of unhydrated cement particles in the cracks. The Autogenous self-healing ability of PC can be in be increased with the addition of expansive mineral additives, such as magnesium oxide (MgO), bentonite clay, and quicklime where minerals are expected to improve the self-healing in the nano-micro-meso scale. The different mix proportions of minerals were investigated for optimum self-healing improvement. The viability of different mineral additions was conducted using mechanical strength tests, and then their self-healing potential was investigated forming early age cracks in the prism samples and monitoring their recovery in 28 days. Finally, microstructures of the self-healing materials formed in the cracks were investigated using FT-IR, XRD, and SEM-EdX. Results show that the combination of expansive minerals had improved the self-healing capacity of Portland cement. The addition of more bentonite clay had reduced the mechanical property of cement matrix, although it had increased the self-healing potential. Lastly, microstructural analysis showed the formation of combined hydrates and carbonates of Ca, Mg, Si, Al as self-healing materials.

Biography Tanvir Shams Qureshi is a third year PhD researcher in the field of Self-healing technology of concrete materials at the University of Cambridge, Engineering Department. In 2012, Tanvir awarded with the Islamic Development Bank (IDB)-Cambridge Overseas Trust scholarship. His educational background includes a Master’s of Science (MSc) in Civil Engineering, with distinction form the Cardiff University. Professionally, he is an academia (Assistant Professor) in the department of Civil Engineering, Leading University, Sylhet, Bangladesh. Before Tanvir joined in teaching, he gained two years of professional experience with Noksa Construction and Consultancy Firm, undertaking major Civil and Environmental Engineering projects.

Politics, Paranoia and Plentiful Pizza: Fast Food in America’s Cold War "Wherever Communism goes, hunger follows." Or so declared the Kennedy Administration. If the Cold War was to be, in the words of one Ambassador, "a struggle between two ways of life", then key to the US' strategy was to demonstrate to the world that "free men eat better than totalitarian slaves." Food, clearly was a hot front in America's Cold War. To date, most studies of food and the American Cold War have focused on food's role abroad, particularly in East Asia where the US used its vast agricultural surpluses in foreign development efforts to feed hungry populations it deemed vulnerable to popular Communist uprising. As yet, no academic studies explore the role of food at home in America's Cold War. Food, however, was clearly recognised as strategically important in the US. Its role being, in the words of the aforementioned Ambassador, to strengthen the US "spiritually and physically to resist those who announce frankly that they will bury [it]." Cheap-yet-luxurious, ever-available food became central to the American identity in this period, an identity to be firmly contrasted to hungry Communist lands. Touring through the politics, paranoia and at times plain-strangeness of Cold War America, this paper will address this gap in our understanding of this period, arguing both that the development of the US diet (in particular with regard to fast food) was shaped to a great extent by Cold War politics and technology, and that changes to food in turn had remarkable influences on US domestic and international politics. Along the way, the paper will introduce the discipline of food studies. Throughout it will argue that food is an important cultural form that should be studied by historians, geographers, social and natural scientists, and all those looking to understand the past and present.

Dom Weldon Department of Geography

Biography Dom began life at Cambridge as a Natural Scientist, eventually specializing in Plant Sciences for Part II, before switching to Human Geography for a fourth year. Before becoming a graduate student, Dom worked for two years as an elected representative at the students' union, where his role focused on the charity's staffing, financial planning and strategy. He is currently studying for the MPhil in Geographical Research, seeking funding to continue to a PhD.