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Each year, Undergraduate Education supports number of students who are conducting research or other creative and scholarly projects during the summer months. These grants are administered through eUreKa! For details and deadlines, please visit unvw.uky.edu/eureka. The following abstracts were prepared by students who received summer research and creativity awards in 2005.

Since Ben Jonson famously wrote that Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time," the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon has been treated as a master of Western literature, a poet whose pen captures the Timeless Truths of humanity. My research, following the recent trend in Renaissance scholarship, takes issue with Jonson's sentiment and attempts to demonstrate that Shakespeare and his plays were in fact constructed by the discourses of his age. That the Shakespearean oeuvre references, and at times actively engages, fundamental issues at the heart of early modern England - patriarchy, colonialism, the performance of power, and the very nature of representation itself - is the guiding principle of my work.

To examine Shakespeare and his contemporaries from this position, I am performing an archaeology of Renaissance ideology to understand how these works

may have contributed to the dissemination of discourse. In an attempt to recreate the conceptual framework surrounding the playhouses, my research has involved a careful study of the pamphlets written about early modern drama in England, specifically the fierce anti-theatrical polemics that accused the theaters of being houses of sin. By reading these treatises and teasing out the latent assumptions that guide their arguments, I hope to conceptualize how the first audiences of Shakespeare's plays would have approached the performance. Would they have seen in Twelfth Night merely a bawdy farce? Or the sinful act of a boy cross-dressing to play a girl who plays a boy? Or would they have intuited a veiled attack on patriarchal discourse?

Drawing on Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, and other philoso-phers, I am also attempting to confront the theoretical problems inherent in any research that claims to uncover and reconstruct what occurred in the past. This aspect of my research, in which method becomes a secondary theme, further distances the project

from the New Critical approach and instead grounds the work in the self-aware, even self-referential style of post-structuralist writing. This is the next stage - as I convert my notes from summer research into a finalized project, eventually into a Gaines thesis, to lend validity to the project by considering the assump-tions that have governed my scholarship.

Free-radical superoxide inflicts oxidative damage on nearly all cells exposed to oxygen and has been implicated in the mechanisms of aging. A class of en-zymes called superoxide dismutases (SODs) detoxifies superoxide into hydrogen peroxide and oxygen through dispropor-tionation.

This project examined the role of H-bonding in the activation of a mutant form of one such Fe-con-taining SOD (FeSOD): Q69E-FeSOD. The mutation of

Gin to Glu was known to preserve the heavy atom structure of wild type FeSOD while disrupting its H-bonding network. By comparing protein crystal struc-tures of the mutant with high resolution, small molecule distances from published studies documented in the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), we sought to identify the protonation states of Glu69 and its coordinated solvent. Though CCDC data alone could not effectively rule out -OH, we determined that the coordinated solvent was H20 based on the dual experimental findings that Q69E-FeSOD remains completely reduced and Fe2+ is found to be much more commonly associated with H20 than -OH. Comparisons of experimental and CCDC C-to-0 bond lengths also indicated Glu69 is best described not as a car-boxylate but as a carboxylic acid, in spite of its experimental behavior as an H-bond acceptor with respect to the coordinated solvent. We propose that Glu69 donates an H-bond to Tyr34 in order to accept an H-bond from H20. A prerequisite for this model is the depression of Tyr34's pKa. We will titrate Tyr34 to test this assumption and hence our model.