FACULTY ORAL PRESENTATIONS ARTS & HUMANITIES Challenging Constraints, Crossing Confines: A Study of Eliza Draper Dr. Susmita Roye Nothing signals the “challenging-constraints, crossing-confines” trajectory more than the uncharacteristically checkered life of Eliza Draper (1744-1778). Born in India, she was sent to England for education. Returning to India, the fourteen-year-old was married to Daniel Draper, an official twenty years her senior, with whom she shared neither tastes nor temperament. During her next visit to England to place her children in school, she aroused violent romantic passions in the literary giant, Laurence Sterne. The brief liaison came to an abrupt end when Draper commanded his wife to return to Bombay without delay, and from thereon, their conjugal relations deteriorated until Eliza eloped, causing a huge scandal. Even such a concise overview of the course of Eliza’s life, as given above, makes one wonder at the daring crossing-overs she performed. A memsahib, a traveler, an emigrant, a “Belle-Indian,” a girl-bride, a teenaged mother, the love-interest of a celebrated literary figure, the centerpiece of a scandalous elopement: what (real or figurative) boundary has she not leapt over? Besides stepping beyond geographical borders in her transnational journeys, she also violated gender strictures in crossing the private-public divide by overseeing the publication of the private love-letters sent to her by Sterne. She stands for diverse crossovers: gender, genre and geography. This paper aims at focusing on this unusual memsahib figure, who both impersonates as well as contradicts the 'types’ of her class. How does her standing at the crossroads of cultures and the milestones of history in the Indian subcontinent both empower and disempower her? Why, as a memsahib in the eighteenth century, is it both important for her to set norms and easy to break them? How does the male empire fare under her female gaze? How does the fluidity of British status in the eighteenth-century India make it possible for her to elope and yet, emerge practically unscathed from that scandal? In searching for answers, this paper will attempt to chart the path to the solidification of the 'mem’ stereotype and of the Anglo-Indian identity, of how eighteenth-century crossovers preempted the free-flow and easy crossings in the latter stage of the Raj.
AGRO-SCIENCES Deciphering the Genetic Basis of High-temperature Stress Tolerance in Blueberry Dr. Krishnanand Kulkarni, K. P. Kulkarni*, Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Delaware State University N. Vorsa, Philip E. Marucci Center for Blueberry and Cranberry Research and Extension, Rutgers University U. K. Reddy, Department of Biology and Gus R. Douglass Institute, West Virginia State University K. Melmaiee; Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Delaware State University Blueberry (Vaccinium Section Cyanococcus) is an economically important small fruit crop native to North America but widely cultivated in several countries. The commercial relevance has been steadily growing for the past 2 decades due to increased awareness of the health benefits of blueberry consumption. The US is the largest blueberry producer with a market value of $904 million in the year 2020. Blueberry plants have stringent growth conditions, and slight increases in the temperature can have adverse impacts on growth and yield. Hence, understanding the genetic and molecular basis of high-temperature stress (HTS) tolerance in blueberry is essential. In this study, 260 F2 plants from V. darrowii x V. corymbosum cross were subjected to HTS at 40?C for 4 days in the growth chamber and evaluated for HTS tolerance traits. Significant phenotype variation was observed for all the measured traits in the F2 population. Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) sequencing with a single restriction enzyme ApeK1 was used to genotype the F2 plants. The sequence reads were mapped to the first 12 scaffolds of the tetraploid variety Draper. The SNPs were filtered using (1) read depth, DP > 3, (2) minor allele frequency, MAF < 0.05, and call rate < 0.9. After quality filtering and trimming, 126,816 SNPs were obtained from the sequencing data. These SNPs were used for the genome-wide association study, which identified 1323 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) significantly (p<0.01) associated with HTS tolerance traits. Further, an NCBI-BLAST search was made to identify the candidate genes information for the 245 SNPs. A number of these genes encoded molecular chaperone proteins and transcription factors reported to be involved in thermal stress or oxidative stress. The results from this study will help decipher the genetic basis of HTS tolerance in blueberry and future breeding plans. Funder Acknowledgment: Authors thank the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) for funding (nos. 2018-38821-27744 and 2018-67014-27622)
FIFTH ANNUAL DELAWARE STATE UNIVERSITY RESEARCH DAY | APRIL 13, 2022
PAGE 15
