UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

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    Speaking from a Strange Place: Refiguring Contemporary Bodies of Jewish American Women's Assimilation
    (2012) Karp, Amy Tziporah; Jelen, Sheila; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Jewish American assimilation in the United States is considered a finished, and successful, project. This narrative of successful assimilation is used as a foundational example of enculturation in the United States in numerous bodies of study, including whiteness studies, cultural studies, and Jewish studies. The usage of Jewish American male experience as the basis of this narrative creates the notion that Jewish American women achieved assimilation through their male counterparts. Though this metonymic usage of male experience for all Jewish American experience has largely gone uncontested in scholarship, a plethora of Jewish American women's writing has emerged contemporarily in which this centering of Jewish male experience is being questioned. In these texts--visual and written--ghostly and strange happenings suggest that for some Jewish American women assimilation may be an ongoing project and that new tools of understanding are necessary to understand their stories, so different from the already sedimented male narratives of the Jewish American assimilation story. In this project, memoir (Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel), fiction (Empathy by Sarah Schulman), and television drama (The L Word by Ilene Chaiken) created by Jewish American women writers is examined in order to re-imagine narratives of Jewish American assimilation. With the use of theory from a variety of bodies of study as well as Jewish American women's fiction produced before and after World War II, Jewish American assimilation is illuminated as an ongoing project in which some Jewish American women inhabit the identity of strangers. The strangers encountered here illuminate not only the failings of assimilation, and its attendant narratives, but also resistances to assimilation and its violence's. Further, the encounter with strange characters in the process of assimilating created by Jewish American women imagined to be successfully "Americanized," provides insight into the necessary tools of discipline and normalization in the construction of citizenship and belonging in the United States.
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    Teaching The Sacred: A Phenomenological Study of Synagogue-School Teachers
    (2009) Nagel, Louis Alan; Hultgren, Francine; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation is a hermeneutic phenomenological study of synagogue-school teachers of Jewish sacred text. The phenomenological question that orients this study asks, What is the lived experience of teaching sacred text in a Conservative synagogue-school? This study takes place in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. The writings of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Max van Manen, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Emmanuel Levinas, among others, orient the study philosophically and methodologically. This investigation of the challenge of making relevant to 21st century American youth an ancient tradition is grounded in sacred texts as well as the author's life experiences, and is metaphorically explored in the encounter with natural landscapes. Eight third through seventh grade synagogue-school teachers of Torah and Hebrew prayer are engaged in individual and group conversations to explore the personal meaning they make of their engagement in this service to the Jewish community. The review of recorded conversations, verbatim transcripts, essays, and notes taken during classroom observations reveal existential philosophic themes that are brought forward in the writings of Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas. In particular, the existentials of being present, relationship, discourse, and the Other, emerge as powerful openings of the phenomenon in question. The narrative of this lived experience is the exercise of Buber's I-Thou relationship, one of profound moments of encounter with the sacredness of the text and of the student; time and timelessness; and boundaries to be respected, tested, and breached. At essence the synagogue-school teacher is seen as taking on the responsibility of perpetuating connection to a sacred community, acting in the role of both the prophet as teacher, best represented by Moses, and in maintaining connections that link to Biblical accounts of encounter with God and with divine messengers. Synagogue-school teachers are seen to demonstrate independence, genius, responsibility, and deep spirituality in a unique educational landscape. These teachers reveal the nature of the synagogue-school as an island of Jewish time, a period rich in engagement with community and sacred text, set in the synagogue environment. A challenge is for the learnings that take place in the synagogue-school to be extended to Being beyond the boundaries of that sacred space.
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    "The Swinging Door": U.S. National Identity and the Making of the Mexican Guestworker, 1900 - 1935
    (2006-11-21) Noel, Linda Carol; Gerstle, Gary; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examines U.S. national identity in the first third of the twentieth century. During this period, heated discussions ensued throughout the country regarding the extent to which the door of American society should be open to people of Mexican descent. Several major events brought this issue to the foreground: the proposed statehood of Arizona and New Mexico in the early twentieth century, the increase in Mexican immigration after World War I, and the repatriation of Mexican immigrants in the 1930s. The "Swinging Door" explores the competing perspectives regarding the inclusion or exclusion of people of Mexican descent embedded within each of these disputes. This dissertation argues that four strategies evolved for dealing with newcomers of Mexican descent: assimilation, pluralism, exclusion, and marginalization. Two strategies, assimilation and pluralism, permitted people of Mexican descent to belong to the nation so long as they either conformed to an Anglo American identity or proclaimed a Spanish American one rooted in a European heritage, whiteness, and a certain class standing. Exclusion denied entry into the U.S., or in the case of those already there, no role in society. Marginalization, which became the predominant strategy by the 1930s, allowed people of Mexican descent to remain physically within the country so long as they stayed only temporarily or agreed to accept a subordinate status as second-class Americans. The prevailing view changed depending on the economic and political power of people of Mexican descent, their desire to incorporate as Americans, and the demand for their labor or land by other Americans. One of the most significant findings of this project is that as the marginalization strategy gained adherents, the image of Mexican immigrants as temporary workers or "guestworkers" became the primary way in which Americans, Mexicans, and the immigrants themselves regarded the newcomers from Mexico. Despite the fact that this image was often false, the notion of Mexicans as only temporarily in the U.S. proved too seductive for the many divergent voices to resist as this image theoretically allowed Mexicans to enter the country and to provide their labor without threatening extant notions of American identity.
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    MULTIVARIATE ERROR COVARIANCE ESTIMATES BY MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION FOR OCEANOGRAPHIC ASSIMILATION STUDIES
    (2005-08-04) Borovikov, Anna Y; Carton, James A; Rienecker, Michele M; Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    One of the most difficult aspects of ocean state estimation is the prescription of the model forecast error covariances. Simple covariances are usually prescribed, rarely are cross-covariances between different model variables used. A multivariate model of the forecast error covariance is developed for an Optimal Interpolation (OI) assimilation scheme (MvOI) and compared to simpler Gaussian univariate model (UOI). For the MvOI an estimate of the forecast error statistics is made by Monte Carlo techniques from an ensemble of model forecasts. An important advantage of using an ensemble of ocean states is that it provides a natural way to estimate cross-covariances between the fields of different physical variables constituting the model state vector, at the same time incorporating the model's dynamical and thermodynamical constraints. The robustness of the error covariance estimates as well as the analyses has been established by comparing multiple populations of the ensemble. Temperature observations from the Tropical Atmosphere-Ocean (TAO) array have been assimilated in this study. Data assimilation experiments are validated with a large independent set of subsurface observations of salinity, zonal velocity and temperature. The performance of the UOI and MvOI is similar in temperature. The salinity and velocity fields are greatly improved in the MvOI, as evident from the analyses of the rms differences between these fields and independent observations. The MvOI assimilation is found to improve upon the control (no assimilation) run in generating water masses with properties close to those observed, while the UOI fails to maintain the temperature-salinity relationship. The feasibility of representing a reduced error subspace through empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) is discussed and a method proposed to substitute the local noise-like variability by a simple model. While computationally efficient, this method produces results only slightly inferior to the MvOI with the full set of EOFs. An assimilation scheme with a multivariate forecast error model has the capability to simultaneously process observations of different types. This was tested using temperature data and synthetic salinity observations. The resulting subsurface structures both in temperature and salinity are the closest to the observed, while the currents structure is maintained in dynamically consistent manner.