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.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item RUBIES IN THEIR CROWNS:AN EXAMINATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCH WOMEN AND HEAD FASHION(2021) Malone, Shoji Von; Williams Forson, Psyche A; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Church hats and other head adornments are a major component of Sunday morning worship for many Black Christian women. Wearing a hat, also known as a crown, is a part of the Sunday ritual and culture of Black churches. This dissertation, Rubies in Their Crowns: An Examination of African American Church Women and Head Fashion, explores the ways in which Black women’s clothing, especially head adornment, aid in revealing how they self-define, self-actualize, and perform self-awarenesss. I argue that Black church women have used and continue to use head adornment to express themselves socially, culturally, and politically. Through head adornment these women begin to create, define, and express Black womanhood differently throughout time. Methodologies in material culture studies, visual culture studies, cultural studies, and ethnography using intersectionality are employed to conduct close readings of primary sources—images, newspaper articles, catalogues, and church manuals. Additionally, I conducted life history interviews with eleven hat-wearing Black church women. These participants from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, illuminate the ways that head adornments tell stories of access, creativity, and entrepreneurship. In revealing Black women’s role as cultural producers their words also unveil how their hats become decorated crowns.Item Empiricism and Exchange: Dutch-Japanese Relations Through Material Culture, 1600-1750(2015) Jamrisko, Kristi; Wheelock, Arthur K; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis will focus on unique modes of material culture exchange to shed light on the early relationship between the Dutch Republic and Japan in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I will demonstrate that while exoticism and “otherness” animated this cross-cultural interaction, important commonalities between the two countries also merit examination. The rich and diverse material culture bequeathed by the Dutch-Japanese relationship, particularly when viewed in the context of “micro-exchanges” such as gift-giving and (anti-) religious ritual, offers an excellent means for exploring these similarities. Three case studies – the Japonsche rok (Japanese robe), Rembert Dodoens’s Cruydt-Boeck (Herbal), and bas-relief plaques of Christ and the Virgin Mary, which in Japan were transformed into fumi-e (踏み絵, “trampling images”) – will illuminate one of these commonalities: the simultaneous rise of empiricism in both the Dutch Republic and Japan.Item Reflections on the Funerary Monuments and Burying Grounds of Early New England(2004-12-08) LaFountain, Jason David; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis comprises a considerable revision of the scholarship on the burying grounds and funerary monuments of early New England. It analyzes numerous objects and texts as yet unstudied in the literature on these topics, arguing for a cultural historical recontextualization of objects and spaces. My research pays attention to both the material realities and material imagination of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The themes of the paper include the following: the status of funerary monuments and burying ground meditations in the materially ambivalent Puritan milieu; the impulse to order as it relates to burying grounds as parcels of colonial landscape; the idea of the "good name"; the purifying "texts of self" that constitute the content of funerary monuments; and the pilgrimage, a prime metaphor for the Protestant life. The project stands between history and fiction, depending upon archival evidence and extensive primary documentation, on the one hand, and suspicious local histories and the playful propositions inherent of the interpretive enterprise, on the other.