UMD Theses and Dissertations
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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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Item Effect of Sloped Terrain on In-Ground-Effect Hover Performance for an Isolated Rotor(2023) Prewitt, Jack; Tritschler, John; Aerospace Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The present work conducted performance testing using a laboratory-scale isolated rotor operating over a ground plane mounted to a six degree-of-freedom motion platform to simulate in-ground-effect operations over sloped terrain. The rotor utilized a pair of 1:13.24 scale OH-58C blades, and performance measurements were collected using a six-axis load cell to which the rotor was mounted. Seven ground plane angles ranging from 0–18 deg, five collective blade pitches ranging from 0–8 deg, and 15 hub heights ranging from a nondimensional hub height, z/R, of 0.6 to 2.0 were tested. Additionally, the rotor was operated out-of-ground-effect for collective blade pitches ranging from 0–12 deg in increments of 1 deg in order to compare in-ground-effect and out-of-ground-effect hover performance. In-ground-effect hover over sloped terrain was found to have over a 7% reduction in performance as compared to hover over level terrain at low hub heights and large ground plane angles. In-ground-effect hover over sloped terrain was also found to require 2% more power than hover out-of-ground-effect at high hub heights and large ground plane angles. Finally, a semi-empirical model for hover performanceover sloped terrain was developed on the basis of the classic Cheeseman and Bennett ground effect model for level terrain. The coefficients obtained from this model were found to change in a consistent manner as both ground plane angle and blade loading coefficient changed, which suggests that the model could be used for future performance predictions for hover over sloped terrain.Item LAST DANCE, LOST DANCE: STRATEGIZING INDETERMINACY TOWARD LIVE AND EMERGENT CHOREOGRAPHIES(2023) Villanueva, Carlo Antonio Ortega; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Last Dance, Lost Dance is a 30-minute interdisciplinary performance piece that explores the concept of indeterminacy in performance. Indeterminacy—the phenomenon of a performer making decisions during performance—is a reifying analytical perspective from which dance improvisation can be seen, applied, and understood. Instinctively directed and choreographed by Carlo Antonio Ortega Villanueva, Last Dance, Lost Dance resists the fixity of choreographic form in pursuit of relational, responsive collaborations in performance strategy and (interdisciplinarily) with theater design. To do so, Last Dance, Lost Dance reschedules choreography to include the moment of performance, through the use of improvisational strategies; and reconfigures choreography to include the design and movement of mise en scène. As a result, Last Dance, Lost Dance commands the full apparatus of the theater despite its imposed rubrics for form, beauty, and aesthetic; and its choreography emerges in real time, authored live by its performers. These experimental modes of choreography ask and dance the question: “What is the relationship between form and possibility?” This document, “Last Dance, Lost Dance: Strategizing Indeterminacy Toward Live and Emergent Choreographies,” supports and contextualizes Last Dance, Lost Dance with discussions of dance and the archive, Asian American postmodern performance, and photographic and narrative documentation of the creative research, development, and critical reflections of Last Dance, Lost Dance; it is accompanied by an archival video of the performance.Item The Home We Can Never Leave(2023) Richardson-Deppe, Charlotte R; Keener, Cy; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Growing up, I performed aerial arts in a circus. In the circus, a web of interdependence keeps you off the ground—the tightness of your grip, the strength of your friend holding you up, the trust in an apparatus to hold your weight. In my own body now, I feel the residual stretch, tension, and ache the circus left in me—remnants of bodies pushing through pain, defying gravity to hold one another up. Via soft sculpture and performance, I negotiate the body as a site of both liberating autonomy and confining oppression.Item CIVIC DRAMATURGY: CULTURAL SPACE, ARTISTIC LABOR, AND PERFORMANCES OF URBAN PLANNING IN 21ST CENTURY CHICAGO(2022) Thomas, LaRonika; Harding, James; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops a theory of “civic dramaturgy.” Civic dramaturgy is a process of performing identity through changes to and impacts on the built environment, as well as a method of analyzing and contextualizing those performances to better understand the multiple modes of identity expression that make up a specific place, in the case of this dissertation, that place is the city of Chicago. Civic dramaturgy joins theories of “performance and the city” together with theatre history and urban studies to examine cultural space, cultural policy, performances of urban planning, and the ways in which artistic labor is used by individuals, corporations, and governments in non-representational performances of civic and urban identity in the United States. This study first establishes a working definition of civic dramaturgy, tracing the development of the ideas of the “civic” and “dramaturgy” through western theatre history, as well as examining other theories significant to urban planning, critical space theory, spatial representations of gender and race, and performance of cities. Dramaturgy involved four main areas of practice: analysis of plot structure, relationship between artist and audience, locality and spatial awareness, and contextualization. Each of chapters one through four examine an aspect of Chicago through one of these practices to build toward this definition of civic dramaturgy. I identified the city of Chicago as the site of study for this work because of its history of planning the built environment and its robust theatre history, including the way in which its theatre has been intertwined with social and spatial movements through the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In addition to an examination of the development of the city and its theatre, civic dramaturgy requires an analysis of the ways in which artistic labor co-creates civic identity, the social space of the city, and the built environment. In particular, the work of Theaster Gates, an artist and planner working on the south side of Chicago, provides a poignant example of the ways cultural planning, performance, and labor work to craft a civic identity; and the structure of these interwoven performances are examples of civic dramaturgy. Finally, the performance of the digital space of the city is also an important component of civic dramaturgy and the fourth chapter breaks down the ways in which actor and audience relationships manifest through sensory-inscribed bodies in performance and planning of the built environment. This study builds upon existing scholarship that posits dramaturgy as a way to understand performance, architecture, policy-making, and politics, extending the use of the structural and spatial concepts of dramaturgy beyond the rehearsal room, the stage, and the site-specific performance, in order to craft a more comprehensive means by which to understand performance and the city, and providing an example of a kind of dramaturgically-based analysis that may also be used when looking at all kinds of urban spaces and phenomena, and which may be theorized as “civic dramaturgy.”Item Finally, Fairies!: A Study in Hauntological Choreography(2022) Koepke, Tristan; Portier, Kendra; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Finally, Fairies!: A Study in Hauntological Choreography” is the written thesis that documents the creative research, development, and critical reflection of my dance production Finally, Fairies!, a requirement of the M.F.A. in Dance at the University of Maryland, College Park. Finally, Fairies! premiered March 11-13, 2022, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center's Dance Theatre. In outlining the process from ideation to performance, I illuminate my personal history and artistic lineage in dance performance and choreography. I consider my choreographic impulses and choices in relationship to hauntology, a concept given name by Jacques Derrida and expanded upon by contemporary theorists such as Mark Fisher, Jack Halberstam, and Merlin Coverley. I explore hauntological moods, methodologies, Vaporwave music, and emergent forms of composition that involve both improvisation and choreography. Ultimately, I offer close readings of Finally, Fairies! to further expose what the performance proposed, as well as develop and trouble formulations of presence and embodiment through an insistence on spectrality and indeterminacy.Item Explorations in Diagnosing Competence and Performance Factors in Linguistic Inquiry(2022) Liter, Adam; Lidz, Jeffrey; Hornstein, Norbert; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take of linguistic performance do transparently reflect the underlying grammatical competence that is the target of inquiry. This has been a very useful and fruitful assumption in the vast majority of cases. Nonetheless, there are certain cases where more careful consideration of the linking hypothesis between the underlying competence of interest and the measurements of linguistic behavior (i.e., performance) that one takes might be warranted. This dissertation presents three case studies that try to model such consideration. How performance and competence might interact is highly dependent on the phenomenon being investigated as well as the method being used to investigate it, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach to these kinds of considerations. The goal of this dissertation is to model such consideration and to encourage more of it. In Chapter 2, we investigate English-acquiring children’s non-adult-like productions of medial wh-phrases. On the basis of experimental data showing a correlation between an independent measure of cognitive inhibition and the production of such examples, we will argue that the best explanation of these productions is that children fail to inhibit the pronunciation of the wh-copy at the intermediate clause boundary due to an underdeveloped executive function and that children do have the target adult-like English grammar with respect to the formation of wh-dependencies (contra, e.g., Thornton 1990, McDaniel, Chiu, & Maxfield 1995, de Villiers, de Villiers, & Roeper 2011). Then, in Chapter 4, we investigate the status of island violations under sluicing (i.e., TP ellipsis). Sluicing apparently improves the acceptability of island violations contained inside the ellipsis site (see, e.g., Ross 1969). Whether we should understood this improved acceptability as indicative of such examples being grammatical is an open question (cf. Ross 1969, Chomsky 1972, Lasnik 2001, Fox & Lasnik 2003, Merchant 2005, 2008b, 2009, Temmerman 2013, Griffiths & Lipták 2014, Barros 2014a, Barros, Elliott, & Thoms 2014, 2015). We investigate the status of such examples with several 2 × 2 experiments, an experimental paradigm discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The idea of the experimental design is to use differences between acceptability ratings and subtraction logic afforded by the linking hypothesis between acceptability and grammaticality to try to more directly get at grammaticality. Our results from this chapter are ultimately somewhat inconclusive, but for potentially methodologically informative reasons. Finally, in Chapter 5, we use the same kind of experimental paradigm to investigate the status of Bulgarian examples with multiple wh-dependencies, where one of the wh-dependencies crosses an island and the other does not. Bulgarian is a language with multiple fronting of wh-elements, and it has been observed that examples where one of the wh-dependencies spans an island but not the other are improved in acceptability (see, e.g., Richards 1997, 1998, 2001). Such examples have thus been taken to be grammatical, though they do still exhibit some degree of unacceptability. We use the same sort of experimental paradigm to try to ascertain the grammaticality status of these examples. We find evidence that such examples are indeed grammatical, which reaffirms the importance of ensuring our syntactic theories can account for such examples.Item HERE I AM: AN EXPLORATION OF VIRTUAL LIVE PERFORMANCE(2021) Bennett, Jeremy Donnell; Mezzocchi, Jared; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following thesis is a series of observations and explorations documenting my experiences as both an artistic collaborator and contributor of the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University’s production of Here I Am. The production opened April 15th, 2021 as a virtual live performance streamed through YouTube. Here I Am was an original performance by Mélisande (Meli) Short-Colomb with direction by Derek Goldman and Nikkole Salter, music composition and vocal performance by Somi Kakoma, multimedia design by Jared Mezzocchi, sound design by Andre Pluess and lighting design by Alberto Segarra.Item THERMAL HYDRAULIC CHARACTERIZATION AND VALIDATION OF HEAT EXCHANGERS BASED ON TRIPLY PERIODIC MINIMAL SURFACE(2021) Dharmalingam, Lalith Kannah; Aute, Vikrant C; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Rapid growth in the field of additive manufacturing has set off a stream ofresearch into complex shapes and geometries for engineering applications. Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS) are a class of differential surfaces that are gaining such increased interest in the past few years. Of the most commonly studied TPMS, Schwarz-D TPMS has been shown to out-perform traditional Heat eXchanger (HX) designs in recent research. This research examines some of the under-studied TPMS structures for HX applications. Fischer-Koch S, C(Y), and C(±Y) TPMS structures were numerically analyzed to predict their thermal-hydraulic performance and the results were compared with a Schwarz-D TPMS HX. The under-studied TPMS HXs showed a 1.5 to 5 times increase in overall thermal performance while maintaining similar pressure drops when compared to the Schwarz-D TPMS HX. Furthermore, thermal-hydraulic characterization of a full-scale TPMS based HX design was carried out for high temperature (> 900 °C) applications and a parametric HX design solver was developed to predict its performance within ±5% deviation.Item Embodied Performance: War, Trauma, and Disability on the Eighteenth-Century Stage(2021) LeRoy, Tamar Dora; Rosenthal, Laura; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project brings attention to the emotional work performed by plays about war from the Restoration and eighteenth century—how these plays position soldiers and communities in relation to one another and the state and in what ways they contribute to the work of negotiating trauma. War-themed plays of the period obsessively reenact tropes and devices that communicate particular affective scenarios or experiences of wartime. These affective scenarios include the temporality of soldiering and enlistment that locks the recruit in a state of inevitable injury and injuring; the longings for return of someone seemingly lost or displaced and the simultaneous fear of the outcome of this return (or no return); and a sense of rootlessness or displacement that unsettles surety in homeland, homecoming, or nation. The tropes and devices that convey these affective scenarios include devices involving the literal substitution bodies, such as bed tricks and dead tricks; an obsessive repetition of scenarios of recognition of identity, reunion, and the many complications of mistaken identity; and humor, joking, and comic tropes (like the soldier breeches role) that communicate a sense of the corporeal/temporal experience of war through the body. From these devices an experiential bridge is created in the playhouse between home front and warfront that positions the soldier as well as the grieving individual as part of a larger affective community. These figures are not isolated by their potentially extreme experiences of the battlefield, enlistment, waiting, or mourning: through the collective space of the stage, their extreme experiences are shown to be acknowledged by the larger group. From these plays, we see the affective experience of war at home from the community networks touched by military conflict.Item A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal(2020) Storti, Anna; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops the concept of racial hosting to conceptualize mixed-raceness as an embodied palimpsest of past, present, and future. A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal argues for the importance of uncovering the disavowed, residual, and violent conditions of racial mixture. The project situates queer theories of temporality and feminist theories of situated knowledge in relation to Asian Americanist critiques of memory. I contend that the Asian/white subject is both an index to track the colonial condition across time, and a host that harbors the colonial desires we have come to name as hybridity, multiracialism, and post-racism. Each chapter builds towards a methodology of memory to, on the one hand, track the sensorial life of mixed-raceness, and on the other hand, document how the discourse of multiracialism obscures mass violence and the colonial ideology of racial purity. Chapter one advances the framework of white residue through an examination of the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Japanese/white police officer serving 263 years in prison for assaulting 13 Black women. I then narrate the life of Elliot Rodger, the Chinese/white mass shooter and involuntary celibate. Opening the study in this way dispels the notion that racial mixture renders racism’s past obsolete. I then shift to mixed race artists whose performances of desire, memory, and time include a fervent belief in queer and feminist possibility. Chapter two illuminates how a femme aesthetic of retribution surfaces as a response to racial fetish. This chapter spotlights performances by Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal. Chapter three forwards the concept of muscle memory to study how the accumulation of history is deposited into the body and enacted through movement. Here, I contemplate the queer and trans dance of Zavé Martohardjono. Chapter four de-idealizes hybridity through the oeuvre of contemporary artist Saya Woolfalk. To end, I refer to the photography of Gina Osterloh to force a reckoning with the pressures to remember and claim ancestry. Mixed race subjection, I conclude, is an embodied phenomenon with reverberating implications for the structure of racial form writ large.