Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Rellihan, Heather

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    Ad/ministering Education: Gender, Colonialism, and Christianity in Belize and the Anglophone Caribbean
    (2008-01-28) Rellihan, Heather; Bolles, Augusta L; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation looks at the relationship between educational achievement and power in the Anglophone Caribbean, with particular emphasis on Belize. Girls are outperforming boys at every level of education, but women still have higher unemployment rates and hold the lowest paying jobs, while men are in more decision-making positions in every sector of the economy. This project considers one major question: Why do women remain in less powerful positions even when they are better educated? To explore this question I look at the role that missionary groups played in administering education under British colonialism. I focus on Belize where religious groups maintain a high level of control over education in the postcolonial era. I use twentieth-century Caribbean literature to suggest the effects of Christian ideology on the hidden curriculum and on women's social, economic, and political power. The literature I discuss includes George Lamming's In the Castle of my Skin (Barbados), Austin Clarke's Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack (Barbados), Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey (Trinidad), Merle Collins's Angel (Grenada), Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Lucy (Antigua), and Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb (Belize).
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    MISERY BABY: A (RE)VISION OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN BY CARIBBEAN AND U.S. BLACK WOMEN WRITERS
    (2005-05-27) Rellihan, Heather; PETERSON, CARLA L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Emerging from a description of the protagonist in Edwidge Danticat's short story "Caroline's Wedding," the phrase "misery baby," is developed as a critical trope to engage questions of gender, as well as individual, national and regional identity in the Caribbean and the United States. Using misery baby as a template, I discuss two other Caribbean Bildungsromane: Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory. I then analyze Toni Morrison's Beloved to make larger diasporic connections. The characteristics that mark misery baby include her positioning as a coming-of-age character between two nations/cultures; her questioning of false dichotomies; her travel across geographic borders; her ability to negotiate a hybrid identity through a questioning of borders and binaries allowing for the reconceptualization of an ironic nationhood; and lastly her participation in a new way of remembering the past through an understanding of the role of the past in the present.