Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

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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    Cosmopolitanism, Mobility, and Royal Officials in the Making of the Spanish Empire (1580-1700)
    (2017) Polo y La Borda, Adolfo; Cañeque, Alejandro; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation explores the worldwide mobility of seventeenth-century Spanish imperial officials who traveled around the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. My study focuses on the lower echelon of imperial officials in order to demonstrate how their experiences of service to the king in a variety of locales affected the the governance of the Spanish Empire and how such a polity was imagined by these officials as a global, yet connected and coherent unity. I argue that the officials’ circulation was central for the cohesion and stability of the empire. It allowed the actual and imagined overcoming of the far-flung geography of Spain’s empire and the incorporation, and sometimes exclusion, of diverse subjects across the globe. The intense and extensive mobility of the officials permitted the consolidation of certain imperial political practices, values, and patterns of rule and administration, which played a decisive role in the emergence of a common imperial identity built from the ground up. This imperial identity worked to give cohesion to a polity as heterogeneous as the Spanish Empire. Imperial official’s interactions with very different peoples and cultures spawned a cosmopolitan imperial culture that unified the many cultural, geographic, demographic, and social peculiarities of diverse societies under the umbrella of the imperial mission of enforcement, defense, and expansion of the crown’s rule and spread of Catholicism. This work departs from the traditional national and area models of study by emphasizing the utility of an analytical framework that takes the whole imperial system—and not just one of its component regions—as the unit of analysis, in order to show that the histories of Europe, America, Africa, and Asia were far more entangled than previously thought. Despite the empire’s enormous diversity, extension, discontinuous territoriality, and the near-autonomous status of many imperial outposts, a great number of Spanish imperial subjects saw the empire as an integrated and coherent political unit. I analyze some of the conditions and settings that made possible the global mobility of the officials, and some effects of such circulation in the ruling and political imagination of the empire.
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    Reclaiming the 'Ancient Luster' of Painting: Pieter de Grebber's Regulen and Haarlem Classicism
    (2012) Harrington, Margaret; Wheelock, Jr., Arthur K.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A single specimen survives of Pieter de Grebber's 1649 Regulen, or "Rules to be observed and followed by a good Painter and Draughtsman." Though infrequently discussed, I argue that De Grebber's Regulen manifest a lofty, patriotic vision for the art of painting. First, I demonstrate that the iconography of the printed broadsheet announces history painting as a way to honor important patrons, glorify the Dutch Republic, and elevate painting to a liberal art. Next, I relate the Regulen to the recently reformed Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, which established a hierarchy of professions according to universal principles of beauty. Finally, I use the Regulen to show that the Haarlem classicists paired theory with drawing from life. Guidelines like De Grebber's Regulen appealed to the Haarlem classicists as they strove to adapt the classical mode of painting to contemporary tastes and concerns.