Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item IN THE PURSUIT: BLACK WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES IN PWI DOCTORAL PROGRAMS & THE USAGE OF BLACK JOY AS PERSISTENCE(2022) Sessoms, Christina Simone; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Out of 104,953 doctoral degrees earned by women within the United States in 2019-2020, Black women obtained 10,576 PhDs across the span of academic disciplines, equating to 11.1%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (2021). However, research has not done its due diligence of parsing through the data to understand the stories of the women who make up those 10,576 PhDs granted. This dissertation study explores the lived experiences of Black women who specifically transitioned from their undergraduate institutions into doctoral programs at predominately white institutions (PWIs) and how Black joy may be employed as a persistence mechanism toward degree completion. Because no literature exists to understand this community of doctoral students, this groundbreaking study begins with the question of what are the lived experiences of Black women who transition directly from their undergraduate to doctorate at PWIs? The dissertation continues to push further to then question how Black women in doctoral programs understand, experience, and sustain their joy and in what ways does joy inform persistence and resistance amongst these sista scholars. Utilizing Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) Black Feminist Thought as a theoretical foundation and Black feminist-womanist storytelling as the chosen methodology, I argue that this specific transition is one that must be deeply explored because of unique components and that Black joy does, in fact, serve as a positive mechanism for persistence. Life stories were collected through two interlocking methods of semi-structured interviews and focus groups amongst 14 Black women spanning 12 different academic fields in PhD programs across the United States. By sharing life narratives of Black women in doctoral programs, in-depth insight is gathered concerning reasons for going to graduate school, academic and socialization transitions, three primary barriers to success - age being a salient identity, mental health challenges, and perceived & real pressure, and, lastly, understanding and experiencing joy through self, community, and work. Through this research project, Black women in doctoral programs created space to critique and disrupt the Ivory Tower while producing joy amongst each other.Item Translating Grace: Postsecularity in Twentieth-Century American Fiction(2021) Gonch, William; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The early twentieth century saw the rise of new, secular ways of imagining and understanding religion, especially through social sciences such as psychology and anthropology. TRANSLATING GRACE: POSTSECULARITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION investigates creative responses to this secular imaginary by novelists invested in religion’s continuing power. For the four primary subjects of this study—Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Marilynne Robinson—secular ways of imagining religion were at once challenges and opportunities. They foreclosed conventional expressions of religious ideas, experiences, and narratives, but they could be used creatively to reimagine religious stories and symbols, giving them fresh life and applying them to new challenges. I propose the metaphor of translation to understand the creative exchange between secular and religious writing. Literary translation is a creative activity that stretches the boundaries of a target language so that it may mean things that it has never meant before; similarly, writing of religion in this period is a translational attempt to stretch secular categories. Novelists jettison conventional religious narratives and symbols and invent new literary forms to make religious experiences and beliefs register for new readers. In doing so, they create new ways of experiencing and reckoning with religion. Translating Grace reassesses accounts of religion and literature by emphasizing the creative potential of religious writing. Previous studies of this period theorize a crucial break around 1960. Before that point, literature secularizes; artists look to art as a substitute for religion and treat religion’s fading as inevitable. After 1960 there is renewed interest in religious narratives, symbols, and practices, but it is “weak” religion, shorn of doctrinal and metaphysical claims. In contrast, I propose that “strong” religion persists as an important creative presence in 20th century literature. Whether strong or weak, religion becomes more self-conscious about its need to make itself comprehensible. Writers engage, sometimes subversively, sometimes playfully, with secular imaginaries. In this way, fiction drives a wider transformation of life within religious communities as they reimagine their place within a now-more-secular culture and world.Item The World Is Old and New Again: Cultural Trauma and September 11, 2001(2011) Muller, Christine; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the emergent cultural aftereffects of September 11, 2001. I consider how popular US narratives from the decade following that day's events evidence an ongoing, pervasive struggle with certain of the hijackings' especially troubling features, manifesting September 11 as a cultural trauma. I distinguish cultural trauma as an intersubjective phenomenon from psychological trauma and its individualized emphasis. I also distinguish my approach from the dominant ways historical, cultural and literary studies have typically conceptualized trauma as a primarily Freudian-theorized, pathological reaction to extreme happenings. Rather, drawing on Janoff-Bulman's shattered assumptions model of psychological trauma, I define cultural trauma as a radical disruption of basic, common, taken-for-granted, culturally-generated and -structured beliefs about what constitutes a community's ordinary life. I focus on how the hijackings' shocking and well-publicized developments shattered assumptions fundamental to mainstream American understandings of daily life. To trace these shattered assumptions, I review ten popular culture texts: three popular press oral history collections - the 2002 September 11: An Oral History, the 2002 Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, and the 2007 Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 - as well as the 2002 Frontline documentary "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero"; the 2003 Tom Junod Esquire article "The Falling Man"; the mid-to-late-2000s television series Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward; the 2008 Christopher Nolan film The Dark Knight; and the 2007 Don DeLillo novel Falling Man. By assessing and comparing these texts' primary thematic concerns, I outline how each narrative, situated in varying media and genres, engages vulnerability in the forms of existential insecurity and the troubling of meaningful and ethical choice, exposing fragmented foundational beliefs in the wake of September 11. However, instead of reconstructing these fragmented pieces into an unequivocal new whole, these texts ambivalently instantiate that day's unresolved cultural fallout, serving to document the still evolving structures of feeling constituting this cultural trauma. Accordingly, this study evidences how popular culture serves as a site for recognizing and negotiating September 11 as a cultural trauma while suggesting how cultural trauma might be recognized and negotiated at other times of stark cultural change.Item The Capital of Diversity: Difference, Development, and Placemaking in Washington, D.C.(2011) Maher, Justin Thomas; Sies, Mary C.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Diversity has long been a part of the urban landscape, both as a demographic fact and as a valuable commodity used to attract development. Both kinds of diversity move through Columbia Heights, the rapidly (re)developing neighborhood in Washington D.C. that serves as my case study. It is home to residents of varying racial, ethnic, sexuality and class-based identifications as well as the rhetoric that selectively values them. In this dissertation, I argue that a rhetorical commitment to diversity has been an integral part of uneven development in Columbia Heights. It is the cornerstone of neoliberal development, a process in which government subsidized, private development benefits middle and upper-middle class (often white) residents, while low-income residents of color are increasingly denied quality housing, employment, and education. This interdisciplinary project draws on urban, cultural, ethnic, and queer studies scholarship to illustrate how representations of difference affect material development. I argue that they create ideological "maps" of the neighborhood that value some markers of difference while erasing and policing others. In turn, these maps guide who invests in the neighborhood and who belongs where. I chart how representations have changed over time, from the appropriation of civil rights rhetoric in the mid to late 20th century, to more recent multicultural imagery and gay-led gentrification narratives used to sell a "new," upscale Columbia Heights. Using a mixed methodology of textual and ethnographic analysis, I examine different sites of discursive production: city planning documents, real estate marketing, and an online neighborhood listserv. I also interview longtime and incoming Columbia Heights residents with various social locations, illustrating how dominant narratives of difference and development are reinforced and/or challenged among residents. This project expands existing development, gentrification, and gay enclave scholarship. It challenges singular analyses of difference and examines how multiple markers of difference affect spaces. All middle-class newcomers are not white, nor are all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer residents middle-class. In addition to suggesting policy solutions, I suggest how "contact" between residents of different social locations has the potential to counteract uneven development and the discourse that reinforces it.Item Museums, Social Media, and the Fog of Community(2011) Wong, Amelia Selene; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the early twenty-first century, museums increasingly turn to "social media" to engage audiences and in these efforts they routinely imagine them as "communities." This dissertation tends to the politics of that choice, which extends a long history of museums employing community as a strategy towards institutional reform. Museums invoke community in numerous ways but without typically articulating those meanings, even though they influence the implementation and evaluation of social media projects. I argue that this lack of articulation creates a "fog" over practices--an ambiguous and confusing context of work--in which community operates as a "self-evident good," but serves traditional interests as much as transformative ones. To expose the many ideas that lay within this fog, I examine how American museums invoked community throughout the last century, showing how they use it both to reinforce their power and alter relations with audiences. After exploring how community has been conceptualized through networked digital media and social media--technologies and a culture that emphasize openness, communication, collaboration, and the materialization of digital bodies--I show how museums continue to use community in complex ways. As social media conflate community with communication--specifically "face-to-face," or immediate, communication, I argue they influence museums to over-value visible acts of communication, which narrows their understanding of online visitor engagement and dilutes the potential of community to shape projects that more conscientiously serve audiences and institutional reform. To illustrate the complexity of these ideas at work, I present three case studies of museums using social media to construct community: the Getty Center's blog, A Different Lens; the Japanese American National Museum's website, Discover Nikkei; and the website of the Science Museum of Minnesota's Science Buzz. I expose the definitions of community at work in each, examine how they influence the use of media, and work to limit and serve the project's various democratizing goals. The conclusion offers a nascent problematique that suggests more critical approaches museums may take for invoking community and using social media towards democratizing aims.Item WORLD WAR II AND U.S. CINEMA: RACE, NATION, AND REMEMBRANCE IN POSTWAR FILM, 1945-1978(2011) Chester, Robert Keith; Gerstle, Gary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation interrogates the meanings retrospectively imposed upon World War II in U.S. motion pictures released between 1945 and the mid-1970s. Focusing on combat films and images of veterans in postwar settings, I trace representations of World War II between war's end and the War in Vietnam, charting two distinct yet overlapping trajectories pivotal to the construction of U.S. identity in postwar cinema. The first is the connotations attached to U.S. ethnoracial relations - the presence and absence of a multiethnic, sometimes multiracial soldiery set against the hegemony of U.S. whiteness - in depictions of the war and its aftermath. The second is Hollywood's representation (and erasure) of the contributions of the wartime Allies and the ways in which such images engaged with and negotiated postwar international relations. Contrary to notions of a "good war" untainted by ambiguity or dissent, I argue that World War II gave rise to a conflicted cluster of postwar meanings. At times, notably in the early postwar period, the war served as a progressive summons to racial reform. At other times, the war was inscribed as a historical moment in which U.S. racism was either nonexistent or was laid permanently to rest. In regard to the Allies, I locate a Hollywood dialectic between internationalist and unilateralist remembrances. On one hand, narratives of the U.S. as the dominant wartime power affirmed the nation's benevolence and might, attesting to the United States' right to dictate the terms of postwar international politics. On the other, progressive filmmakers used images of the Allies to challenge postwar U.S.-centrism and bemoan the Cold War nation's military and economic mismanagement of international relations. Emphasizing the contested character of the war's cinematic image, the dissertation recuperates a tradition of dissent, complicating our understanding of World War II remembrance and postwar Hollywood history. The project also considers the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) Pictorial Division - the military's liaison with Hollywood - and the film industry. Drawing on DoD records, I show how the postwar state influenced representations of racial diversity, and how the military shaped images of the U.S. in interaction with its wartime Allies.Item Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Goes Upscale: Redevelopment as Neighborhood Cleansing(2010) Bergman, Ruth O.; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite an abundance of literature on gentrification that has been published over the past several decades, little attention has been focused on the fate of displacees once they have migrated away from their neighborhoods of origin. This study covers new ground by tracking displacees to their new sites of habitation and applying ethnographic methodologies to collect displacement narratives spanning a decade--from forced relocation to resettlement and beyond. I argue that, notwithstanding the "trauma" of eviction, outmovers were able to tap into their own personal as well as their collective sense of place-identity in order to better negotiate the relocation process, proving to be far more resilient than might otherwise have been anticipated. Furthermore I suggest that the informants, all former residents of a cluster of courtyard enclaves in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, were empowered in their displacement journeys by the everyday practices of collaborative living that they experienced as participants in a highly articulated socio-spatial system that I have called "court-ordered living." Finally, this dissertation argues that the discourses surrounding gentrification-induced displacement be reflected upon from the vantage point of hindsight, providing new insights into the intersection of historic preservation, property rights, neoliberal governance, affordable housing, and what constitutes "a beautiful neighborhood" from the perspective of competing stakeholders across time and place.Item The Textualization of Pat Tillman: Understanding the Relationships Between Person, Discourse, and Ideology(2011) Herbig, Arthur William; Gaines, Robert N; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a critical examination of the ways in which the life and death of Pat Tillman were shaped into a discursive Pat Tillman. This is not a project that examines the life led by the person Pat Tillman. The discursive Pat Tillman can be found in the pages of magazines, on television, invoked by politicians, and even memorialized in song. It is Pat Tillman, the discursive creation, that is my focus. In this project I take for granted that Pat Tillman only existed in places like the pages of books or on film. What is not lost on me and should not be lost on the reader of this project is my own participation in this process. With this project I have entered into the very discourses that I seek to critique. This is an analysis of the existence of a Pat Tillman that many people still know and the ideas that help shape how that existence is communicated. My critique focuses on the existence of a discursive Pat Tillman as a rhetorical phenomenon, drawing upon scholarship that can inform an understanding of how the life of Pat Tillman became the material for public discourse. My analysis interconnects Michel Foucault's (1972) work on knowledge and discourse with Michael Calvin McGee (1990) referred to as rhetorical fragments, in order to provide a foundation for understanding the discursive existence of Pat Tillman. Using how discourse producer connected various facts, stories, and images with conceptions of heroism, masculinity, and the American Dream, I reveal how the life and death of Pat Tillman was used as the material to represent political and cultural positions that exist external to that life. Through an analysis of the various news reports, books, documentaries, blogs, and other mediated texts that were produced in response to the life and death of Pat Tillman, this study presents a clearer picture of what is meant by "fragmentation" in critical analysis.Item Synthesizing Transcendental Painting: Race, Religion, and Aesthetics in the Art of Emil Bisttram, Raymond Jonson, and Agnes Pelton(2010) Rees, Nathan; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Three core artists of the Transcendental Painting Group, Emil Bisttram (1895-1976), Raymond Jonson (1891-1982), and Agnes Pelton (1881-1961), employed modernist painting styles in an attempt to create spiritually significant art. Although previous scholarship has focused on the artists' formal innovations, their work was imbricated in contemporary cultural politics, actively participating in discourses surrounding conceptions of race, religion, aesthetics, and the interrelation of each of these realms. Each drew from sources in metaphysical religious literature, especially Theosophy and related traditions. Their theories of ideal aesthetics for religious art, based on the supposition that artists could convey direct emotional experience through abstraction, reflected the Theosophical drive to overcome materialist philosophy by transcending the limits of physicality. Bisttram, Pelton, and Jonson also internalized Theosophy's promotion of syncretism as a guiding principle, and followed metaphysical religionists in advocating a combinative appropriation from diverse religious and artistic traditions. In particular, they relied on Theosophical conceptions of the importance of gleaning allegedly ancient wisdom as they addressed American Indian cultures of the Southwest. Their art created a hybrid iconography, combining symbolic elements from metaphysical religious sources with imagery derived from Southwest Indian cultures, asserting an integral relationship between the two, and advancing the perceived agreement between Native American and Theosophical religious systems as evidence of the truth of the latter. In addition to expressing metaphysical interpretations of Native American religions in their work, they promoted a transcultural aesthetic that posited American Indian art as an archaic and therefore "authentic" means of expressing of spiritual wisdom; they modeled their own abstract aesthetics in response to their encounters with Indian art. As they appropriated from Native American sources, they created images that celebrated the indigenous peoples of the Southwest as possessing unique and important religious knowledge. Their intent, however, was to advance Western culture forward by drawing from ancient sources to create a new, synthetic religion. The result was an art that referenced American Indian cultural practices and art traditions, but gave no voice to the original Native American artists, claiming to transcend the sphere of cultural significance and approach the level of "universal" meaning.Item "The Imagery of the Ear:" Listening and Sound in American Art, 1847-1897(2010) Naeem, Asma; Promey, Sally M; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)America's soundscape underwent tremendous changes from the mid-nineteenth century on: not only in terms of the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph, but also with the noises heard in the city streets, factories, and countryside nearby. During this period, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing explored the intersection of auditory experience and artistic production, creating complex works that gave visual form to the changing nature of sound and listening. All three painters pursued the representation of aurality as career-long endeavors, and developed distinct approaches and pictorial syntaxes. Homer, whose life and artistic outlook were marked by his experience as a traveling Civil War illustrator, painted the everyday sounds of laborers in the American countryside and out at sea in terms of issues related to distance and signaling over space. At a time when a growing number of people were communicating with one another with the aid of such machines as the telegraph and telephone, Homer's long-distance aural exchanges probe the human desire for connectivity, and its converse, separation. Eakins piques our aural imagination with the physiognomic and sartorial acuities of his musicians and singers, not to mention the mimeticism of their actions, and attempts to pack the parallel visual and aural experiences of realism tightly into his paintings, despite the limits of the medium. Transferring his photographic experiments of stopping the human body in mid-motion to the painterly stopping of musical sound in mid-song, Eakins's works evince his personal form of transcription. Whereas Eakins sought to unify the eye, ear, and hand in one split second of representation, Dewing sought to fragment aural moments to pictorialize the psychic effects of listening, and promote the vaults of the imagination. Most notably through attenuated sonic transmissions and the idea of pause, Dewing's representations of women in airless domestic interiors and atmospheric landscapes frequently evince a "pulling apart" of sight and sound that render his depictions of music and speech strangely quiet and unsettling. At the same time, these suspended aural scenarios help to cabin the women he so often portrayed.