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
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Item The Exiles' Return: Emigres, Anti-Nazis, and the Basic Law(2021) Miner, Samuel James; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation traces the historical origins of several novel features of the postwar West German Constitution (Basic Law). Next to a legally enforceable catalogue of basic rights, the novelty of the 1949 Basic Law lay in articles outlining the forfeiture of those basic rights for any individual, organization, or political party who fights against the “fundamental liberal-democratic order.” This is a pillar of “militant democracy,” a term invented by the emigre jurist Karl Loewenstein, but a feature of German constitutionalism since it uses by the Federal Constitutional Court. That court occupies the position of “guardian of the constitution” in postwar Germany. Postwar “new German constitutionalism” (Kommers) was largely a project of the parliamentary left. Despite their historical aversion to judicial power, postwar German anti-Nazis transferred tremendous powers to the judiciary, especially state and federal constitutional courts. The following dissertation is a collective intellectual biography of the key anti-Nazi and emigre constitutional framers behind the state and federal constitutions. It examines their lives between the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the late 1950s, when the Federal Constitutional Court established itself as the final arbiter of German law. The Federal Constitutional Court with its powers of judicial review was not an American export. Rather, it was a German response to the circumstances of postwar occupied Germany. Judicial review came to Germany as an anti-Nazi measure designed to prevent the continued use of Nazi statutes in defense of war criminals. Judges in Allied-occupied Germany were asked to review statutes for their adherence to principles of justice to avoid light sentences for Nazi criminals. To counter the tendencies of a reactionary judiciary, anti-Nazi jurists campaigned for a lay judiciary with mixed results. The state constitutions of the American occupation zone provided the prototype for how a “militant democracy” would function in postwar West Germany. The state constitutions were anti-Nazi documents written in response to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The framers of the state constitutions came from the ranks of recent re-emigrants and concentration camp survivors. The following dissertation examines their contributions to postwar law and politics.Item Let it Flo! Theatrical Process and Production(2013) Clay, Caroline Stefanie; Smiley, Leigh W; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Let It Flo! is a theatricalized imagining based on the real life of the late attorney, and feminist Florynce "Flo" Kennedy. It was borne out of my deep artistic need to understand the intersections between activism and identity. Kennedy's audacity, flamboyance, sharp tongue, and intellect were her currency in the world of 1970's racial and gender politics. In later years, Flo faces increasing anonymity among the very generation of women who benefitted most from her willingness to fight for their rights. This scholarly query is measured through the lens of Kennedy's life choice to walk the road less travelled as a free woman. Hers was a trajectory marked by verbal radicalism, personal triumph, contradiction, and ascension. As Flo faces her final transition, she fights to spur into action the current generation into a life of advocacy, equality, and authenticity.Item Constructing Home Economics in Imperial Japan(2011) Tatsumi, Yukako; Finkelstein, Barbara; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the life and work of two Japanese women, Miyakawa Sumi (1875-1948) and Inoue Hide (1875-1963), who became pioneers of domestic education in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. They discovered home economics as a field of study, went to the Western nations in an attempt to explore its contours and possibilities, and returned to Japan where they introduced and institutionalized a distinctly Japanese variant of domestic education. Their life stories reveal two distinctive constructions of home economics specifically due to the distinct purposes of domestic education. Miyakawa, who borrowed the British model of practice-oriented domestic training, aspired to modernize women's technical competence in an attempt to advance women's self-sufficiency in household management. She believed that the individual household was a fundamental unit of state and essential to national economic development. Accordingly, she sought to mobilize women for serving the state through self-sufficient household management. By contrast, Inoue adopted scientific and sociological paradigms for home management that she had discovered at elite educational institutions in the United States. She sought to elevate the scholarly position of home economics in an attempt to legitimatize a gender-specific university education for women. Additionally, she promoted social activism in the hope of demonstrating women's civic leadership. Their life stories illuminate the key roles of home economics in expanding and advancing higher education for women. The emergence of advanced educational opportunities for women with marriage aspirations suggests a shift in public demand for programs that could credential and train ideal bridal candidates and expand their education to include post-secondary educational opportunities. Additionally, the emergence of an interdisciplinary framework for home management, the alternative to scientifically-based curricula, suggests a shift in a focus of domestic education from environmental solutions to social problems to the comprehensive pursuit of familial and social wellbeing. Using biography as a methodology, this study illuminates women's agency in refining the meaning of ideal womanhood, Ryôsai Kenbo (Good Wife, Wise Mother), uncovers the models with a high potential of acceptance specifically by urban middle-class women and suggests an expanded view of the mainstream discourse of ideal Japanese womanhood.Item Are You Stek Mainard?: The Fragmented History of an Indie Rock Legend(2011) Jerome, Timothy Joseph; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Are You Stek Mainard?: The Fragmented History of an Indie Rock Legend is a biography of the singer/songwriter Stek Mainard. The text opens with Stek Mainard walking away from his music career at its peak, when mainstream success and fame are all but realized. The book's editor/writer, Timothy Jerome, is Stek's best friend, and this book his attempt to explain to the world why his best friend left his music career behind. Jerome combines stories from fans, bandmates, and critics with his own stories about him and Stek all in order to answer one big question: Why did Stek Mainard leave?Item The Life and Legacy of Laskarina Bouboulina: Feminist Alternatives to Documentary Filmmaking Practices(2007-10-17) Householder, April Kalogeropoulos; Fuegi, John; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When Michael Moore won the Academy Award in 2004 for his film Fahrenheit 9/11, the documentary re-emerged as an important critical discourse in the making of culture. As a political consciousness-raising tool, the documentary fits squarely into the goals of independent media activism. With the development of digital videomaking technologies, a distinctive means through which to explore the issues of culture, class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality that have been neglected in mainstream documentary filmmaking practices has emerged. Specifically, this new methodological approach to collecting, preserving, and analyzing history provides a voice for the stories that have been under-- and misrepresented in the consumption and production of biographies of women in film and literature. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a series of social, political, cultural, and economic events convened in Europe which enabled Greece to spark the War of Independence. This national instability provided a space for the emergence of a heroine who broke all established gender codes in the area of politics and on the battlefield: Laskarina Bouboulina (1771-1825). Over the course of her life, Bouboulina owned a successful merchant fleet, became an international diplomat, and was the only woman to join the Filike Etairia, an underground organization that prepared the Greeks for the war with the Ottomans. She is the first woman in world naval history to have earned the title of Admiral for her command of the Spetses fleet in crucial naval battles. Her life represents an alternative history to the masculinist and nationalistic depictions of the Greek War of Independence, as told in both Greek and Philhellenic literatures. It is a radical re-imagining of gender and the Greek identity in the nineteenth century, and foregrounds the many contributions made by women to modern Greek history. It also provides an alternative to the images of Greek women in the historical imaginary of Hollywood and other dominant media practices. Using historical documents and artifacts, interviews with Bouboulina's descendants and specialists in the fields of Greek and Ottoman History, live footage, music and artwork of the period, as well as contemporary film and media as grounds for cultural comparison, this hour-long documentary video synthesizes multi-media artifacts to create a critical pedagogy that explores the margins of Greek history through the life and times of one of Greece's most important revolutionaries.Item Venus Imaginaria: Reflections on Alexa Wilding, Her Life, and Her Role as Muse in the Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti(2006-12-11) Lee, Jennifer; Pressly, William L.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While much has been written regarding the associations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, and mistresses, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris, scholars have generally ignored, or at the very least, minimalized, the potential importance of his connection to Alexa Wilding. This thesis shall serve as a rudimentary biography for her through analysis of public records and private letters, and it will examine overlooked evidence in the search for the real woman behind Rossetti's most versatile face, and the influence of the artist on the model as well as the inspiration she gave to him.Item PURELY COINCIDENTAL RESEMBLANCE TO PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD: WORRY AND FICTION IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIFE WRITING(2005-12-04) Eubanks, David; Leonardi, Susan J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At the end of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first, American life writing remains both an unsettled form and an unsettling practice. This study addresses six representative texts that suggest a critique of life writing as they deploy self-conscious fictionalization, experiment, and suspicion of their own strategies. Three of the works under analysis signal a noteworthy change in contemporary U.S. life writing. As they interrogate the conventions of memoir and biography, they begin to insist on notions of self, history, and agency at odds with the poststructuralisms that shape their approaches to representing selves and histories. These instances of vexed life writing, having recognized and engaged the constructedness of experience, memory, and self, nevertheless struggle to operate as nonfiction. Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace are symptomatic instances of panic in contemporary American life writing. In each of these memoirs, the life writer supplements ostensibly nonfiction narratives with metacommentary and fiction but posits neither the fantasy of an authoritative master narrative nor the jouissance of having abandoned the same. Obliged to what each memoirist identifies as his or her local responsibilities, these texts struggle toward representing freighted experiences. I read these texts as uneasy heirs to three predecessors that adopt parallel methods to represent lives but make distinct arguments about life writing. Eggers' memoir echoes the form and epistemology of Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Morris' experimental presidential biography follows Gore Vidal's Lincoln: A Novel. The Fifth Book of Peace counters Kingston's own family memoir, China Men. As the contemporary examples of life writing adopt the postmodern forfeiture of stable representation, they do so under an anxiousness that McCarthy, Vidal, and the early Kingston evade. The presence of that worry in contemporary American life writing indicates the limits of this category of text and the native tension between postmodern indeterminacy and specifically obliged life writing.Item Music Education in Prince George's County, Maryland, From 1950 to 1992: An Oral History Account of Three Prominent Music Educators and Their Times(2004-11-23) Moore, Judy Williams; McCarthy, Marie; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation documents the professional lives of three prominent music educators in Prince George's County, MarylandLeRoy Battle, Maurice Allison, and Dorothy Pickardwhose careers from 1950 to 1992 spanned the period of school desegregation and its aftermath. The professional lives of Battle, Allison, and Pickard, their philosophies of teaching, and the instructional strategies they used in building music programs of distinction are examined employing methods of oral history. The interviews of twenty-three other Prince George's County professionals, including a county executive, a superintendent, county teachers, and county administrators, combine with testimony of the three music educators in creating the fabric of this historical dissertation. Set in Prince George's County, scene of dramatic societal change between 1950 and 1992, county educational, cultural, societal, and political processes are explored to gain understanding of the lives and times of Battle, Allison, and Pickard. Although the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling ended the era of "separate-but-equal" schooling in the United States, it was not until December 29, 1972, that a countywide system of busing of students was ordered in Prince George's County to enforce racial balance in schools. Busing altered the racial distribution in county schools and was thought by many to have precipitated "white flight" of Prince George's residents to surrounding jurisdictions. Remaining county residents voted to limit taxes for county services, creating a financial burden for the schools, the police, and the county government. Subsequently, the white-to-black ratio in the county and the schools altered. Through advocacy efforts of teachers, concerned residents, and students, the elective programs in Prince George's County Public Schools were twice spared from elimination, in 1982 and again in 1991. Music education remains an active part of the Prince George's County School curriculum due in part to the work of Battle, Allison, and Pickard, music educators who displayed creativity in the face of adversity. They set an example for other educators of how to produce, maintain, and support quality-performing groups in music education.