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 Swinging, Stillness, and Self-Reflection: An Experiential Approach to Campanian Oscilla(2023) May, Mekayla; Gensheimer, Maryl B.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Modern studies of Roman oscilla, in their focus on the Latin etymology of the term and their treatment of the iconography as standardized Dionysiac imagery, neglect the animation of—and subsequent viewer engagement with—the objects themselves. Oscilla were double-sided marble reliefs suspended in the intercolumniations of predominantly domestic atria and peristyles. This thesis develops an experiential methodology to study the oscillum’s form, context, and disposition and examines their presence in elite and sub-elite houses and in atria and peristyles. The traditional view has characterized oscilla as commodified ancient agrarian ornaments that depict standardized imagery fit for a garden space; I argue in this thesis that the oscillum’s presence within such inherently social spaces as the Roman atrium and peristyle warrants more scrutiny. No two discovered oscilla are the same, and it is the varied imagery and forms that visually and mentally stimulate the Roman viewer as he waits in the reception spaces of the atrium and peristyle to conduct business with the head of the household.I discuss the oscilla programs of three Campanian houses, where oscilla are displayed in various parts of the Roman house, in houses of diverse social strata, and in different levels of quality. My first case study, the House of the Telephus Relief in Herculaneum, offers an opportunity to begin reconstructing a wealthy ancient viewer’s cognitive experience as four tondi oscilla are reinstalled in situ. These oscilla depict scenes of active movement, urging the viewer’s physical engagement alongside his intellectual recognition of proper decorum in the socially and politically charged space of the atrium. In my second case study, I investigate the oscilla program in the peristyle of the House of Marcus Lucretius in Pompeii, where images of solitary masks and instruments provoke theatrical participation and recollection; the oscilla frame and simultaneously disrupt the framing of the theatrical garden to draw attention to the aristocratic viewer’s participation in social performances. Finally, at the House of Fortune in Pompeii, a freedman involved in trade commissioned numerous albeit poor-quality oscilla that pair scenes of conflict with those of cooperation to convince the viewer of the patron’s social and civic participation in the domestic sphere. Together, these case cases demonstrate the oscillum, a unique double-sided and suspended decorative object, inherently mobile and mutable, offered multifaceted experiences between the object’s two sides and for many different types of Roman viewers.Item “Our Tears”: Thornton Wilder’s Reception and Americanization of the Latin and Greek Classics(2017) Rojcewicz, Stephen J.; Hallett, Judith P.; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I argue in this dissertation that Thornton Wilder is a poeta doctus, a learned playwright and novelist, who consciously places himself within the classical tradition, creating works that assimilate Greek and Latin literature, transforming our understanding of the classics through the intertextual aspects of his writings. Never slavishly following his ancient models, Wilder grapples with classical literature not only through his fiction set in ancient times but also throughout his literary output, integrating classical influences with biblical, medieval, Renaissance, early modern, and modern sources. In particular, Wilder dramatizes the Americanization of these influences, fulfilling what he describes in an early newspaper interview as the mission of the American writer: merging classical works with the American spirit. Through close reading; examination of manuscript drafts, journal entries, and correspondence; and philological analysis, I explore Wilder’s development of classical motifs, including the female sage, the torch race of literature, the Homeric hero, and the spread of manure. Wilder’s first published novel, The Cabala, demonstrates his identification with Vergil as the Latin poet’s American successor. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I investigate the role of female sages in Wilder’s novels and plays, including the example of Emily Dickinson. The Skin of Our Teeth exemplifies Wilder’s metaphor of literature as a “Torch Race,” based on Lucretius and Plato: literature is a relay race involving the cooperation of numerous peoples and cultures, rather than a purely competitive endeavor. Vergil’s expression, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt [Here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart] (Vergil: Aeneid 1.462), haunts much of Wilder’s oeuvre. The phrase lacrimae rerum is multivocal, so that the reader must interpret it. Understanding lacrimae rerum as “tears for the beauty of the world,” Wilder utilizes scenes depicting the wonder of the world and the resulting sorrow when individuals recognize this too late. Saturating his works with the spirit of antiquity, Wilder exhorts us to observe lovingly and to live life fully while on earth. Through characters such as Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker and Emily Webb in Our Town, Wilder transforms Vergil’s lacrimae rerum into “Our Tears.”Item Lucretius: the Wonderer(2014) Kunz, Inna; Hallett, Judith; Classics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I seek to create a Lucretius text useful for a high school classroom including a commentary on four sections of the poem. The passages include 2.998 – 1047 which explains how the Epicurean atomic theory, 3.912—979 the famous passage that denies the underworld and its tortures, 5.855 – 923 the semi-Darwinian passage detailing the sorts of creatures that can exist in this world, and 5.1194– 1240 about the detrimental effects of humans fearing gods. In addition to writing a commentary on these passages, I will explore the perception of Lucretius though the present day, in hopes of discovering how and why this important and influential author has been so systematically excluded from secondary latin literary studies. My discussion will include an overview of how modern Latin textbooks do or do not mention Lucretius and how his presence in these textbooks compares to his role in university-level Latin course offerings. In addition to writing a commentary on these passages, I will explore the perception of Lucretius though the present day, in hopes of discovering how and why this important and influential author has been so systematically excluded from secondary latin literary studies. My discussion will include an overview of how modern Latin textbooks do or do not mention Lucretius and how his presence in these textbooks compares to his role in university-level Latin course offerings. I am hoping this research will be useful both pedagogically and for learning how decisions about literary content are made in American secondary and higher education in Latin.Item Adverb and adverbial constructions in "Beowulf."(1927) Ordeman, Daniel Thomas; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Item Enhancing Productivity and Performance Portability of General-Purpose Parallel Programming(2012) Tzannes, Alexandros; Baua, Rajeev; Vishkin, Uzi; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This work focuses on compiler and run-time techniques for improving the productivity and the performance portability of general-purpose parallel programming. More specifically, we focus on shared-memory task-parallel languages, where the programmer explicitly exposes parallelism in the form of short tasks that may outnumber the cores by orders of magnitude. The compiler, the run-time, and the platform (henceforth the system) are responsible for harnessing this unpredictable amount of parallelism, which can vary from none to excessive, towards efficient execution. The challenge arises from the aspiration to support fine-grained irregular computations and nested parallelism. This work is even more ambitious by also aspiring to lay the foundations to efficiently support declarative code, where the programmer exposes all available parallelism, using high-level language constructs such as parallel loops, reducers or futures. The appeal of declarative code is twofold for general-purpose programming: it is often easier for the programmer who does not have to worry about the granularity of the exposed parallelism, and it achieves better performance portability by avoiding overfitting to a small range of platforms and inputs for which the programmer is coarsening. Furthermore, PRAM algorithms, an important class of parallel algorithms, naturally lend themselves to declarative programming, so supporting it is a necessary condition for capitalizing on the wealth of the PRAM theory. Unfortunately, declarative codes often expose such an overwhelming number of fine-grained tasks that existing systems fail to deliver performance. Our contributions can be partitioned into three components. First, we tackle the issue of coarsening, which declarative code leaves to the system. We identify two goals of coarsening and advocate tackling them separately, using static compiler transformations for one and dynamic run-time approaches for the other. Additionally, we present evidence that the current practice of burdening the programmer with coarsening either leads to codes with poor performance-portability, or to a significantly increased programming effort. This is a ``show-stopper'' for general-purpose programming. To compare the performance portability among approaches, we define an experimental framework and two metrics, and we demonstrate that our approaches are preferable. We close the chapter on coarsening by presenting compiler transformations that automatically coarsen some types of very fine-grained codes. Second, we propose Lazy Scheduling, an innovative run-time scheduling technique that infers the platform load at run-time, using information already maintained. Based on the inferred load, Lazy Scheduling adapts the amount of available parallelism it exposes for parallel execution and, thus, saves parallelism overheads that existing approaches pay. We implement Lazy Scheduling and present experimental results on four different platforms. The results show that Lazy Scheduling is vastly superior for declarative codes and competitive, if not better, for coarsened codes. Moreover, Lazy Scheduling is also superior in terms of performance-portability, supporting our thesis that it is possible to achieve reasonable efficiency and performance portability with declarative codes. Finally, we also implement Lazy Scheduling on XMT, an experimental manycore platform developed at the University of Maryland, which was designed to support codes derived from PRAM algorithms. On XMT, we manage to harness the existing hardware support for scheduling flat parallelism to compose it with Lazy Scheduling, which supports nested parallelism. In the resulting hybrid scheduler, the hardware and software work in synergy to overcome each other's weaknesses. We show the performance composability of the hardware and software schedulers, both in an abstract cost model and experimentally, as the hybrid always performs better than the software scheduler alone. Furthermore, the cost model is validated by using it to predict if it is preferable to execute a code sequentially, with outer parallelism, or with nested parallelism, depending on the input, the available hardware parallelism and the calling context of the parallel code.