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 Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016(2018) Isto, Raino Eetu; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on monumentality and the ways it has developed in the sociopolitical conditions of late socialist and postsocialist Southeastern Europe. It examines monumental production in this region between the 1960s and 80s, and the artistic practices that constitute responses to socialist monumentality undertaken in the postsocialist period in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. It considers the relationship between ways of remembering the Second World War and the monumentalization of what is often referred to as ‘actually existing socialism.’ Additionally, it explores how legacies of socialist monumentality have affected contemporary artists working in relation to socialist heritage and to more recent traumatic experiences, such as the wars coincident with and following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Southeastern Europe’s modernity has been a particularly conflicted one, both geopolitically and culturally. Home to an overwhelming number of (frequently overlapping and amorphous) ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, the region is notable for the hybrid and disparate ways political and cultural actors—from dictators to democratically elected officials—have attempted to cultivate a collective historical consciousness. Monuments serve as particularly rich examples of the ways politicians, artists, and publics navigate collective values and contest both projected pasts and futures. The transition from late socialism to postsocialism provides diverse examples of how public monuments in countries such as Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania relate to debates on ethnicity, gender, political economy, and class-consciousness in the context of continued redefinitions of Europe’s borders and culture as a whole. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to preserve, restore, relocate, or destroy socialist-era monuments offer a rich and complicated body of evidence for the ways that histories are repurposed, especially the histories of the Partisans’ transnational antifascist struggle during the Second World War. This dissertation argues that many contemporary artists from Southeastern Europe have focused precisely on the ambiguous and conflicted meanings of socialist monuments, and have avoided treating monuments as monolithic forms associated with official ideological forces, in need of demythologization. Instead, these artists have turned to monuments in order to address the disparate histories of struggle that have given rise to Europe’s current sociopolitical situation.Item The Wrapped Reichstag and Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe: Some Difficulties with Contemporary Monuments in Post-Reunification Berlin(2008-05-05) Rook-Koepsel, Megan; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The proliferation of memory-sites following the reunification of Germany in 1990 was a testament to the great need of that nation for contextualizing and comprehending its recent traumatic histories. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Reichstag Project for Berlin, and Peter Eisenman's Memorial for the Murdered Jew of Europe are two monuments whose visual forms and conceptual narratives offer answers to the question of how to represent, complicate, and perpetuate memory through monument forms. Yet an analysis of the public reception and comprehension of these two works and the dialogues constructed around their realizations shows that in many ways each of these monuments falls short of its conceptual goals. In this thesis I will question whether an effective and appropriate contemporary monument to Germany's traumatic past is even possible, suggesting that often those elements that make up a successful monument are also the ones that provide for its failings.