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 Development of Theater in Post-Revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1997(2022) Ahmadian , Nahid; Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Fatemeh; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research studies the development of Iranian dramatic literature and theater in post-revolutionary Iran. In a historical survey from the 1979 revolution to the beginning of the Reform Era, it explores the connection of the dramatic literature and their productions to their cultural contexts and studies the ways these contexts impact the function and formation of Iranian theater. In a chronological survey, this research examines the ways Iranian theater developed new theatrical forms to meet and reflect on the political, social, and cultural demands of an important phase in Iranian history. This research benefits from the methods of postpositivist theater historiography to advance a revisionist historical narrative based on the dynamic dialectics between Iranian theater and its cultural setting. This is summative, analytical, and archival research. Based on archival research grounded in nearly 2000 documents, and 200 plays it also provides resources on Iranian theater history and historiography. By bringing together the list of scholarship, theatrical productions, and historical documents of the 1980s and 1990s, it provides a resource on Iranian post-revolutionary history in one of the most transformative periods in Iranian contemporary history.Item Spoken Words, Embodied Words: A New Approach to Ancient Egyptian Theatre(2022) Hedges, Allison; Hildy, Franklin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, the author advocates for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of dramatic texts and theatrical performances in ancient Egypt. Two primary lines of inquiry run through this study. The first is an in-depth historiography of ancient Egyptian drama and performance in the American discipline of theatre history over the last one hundred years, to better understand the positioning (or lack thereof) of ancient Egypt in American narratives of early theatre history. An important aspect of this historiographical approach is the observation of missed connections between twentieth century Egyptological advances in the discovery and interpretation of dramatic texts, and contemporary conversations in the field of theatre history about the role of ancient Egypt in the formation of the art form. The second line of inquiry follows a Performance as Research (PAR) approach, to evaluate theatrical practice as a useful tool in further interpreting dramatic texts and understanding theatrical performances in ancient Egypt. The goal of this study overall is to encourage collaboration between theatre practitioners, theatre historians, and Egyptologists for a more holistic understanding of the ancient Egyptian theatrical tradition, and to raise awareness of the potential for modern performance of ancient Egyptian dramatic texts.Item STAGING BLACK WOMEN’S HISTORIES: RECOVERY AND RECUPERATION IN THE THEATRE OF GLENDA DICKERSON(2018) Long, Khalid Yaya; Chatard Carpenter, Faedra; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a critical study of artisan and pedagogue Glenda Dickerson (1945-2012). Glenda Dickerson, whose career spans a little over forty years, held many roles within the field of American/Black/Feminist theatre: playwright, director, folklorist, performer, choreographer, adapter/conceiver, and educator. Dickerson was the second African American woman to direct on Broadway with the 1980 production, Reggae, a Musical Revelation. After a successful run in commercial theatre, Glenda Dickerson chose to place her efforts in developing works more intended for academic and community-oriented theatre. Dickerson’s career in theatre was quite distinctive. Despite the ways in which Glenda Dickerson challenged racial and gendered boundaries within both professional and academic theatre, and with her pioneering of contemporary Black theatre as well as a Black feminist theatre, Dickerson’s legacy is still largely unknown, and, most strikingly, severely under-documented within the scholarly histories of theatre and performance. Accordingly, this dissertation provides a genealogy of Dickerson’s career, highlighting some of the historical and socio-cultural influences that shaped her life and work in the theatre. Additionally, this dissertation critically examines several of her unpublished, contemporary dramatic works: Kitchen Prayers: Performance Dialogue on 9/11 and Global Loss (2001), Identities on Trial: A Kitchen Protest Prayer (2003), Sapphire’s New Show: The Kitchen Table Summit (2004), and Barbara Jordan, Texas Treasure (2005). By highlighting major themes found within these works and providing both a historical and theoretical study of her writing, devising, and staged performances, this dissertation aims to situate Dickerson as a forerunner of contemporary Black theatre as well as contemporary Black feminist theatreItem Representation of Books and Readers in English Renaissance Drama(2018) Adams, Brandi Kristine; Cartwright, Kent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study presents a novel approach to the history of books and reading by encouraging scholars to look beyond the archives to include the study of English Renaissance Drama to understand how early modern readers interacted with and used their books. In this dissertation, I suggest that by employing an archeology of feeling—which involves deliberate consideration of how English Renaissance dramatists represented books and reading in the theater and in print—it is possible to cultivate a deeper understanding of readers living in London during the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries. My project focuses on dramatists (and other writers) with significant connections to either the universities or Inns of Court; I suggest that their theatrical representations of books and reading onstage indicate their growing anxiety over the diminishing roles and opportunities for scholars and public intellectuals. I also argue that they use the theater to advocate for themselves and their colleagues using their books and erudition through nostalgia, satiric complaint, or counsel. This anxiety about the significance of books and reading may also be the result of changing discourses in education which were moving from a humanist-centered to a more empiricist-centered framework, perhaps encouraging dramatists to question the limits and worth of their studies. Through an examination of plays that features bookish and erudite characters including those from Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1604), The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1606), and John Fletcher’s The Elder Brother (1633), I articulate ways in which scholarly readers use books to confront their concerns over government, social and political changes that do not necessarily prioritize the learned. In the first chapter, I propose that characters engage in specific acts of reading to anticipate the changing course of humanism and future paths of reading; in the second chapter, I consider physical sites of reading, including the Renaissance study, in which scholars use their reading and books to define the space and themselves alongside the tumult, noise, and capitalism inherent in city life that begins to encroach upon their space of reading and writing. Finally, in the third chapter, I examine the consequences of reading in which bright, learned individuals are left without provision or preferment after a university education. Their shared reading experiences and history of attending university and then living in London create a powerful group of readers who, through books, satire, and complaint signify their potential danger to the city, the country and the monarch due to their shifting political, social, and economic views. Throughout these plays, readers vacillate between questioning and affirming the worth of their reading and books even as they continually champion the value of their literacy.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 Staged Magic in Early English Drama(2013) Lellock, Jasmine Shay; Cartwright, Kent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In late medieval and early modern England, magic was everywhere. Although contested, occult beliefs and practices flourished among all classes of people, and they appeared regularly as a subject of early English drama. My dissertation focuses on staged magic in early English drama, demonstrating the ways in which it generates metacritical commentary. It argues that magic in drama serves more than just a symbolic function, but rather, some early English drama saw itself as performing a kind of magic that was also efficacious. To this end, this project theorizes that drama participated in forms of contemporary magic that circulated at the time. This dissertation focuses on representations of magic in early English drama, specifically in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (ca. 1471), Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1588-92), William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-1), and John Milton's A Maske Performed at Ludlow Castle (1634). These early English plays stage their magic as socially and personally beneficial, not just illusory, flawed, or demonic. Whether staging magic as a critique or apology for its own medium, however, the plays suggest that theater draws upon magic to depict itself as efficacious. This project thus reads magic as both a metaphoric, literary convention and its own entity with accompanying political and cultural effects. Examining magic and its representation as part of a continuum--as contemporary audiences would have done--offers a clearer picture of what magic is doing in the plays and how early observers might have apprehended its effects. This dissertation offers a textually based cultural context for the magic found within its central plays, bringing extraliterary magical texts into conversation with literary, dramatic texts. Because the borders between natural philosophy, religion, and magic were not clearly defined in early modern England, this project draws as well upon scholarship and primary materials in the history of science and religion. The motivation of this project is to reanimate early English theater with a sense of wonder and magic that it historically offered and that it continues to bring to readers and audiences to this day.Item THE "OTHER" WOMAN: EARLY MODERN ENGLISH REPRESENTATIONS OF NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN, 1579-1690(2011) Lush, Rebecca Marie; Bauer, Ralph R.; Donawerth, Jane L.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how early modern writers deployed figures of similarity and arguments of similitude in textual and visual representations of Native American women in trans-Atlantic texts about the Americas. I explore the relationship between representations of English and Native women by investigating the ways English authors link the two figures through comparisons that reveal similarities. English writers asserted shared traits between Native and English women to cast indigenous peoples as potential subjects of the English crown. However, these writers did not describe processes of assimilation or acculturation: the English represent the Natives as already like them. English writers used similarity between Native and English to differentiate themselves from other European colonizers in the Americas, to provide rationales for possessing American land, and to reassure English investors and would-be colonists of the safety and stability of the relationship between Native and English. My introduction situates early modern arguments of similarity and similitude alongside contemporary notions of fluid racial and cultural identities. Chapter 1 examines the descriptions of the Native woman captive in George Best's travel narrative about the Frobisher voyages and the rhetoric of similarity between Native and English women employed in this description; this rhetoric enables Best increasingly to include England's own Elizabeth I as a central character in support of the voyages. Chapter 2 considers Sir Walter Ralegh's use of the figure of the Native woman to make an analogical rhetorical argument comparing Elizabeth I to Native women rulers and, thus, to argue for English claims to American land. Chapter 3 examines how Aphra Behn and Mary Rowlandson reflect changing attitudes about Native Americans through their use of similarity to convey colonial anxieties about safety and cultural degradation as opposed to earlier depictions of similarity to convey a reassuring statement of colonial peace.