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 By the Book: Early Modern Women's Artistic Education and the Silent Instruction of Print Culture(2023) Haselberger, Mallory Nicole; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Across early modern Europe, the use of the hand as a tool, full of vigor, and comparatively, attentive to both medium and content, remained at the forefront of artistic practice. For many artists, particularly women, a question of refining the skilled work of the hand became central to understanding the gendered nature of art itself and the limits of contemporary artistic education. This thesis broadly considers the changing nature of women’s artistic education between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, guided by the work of the woman artist through print culture and self-instruction. With central case studies exploring the artistic texts of Giovanna Garzoni, Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron, and Catherine Perrot, this thesis traces the private means by which women artists utilized rising access to print culture for artistic instruction in domestic spaces, commensurate with mass production and expansion of printed volumes in Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Item ESSAYS ON LINKAGES BETWEEN CAPITAL FLOWS, LEVERAGE, AND THE REAL ECONOMY(2021) Kwak, Jun Hee HEE; Kalemli-Ozcan, Sebnem; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Europe experienced a sovereign debt crisis starting in 2010, in which perceived default risk and interest rates on government bonds soared in many countries, leading to recessions. This episode was preceded by a steady rise in the ratio of corporate debt to GDP, suggesting that private sector leverage may be a contributing factor to rising sovereign risk. In the main essay, I find that corporate debt causally affects sovereign default risk and show that this corporate-sovereign debt nexus is an important amplification mechanism driven by externalities that call for macroprudential policies. I run instrumental variable regressions to estimate a causal relationship running from aggregate corporate leverage to sovereign spreads. I use the weighted sum of idiosyncratic shocks to top 50 large firms in each Eurozone country as an instrument for aggregate corporate leverage to rule out potential reverse causality and omitted variable bias. The regressions suggest that rising corporate leverage causes sovereign spreads to rise, which confirms the existence of the corporate-sovereign nexus. To understand the mechanism, I build a model in which both firms and the government can default. When corporate debt increases, tax revenues are expected to be lower, as firms stop paying taxes and dividends when they default, which raises sovereign default risk. This tax revenue channel is supported by empirical evidence. Country-level tax revenue regressions show that increases in corporate debt-to-GDP ratios reduce future tax revenue growth. Difference-in-difference regressions using firm-level data suggest that highly-leveraged firms reduce tax payments more compared to less-leveraged firms in response to the 2008 global financial crisis. Moreover, I analyze an externality that arises from firms' limited liability, which is distinct from the pecuniary and aggregate demand externalities. I find that there exist time-consistent optimal policies that correct the limited liability externality. A quantitative model calibrated to six Eurozone countries shows that such policies consists of a low constant debt tax rate together with transfers and investment credits to firms during the crisis. Implementing these policies alleviates the corporate-sovereign linkage, so that the number of defaulting firms decreases, and the government has enough fiscal space to provide transfers to households suffering from low consumption. Furthermore, practical policies such as either constant or cyclical debt tax schedules can correct overborrowing externalities. However, a countercyclical debt policy (which raises the debt tax rate during corporate credit booms) induces more firm defaults during crises, and thus it is less effective than constant and procyclical debt tax policies. This suggests that policymakers should be cautious about implementing countercyclical debt tax policies such as countercyclical capital buffers, and should even consider relaxing regulations when corporate default risk is high. The second essay (co-authored) documents new facts on the relationship between sector-level capital flows and sectoral leverage. We highlight the interconnections between different approaches and argue that harmonization of the macro and micro approaches can yield a more complete understanding of these effects of capital flows on country-, sector- and firm/bank-level leverage associated with credit booms and busts. The third essay (co-authored) uses a historical quasi-experiment in the Ottoman Empire to estimate the causal effect of trade shocks on capital flows. We argue that fluctuations in regional rainfall within the Ottoman Empire capture the exogenous variation in exports from the Empire to Germany, France, and the U.K., during 1859-1913. Our identification is based on the following historical facts: First, only surplus production was allowed to be exported in the Ottoman Empire (provisionistic policy). Second, different products grew in different regions that were subject to variation in rainfall. Third, Germany, France, and the U.K. imported these different products. When a given region of the Empire gets more rainfall than others, the resulting surplus production is exported to countries with higher ex-ante export shares for those products, and this leads to higher foreign investment by those countries in the Ottoman Empire. Our findings support theories predicting complementarity between trade and finance, where causality runs from trade to capital flows.Item Objects of Memory: Paul Gauguin and Still-Life Painting, 1880-1901(2017) Shields, Caroline D.; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Memory plays a profound role in the aesthetic philosophy and still-life painting of French Symbolist artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Throughout Gauguin’s career, memory and imagination served him as an artistic tool, a personal resource, and a metaphor for the freedom of artistic expression. These themes recur in his writing, and this dissertation locates their visual expression in Gauguin’s still-life painting, wherein he gave tangible form to his theories through reflection upon and manipulation of objects. In chronologically-arranged case studies, I examine three types of memory: visual memory, nostalgia, and the ephemeral nature of autobiographical memory, situating each within nineteenth-century and present-day science. In so doing, I perform a type of interdisciplinary methodology called “cognitive historicism” that is new to art history. Art historians have long noted the exceptional qualities of several of Gauguin’s still lifes, but have not to date identified what in particular sets the genre apart. My research has located and articulated the achievement of Gauguin’s still life as a body of work in which he repeatedly grappled with memory, its processes, and its meaning. A concentrated analysis of period beliefs about memory and the ways memory appears in Gauguin’s visual art and writing reveals the depth and significance of the relationship between aesthetic Symbolism and the nineteenth-century interest in individual, autobiographical memory. In turn, this study contributes to a larger historical inquiry into the meaning of memory to the late-nineteenth-century mind. As Gauguin was explicitly attuned to the scientific developments of his time, he functions as a lens through which to consider the art and science of memory. While I ground my investigation in theories proposed during Gauguin’s lifetime, I situate historical intellectual developments in the context of recent science. This project thereby constitutes an exploration of interdisciplinary methodologies that bridge science and the humanities in a way that privileges the artwork and its historical circumstances. It demonstrates the rich but previously untapped potential of this method that uses frameworks and vocabulary derived from cognitive science to inform art historical inquiry, which promises to provide new directions for the discipline.Item The problem of Tunisia in Franco-Italian relations, 1835-1938(1942) Metcalf, Helen Broughall; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Item The preparation of teachers in France(1947) Kabat, George Jule; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Item Art comme archive dans (Archives du nord)(2012) Phair, Elise; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Archives du nord est l'histoire d'une humanité où la présence de l'auteur est évidente non dans la forme traditionnelle d'un personnage, mais dans les opinions et l'imagination insérées dans ses réflexions sur l'art et son analyse de l'art comme témoignage de l'Histoire et de la pensée humaine. Ce mémoire explore le discours sur l'art dans Archives du nord et montre en quoi il est un témoignage historique selon Yourcenar, ses perspectives sur l'Histoire de la pensée, et comment art reflet sa propre identité, liée aux cultures française, flamande, et européenne en général. Ces réflexions sont fondées sur des peintures, des sculptures, et dans quelques cas, des photographies. Yourcenar donne à l'art une place importante dans les archives qui forment la base de son oeuvre, car les tableaux et les portraits sont des témoignages visuels de l'identité individuelle et universelle, propre à ses personnages et générale à tout le monde à la fois. Archives du nord is a story of humanity where the author's presence is felt through the opinions and use of imagination included in her reflexions on art and her analysis of art as a testimony of human thought, rather than in the form of a traditional character. This thesis explores the discours on art in Archives du nord and reveals how Yourcenar considers it historical evidence, her perspectives on human thought, and how art reflects her own identity as it is linked to French, Flemish, and European culture in general. These reflexions are based on paintings, sculpture, and in some cases, photographs. Yourcenar gives art an important position among the archives that provide the basis of her work, for paintings and portraits are visual testimonies to both individual and universal identity, relating to her characters and to humanity in general.