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 Race, Sexuality, and the "Progressive Physician": African American Doctors, Eugenics, and Public Health, 1900-1940(2014) Nuriddin, Ayah; Michel, Sonya A; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis will examine how African American doctors interpreted eugenic thought in the early twentieth century. African American doctors embraced eugenics for its potential to improve the health of their race, thus bringing about a kind of "biological racial uplift." African American doctors thus drew on their discipline to pursue a form of eugenic activism that had internal and external ramifications for the race. . Even though African Americans faced medical injustice, they were not simply the victims of eugenics and scientific racism. They were also critics and proponents of eugenics. The first chapter will address how eugenics shaped African American discussions of public health, and how eugenic ideas about sex and sexuality influenced their discourse and understanding of venereal disease. The second chapter will examine how African American doctors discussed birth control, compulsory sterilization, and abortion within the context of racial uplift.Item Beautiful Science: Victorian Women's Scientific Poetry and Prose(2014) Boswell, Michelle; Rudy, Jason R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship in literary studies and the history of science has demonstrated increasing interest in scientific writing by women. “Beautiful Science” investigates why form and genre are important interpretive tools—not static categories—for considering ways in which women entered Victorian scientific debates, how they accommodated scientific ideas for various audiences, and how formal tensions within their texts reveal broader intellectual frictions between secular and religious science in nineteenth-century Britain. Far from being marginal figures in scientific studies, the voices of these women were prominent, and their interpretations of contemporary theories shaped the reception of science among nonspecialists. Literary forms and genres—including parables, fairy tales, verse dramas, novels, and comic poems—brought with them a wide horizon of readerly expectations into conversations about science. Deploying these genres for a variety of purposes, women science writers could deliver new knowledge in familiar, recognizable literary ways. My first chapter uncovers Mary Somerville use of Byron's closet drama Cain both to explain an astronomical phenomenon, parallax, and to respond to the play's depiction of its protagonist's response to “sublime” astronomical distance. In chapter two, I demonstrate how Margaret Gatty and Arabella Buckley employ the genres of parable, beast fables, and fairy tales to negotiate the entangled debates of morality, religion, science, and education in the Victorian era. Chapter three suggests that reading George Eliot's early “Ilfracombe Journal,” her Westminister Review essays, and The Mill on the Floss within a tradition of Victorian natural history writing illuminates matters of form and exchange within both natural history narratives and the development of the mid-Victorian novel. Lastly, in chapter four I argue Constance Naden's comic “Evolutional Erotics” poems and her philosophical poems all suggest an engagement with scientific and philosophical discourse at the level of prosody, particularly in Naden's choices of rhyme. As a whole, “Beautiful Science” argues that an examination of form and genre within both the nineteenth-century literary publishing world and the discourses of scientific popularization reveal the mutual exchange between both realms, and that Victorian women's writing makes these changes most visible.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 SAMUEL MORTON, JOSIAH NOTT, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE `AMERICAN SCHOOL': AUTHORITY, GENIUS, AND SYSTEMS-BUILDING IN NINETEENTH CENTURY ETHNOLOGY(2009) Donohue, Christopher R.; Ridgway, Whitman H.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis traces the origin and development of the "American School" of ethnology from the natural historical debate over the nature of hybridity and the definition of species between the naturalist John Bachman and the ethnologist Samuel George Morton to the posthumous management of Samuel Morton's reputation and authority by the physician and ethnologist Josiah Nott and his collaborators in Types of Mankind for the purposes of establishing themselves as ethnological authorities in their own right.Item Reason and Faith: A Study of Interwar Chilean Eugenic Discourse, 1900-1950(2013) Walsh, Sarah; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how social reform discourse that rationalized gender difference allowed Chilean Catholics to play a critical role in the development of eugenic science between 1900 and 1950. Building on scholarship relating to the development of a modernized, patriarchal system during the 1920s and 1930s and the rise of eugenics among scientists during the same period, this dissertation posits that eugenic science in Chile was the result of a complex interaction between Catholic and secular intellectuals vying for dominance in the reconstruction of the modern Chilean social order. Political liberals characterized the Catholic Church as a dogmatic monolith that was antithetical to social progressivism and disconnected from the realities of modern life. At the same time, Chilean Catholics used the social disruptions caused by capitalist industrialization to assert their social, moral, and scientific superiority. The dissertation asserts that anti-clerical discourse popular among progressive actors served to obscure the scientific and social contributions, both conservative and progressive, of the Catholic Church and its supporters in Chile. Each chapter in this dissertation examines how Catholics responded to secular efforts to oust them from their traditional places of social influence - hospitals, orphanages, schools, charities, and family life - through the application of eugenic science. Secular reformers contrasted their own presumably rational, scientific responses to social problems while feminizing religious practice and Church or Catholic perspectives. Chilean Catholics responded by asserting the compatibility of science and religion, particularly in the field of eugenics. Catholic scholars suggested, for instance, that they had to be involved in eugenic practices to ensure the most ethical application of scientific principles.Item RISKY BUSINESS: CHANCE AND CONTINGENCY IN AMERICAN ART AROUND 1900(2012) Greenhalgh, Adam Robert; Promey, Sally M.; Kelly, Franklin; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation exposes and interprets unnoticed points of intersection between American visual culture and the rhetoric, logic, and imagery of institutions and disciplines dedicated to rationalizing chance--insurance, census, statistics, probabilism--around 1900, when popular, mathematical, and philosophical conceptions of the accident were undergoing considerable revision. Following the Civil War, experts in a number of disciplines and commercial enterprises counted, measured, and classified individual experiences, bodies, and lives. Statistically minded theorists recognized that, given a large enough sample, phenomena previously considered random or divinely predetermined, such as death, injury, accident, disease, and crime, occurred regularly and were, to a degree, predictable. Anthropometrists also noticed that anatomical and physiognomic traits were distributed according to statistically evident norms. Innovative graphic techniques were developed to visualize, dramatize, and publicize the previously invisible trends, laws, and patterns revealed by such statistical analysis. Insurance underwriters gathered vital statistics and compiled actuarial charts, effectively quantifying lives and configuring individuals in terms of risk. Insurance advertisements portrayed the modern world as a place of hazard and imminent peril manageable only through accident and life coverage. My dissertation demonstrates that this statistical and actuarial calculus manifested in works of art as Americans began to think, speak, and visualize their world in terms of risk, odds, and contingency. Organized as a series of case studies, my work demonstrates that visual culture fully engaged with the abstract concepts--chance, risk--and mathematical disciplines--statistics, probabilism--that informed this emergent worldview. My study builds on recent social histories of chance, enhancing and complicating them by considering understudied imagery--insurance advertising; composite photography; statistical graphics--and period documents overlooked by art historians--census questionnaires; actuarial life tables; Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward--to reveal not only how this material informs major artworks, but also how works of art participated in underwriting an emerging conception of the world as an ultimately indeterminate, chance-based system. Individual chapters focus on artworks clustered roughly around the year 1900: Winslow Homer's mid-1880s paintings of peril at sea, blurry pictorial photographic portraiture by Edward Steichen, and George Bellows's painting Forty-two Kids (1907).