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 SOME OF US ARE STARING AT THE STARS: SPECULATIVE FICTION, FANDOM, AND TRANS IMAGINATION(2023) Hagen, Damien; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Some of us are staring at the stars: Speculative Fiction, Fandom, and Trans Imagination takes up the multiple ways that trans and nonbinary people have used speculative fiction as a survival strategy and worldbuilding tool. Through engagement with trans and nonbinary fans and creators of imaginative works, Damien shows how speculative fiction has powerful material effects for trans lives. Primary attention is given to the possibilities contained in media that was not created to be explicitly “transgender,” but was experienced and read as such through a “trans imaginary.” Damien’s research methods are interdisciplinary, incorporating the use of autoethnography, focus groups, close readings, and thematic analysis. Chapters include an analysis of regeneration as trans possibility in the TV series Doctor Who, an inquiry into shared experiences among trans and nonbinary fans deriving from focus group interviews, an examination of the ways the genre of “body horror” in film and television has been used as a tool for processing and dealing with experiences of body dysphoria, and an analysis of the trans world building possibilities in Blue Delliquanti’s Oh Human Star and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt.Item SKYRISE: BLACK GIRLS ‘ARCHITEXTING’ YOUTHTOPIAS(2023) Young, Alexis Morgan; Brown, Tara M; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation illustrates the utility of Black girls’ imaginations in liberatory projects, particularly in the (re)imagining of education. As this biophysical world continues to reveal the insidiousness of current systems of power, now, more than ever, people are exploring the (im)possibilities of abolition. Central to the project of abolition is imagining otherwise ways of being and living; thus, those committed to actualizing liberated futures for Black girls must make sure their voices are amplified in world-making projects. This project examines a six-week extracurricular program, Astronomy Club, that serves as homeplace (hooks, 1990) for six preadolescent Black girls. During the program, Black girls engaged in architexture, the hybrid approach of melding principles of architecture and literature to document their speculations of a youthtopian future. Grounded in Black Feminist Futurity (Campt, 2017), Black Quantum Futurism (Phillips, 2015); Black Critical Theory (Dumas & ross, 2016); the overarching question of this qualitative study asks: In a literacy program designed for and with them, how do Black girls ‘architext’ their imaginations of Black girl-centered educational futures? Data sources include interviews video-recorded observations of program sessions and multimodal program artifacts, analyzed through a grammar of Black futurity as modeled in Campt’s (2017) Listening to Images. Study findings indicate that when the Black girls in this study dream of freer educational futures, they: (1) dream in the dark, (2) dream in community, and (3) dream of a world full of justice. Furthermore, they provided directives for constructing youthtopian learning environments and described them as sites that: (1) center Black life and Black girlhood in the curriculum, (2) tend to their identities and socioemotional positions, and (3) nourish their body, mind, and soul. This study adds to the continued project of creating a new world for and documenting the revolutionary ideologies of Black girls. This dissertation is an invitation to improve the educational conditions of Black girls through their analyses of present schools and their fantasies for schools they desire in the future.Item IMAGINING REDEMPTION: FICTIONAL FORMS AND SENSORY EXPERIENCE IN EARLY MODERN POETICS FROM SIDNEY TO MILTON(2020) Neff, Adam Bryan; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how four early modern authors—Sir Philip Sidney (d. 1586), William Shakespeare (d. 1616), Sir Francis Bacon (d. 1626), and John Milton (d. 1674)—viewed imaginative writing. I argue that all four writers see fictions as a potential instrument of cosmic redemption with the potential to mitigate the effects of the fall. Starting with Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, this dissertation traces a belief that fictions affect our often-unacknowledged assumptions about what is possible or likely in the world and the judgments we make about whether a fiction is believable or not. According to Sidney’s imaginative poetics, well-crafted fictions that appear to be a mimesis of the material world but contain elements of the poet’s “golden” world shift readers’ presuppositions, which in turn change how they interact with the material world and make the (formerly fictional) vision of the poet into material reality. For these writers, fictions’ impacts are profound but difficult to perceive because they change us and, through our actions, the world, essentially becoming fact because we have made them so. In four chapters this project presents a theory of Sidney’s poetics and the unusual scope it granted to poets’ and readers’ imaginations, as well as the moral and cultural anxieties that his poetic theories provoked in his own writings and those of his literary successors. Chapter two reads Shakespeare’s King Lear as a study of imaginative excess and its civilizational consequences, calling into question whether or not restorative fictions can indeed keep delusive, self-destructive ones at bay. Shakespeare presents a nightmare vision of civilizational collapse in which fictions retain their persuasive power but lose their architectonic impulse. In response to this threat, Bacon’s poetics becomes an experiment in how rigorously we can restrain the imagination from knowledge creation while still keeping an unseen, providential, redemptive teleology in mind. Recognizing the dangers of too much or too little restraint on the imagination, Milton explores a formal solution in Paradise Regained. The poem’s fictional mediation of Jesus’ temptation and use of metaphors steers readers between excessive and deficient imaginative responses to the Son of God.Item "Melancholy's Wake: Loss and Literary Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Britain"(2016) Williams, Jonathan C.; Chico, Tita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)If the centuries preceding and following it are known for their revolutionary character (the seventeenth century for its regicide and the Romantic period for the French Revolution), then the eighteenth century in Britain has seemed in many accounts to be an age of progress rather than upheaval. As a period of refined sensibility and rapid economic growth, the British eighteenth century appears to be marked by an insistence on social stability and thus to have little room for melancholy, the sadness that does not end. In “Melancholy’s Wake,” however, I contend that the politically revolutionary spirit that seems otherwise missing in the eighteenth century is located instead in the melancholic language of loss deployed by the graveyard poems and the sentimental novels, among other genres. Across a range of genres, loss works as a synecdoche for cultural crises figured by the rise of commercialism and sociability. While modernity offers the promise of a prosperous future for the upwardly mobile, some literary writers see modernity instead as the erasure of opportunity for the lower-rank. In dwelling with the spirit of loss, literary writers see a trace of the revolutionary spirit in the quiet expression of melancholy, as such expressions cannot be assimilated within the project of modernity. Such quiet expressions also reveal, however, that some aspects of revolutionary thought are fundamentally inoperative. Melancholy sees utopic thought as a dream not accessible to the present, but the articulation of such a dream offers an alternative to modernity when no other alternative presents itself.Item The Experience of Fiction(2013) Picciuto, Elizabeth Rose; Carruthers, Peter; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on some of the philosophical puzzles that are associated with the experience of engaging in fictions. Some of these puzzles are longstanding in the philosophical tradition, viz., the paradox of fiction, the paradox of tragedy, and the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. Another has received surprisingly little philosophical attention: the puzzle of why we engage with fictions at all. I argue against what I will call the Simple Story of fictional engagement. Previous discussions have (to greater or lesser degrees) described engaging in fictions as a matter of entertaining the events described at a fictional world. In the Simple Story, the content of the fiction is decisively determinative of our motivations to engage in fiction and responses to fictions. That is not, however, our experience of fiction. I de-emphasize the role of the content of the fiction in our motivations and responses to fictions. Too little attention has been paid to the role of factors extrinsic to the fiction in explaining the nature of our experiences of and responses to fictions. In general, I stress that the role of the content of the fiction as determinative of our responses is far less important than has been assumed. Some aestheticians have long been interested in psychological data and I am, too. Many, however, are wary of in evolutionary psychology. They are rightfully worried that to explain the beauty of Anna Karenina in terms of hunting on the savannah would be to miss something deep. There is, however, a useful role for evolutionary psychology to play in explaining why we might have motivations and emotional responses to fictions. I explore this idea.