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 HASIDIC HAGIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION – A HISTORICAL AND LITERARY PERSPECTIVE.(2020) Mandel-Edrei, Chen; Zakim, Eric; Jelen, Sheila E; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Hasidic Hagiography in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” sheds light on a neglected genre in the scholarship of modern Hebrew literature – Hasidic hagiography. Nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment activists, influenced by Romanticism with its perspective on “primitive,” “national” literatures, read Hasidic hagiographies as folklore; until today this genre is excluded from the canon of Modern Hebrew literature and from critical literary discourse. My work challenges this myopia and offers a critical perspective on the complex relationships among religion, mysticism, and modernity within the Hasidic stories; it shows how Hasidic hagiography represented an alternative path for Jewish modernization that rejected the binary lens of the Enlightenment’s secular rationalism. The dissertation’s title references Walter Benjamin, who revolutionized an understanding of literature as a reaction to changes in society wrought by industrialization and market capitalization. My dissertation applies a similar perspicacity to the study of Hasidic hagiography. The 1848 revolutions, the growing political and cultural awareness, and the influences of print-capitalism in Galicia, prompted two Hasidim–Menachem Mendel Bodek (1825-1874) and Michael Levi Rodkinson (1845-1904) to print oral Hasidic hagiographical stories in the popular format of folktale collections, thereby constituting Hasidic hagiography as a new genre in Hebrew literature. These projects marked a sharp transition from oral and intimate gatherings with the tsadik to popular printed experience of the masses. The process through which mechanical reproduction replicates the first-hand meeting with the tsadik for the masses, reflects the Hasidic engagement with the project of Jewish modernity. Distributed through networks of popular media, Hasidic hagiography became the device through which Hasidism integrated into contemporary Jewish and secular discourses, responding to ideas such as nationalism and individualism. The goal of this project is twofold: first, to offer a new critical methodology for reading those texts and establish a framework for discussing similar cases of marginalized texts in world literature; and secondly, to offer a new understanding of the political role of Hasidic hagiography and its promise for modern Jewish experience and literature. Finally, my dissertation contributes to our understanding of the political and cultural functions of popular literature, and illuminates alternatives to historiographies of national literatures.Item Tradition Revitalized: The Chinese Painting Research Society of Republican Beijing(2014) Zhang, Jingmin; Kuo, Jason; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1920 a group of traditional artists in Beijing formed the Chinese Painting Research Society, an art institution that enormously influenced Chinese art in the twentieth century. This dissertation locates this society within contemporary social, historical, and cultural trends and argues that its use of traditional Chinese art, antiquities, and even archaeology to counter Western art influence was part of a larger search for national and cultural identity. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the historical and theoretical foundations of the society. The second part sets the artistic activities of the group, including their exhibitions and journals, against contemporary cultural backdrops. The study accomplishes a number of goals. First, it sorts out the historical facts of this overlooked society in a way that reintroduces it to art historical scholarship. Second, it demonstrates that the seemingly conservative stance of the society was just a way to secure its standing and guard its goals. Third, it establishes the group's importance to the field of modern Chinese art. Finally, by thoroughly examining the society and its accomplishments, this dissertation shows that the traditional artistic approach championed by the society is worth scholarly attention, and that the modernization of Chinese painting occurred not only in Chinese-Western synthesis. Innovation within tradition was equally viable.Item NATIVE CLASSICAL: MUSICAL MODERNITIES, INDIGENOUS RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES, AND A KANIENKÉHA (MOHAWK) CONCEPT OF NON:WA (NOW)(2014) Avery, Dawn; Witzleben, John Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I explore how Indigenous methodologies that foreground cultural advocacy, revitalization, and education can be articulated using Indigenous language and cultural metaphor in research on North American Indian composers. Toward this end, I apply the Kanienkéha (Mohawk) concept of "non:wa" or "now" that also refers to three modes of perception--the now of the past, the present, and the future--toward understanding the intersection of innovation and tradition in classical Native music. This research joins the existing discourse that critiques binary oppositions separating Indigenous tradition (as past) and innovation (as present and future). Through interviews, fieldwork, and musical analysis, I illustrate Native values of interconnectedness, relationality, continuity, politics, and soundscapes in the processes of Native composition as well as the resultant works, I explore how these, in turn, may be understood through the application of Indigenous research techniques. In collaboration with a cohort of contemporary musicians, I look primarily at two Navajo composers--Raven Chacon and Juantio Becenti--and examine my own work as a composer, performer, and ethnomusicologist of Kanienkéha descent to explore the following questions: How can the topic of classical Native music best be served by using Indigenous methodologies in fieldwork, research, and representation and What is classical Native Music and is it different from other contemporary classical music styles? Drawing on the teachings of Indigenous dotahs (elders/teachers), the scholarship of ethnomusicologists, and examining oral and written tradition while using language and cosmology as cultural metaphors, I present a variety of possibilities for looking at Indigenous music through Indigenous eyes. Rather than offering a set of conclusions, I offer a set of tools for discussion and reflection: 1) how we might understand a definition of classical Native music; 2) how we are part of a modern movement of artistry; 3) how our creative processes reflect Indigenous sensibilities; 4) how specific composers are contributing to that movement; and 5) how Indigenous language, metaphor and worldview are a powerful and applicable epistemology for research.Item EVANESCENT HAPPINESS: OTTOMAN JEWS ENCOUNTER MODERNITY, THE CASE OF LEA MITRANI AND JOSEPH NIEGO (1863-1923)(2010) Skarlatou, Amalia; Cooperman, Bernard D; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The thesis aims to be a collective biography of Joseph Niego and Lea Mitrani, two Ottoman Jews, whose lives would span a sixty-year period of profound changes for Ottoman Jewry. Born in Edirne, Joseph and Lea were educated in the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Subsequently, they were sent to Paris in order to be trained as teachers and be sent back to help "regenerate" "Oriental" Jews through a Western- style education. After their marriage, Joseph was appointed director of the agricultural school "Mikveh Israel," established by the Alliance in the outskirts of Jaffa, where the family would spend twelve years. Their time in an agricultural school and contact with Zionism and the Jewish pioneers in late nineteenth-century Palestine would define their lives as a married couple and as Jews in the vortex of modernization and nationalisms. While Joseph would thrive professionally, Lea would gradually lose control of her life.