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 Performance of Remastery in Theatre and Media(2023) Miller, Alexander Williams; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within the field of mediatized performance, there are many terms that rely upon the “re-” prefix. Terms like remediation and remix have been utilized for the last two decades in discussions of how digital media has affected our perceptions of live performance. This dissertation analyzes the potential of a third “re-:” remastering. Remastering refers to the act of “touching up” older mediums, mostly vinyl discs and reels of film, digitizing the media they contain while improving the overall quality of sounds and/or images. With this sort of digital augmentation affecting the audience reception of media, the question emerges: how can we think of the remastering process as performative?This project centers on the notion that performance studies provide an excellent template to begin to answer the questions that arise surrounding remastering. It explores technical acts of remastering through the lens of performance and performativity to develop a working theory of remastery. This theory draws upon and expands previous conversations surrounding both digital media and performance. Starting with a discussion of the technical requirements that go into remastering in general, I develop a working understanding and theory of remastery. This theory centers remastery as a performative action that can shed light on the power dynamics that underpin our cultural interest in obsolescence, nostalgia, and technology. In discussing this theory of remastery, four case studies of remastered media are analyzed, each providing a different facet of my theory. The first is The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: a remastered collection of work from a defunct inter-war recording company that produced a wide variety of African American Artists and performers. The second is the various remastered versions of Star Wars and their effect on the prospects of authenticity and alteration within remastering. The third is Warcraft III: Reforged, a remastered videogame from 2020 that was met with critical and commercial failure. The fourth is Elements of Oz by The Builders Association, a live production of multimedia theatre that demonstrates the usefulness of remastery as a theoretical concept to bridge the gap between performance and technology.Item Women in White: Performing White Femininity from 1865-Present(2021) Walker, Jonelle; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how white woman character tropes on stage, page, and screen are both haunted by histories of post-Civil War racial terror and themselves haunt white women’s everyday embodiment. This spectral framework is undergirded by a less traditionally academic approach: a self-reflexive interrogation of a compulsion to endangerment, peril, fear, and self-destruction the author observes in representations of white women and in herself. The study of white femininity represented in theatre, literature, film, and social media is narrowed to focus on this predilection for danger and its political implications for racialized-gender embodiment. The dissertation attributes this phenomenon to a dialectic central to white femininity in an Anglophone context: being in/the danger, that is simultaneously being victim and instigator of violence, tragedy, and destruction. The project pursues being in/the danger within the context of theatre and performance studies by asking: How has the white woman been made and continuously remade through staging white woman character tropes? Which gestures, affects, and self-fashionings from these tropes haunt everyday white womanhood? Each chapter examines one trope and its implications in detail, including the damsel in distress, the girl crime victim, the suicidal authoress, the anorexic waif, among others. The dissertation examines how characterizations of melancholy, endangerment, and frailty in these characters shaped common and highly racialized understandings of white womanhood during the period studied. To illustrate this broad cultural phenomenon, the dissertation studies an appropriately broad set of objects including plays; films; literature; artist biographies; and social media communities.Item Agents and Actors Alike: On the Hidden Theatre of Espionage(2021) Stevens, Fraser Morris; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This PhD dissertation analyzes espionage as a form of theatre and performance. Using archival documents, comparative analysis of theatre and espionage case-studies, and the application of critical theory, espionage is revealed to be a theatrical endeavor. It is a paramount example of a phenomenon which exists at the intersection of where art and life are blurred. One that gives urgency to an understanding of how theatre may be viewed outside of its traditional framing. This study of espionage is an undertaking that delves into a history of clandestine performances ranging from Mata Hari, James O’Keefe, Virginia Hall, Kim Philby, Maria Butina, and even theatre practitioner Augusto Boal. The project explores how espionage: is defined by a dialectic of success and failure, has mirrored actor training in the preparing of agents, is reliant on the archive for its execution, is governed by a desire to control, and can be viewed as a form of theatre.Item BY THE AUTHORITY OF DREAMS: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE IN KICHWA MUSKUY NARRATIVES(2020) Carney, Lisa Warren; Harrison, Regina L.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For Kichwa-speaking Runa of Ecuador’s tropical forest region, narratives about muskuy experiences—dreams and visions—are revered sources of knowledge. Muskuy is a real (non-fantasy) experience in which humans communicate with each other and non-human persons that inhabit their environment, acquiring information and powers in the process. Through analysis of video recordings of muskuy narratives told by Kichwa speakers (2014-2016), this dissertation explores how verbal artistry, performance technique, and emotional resonance are central to knowledge acquisition and transmission. Specifically, narratives are deemed truthful and authoritative when they evoke empathy and memory through imagery, gesture, and vocal dynamics. Whereas ethnography and psychoanalysis have been the prevalent models for scholarship of indigenous dream practices, this is among the first scholarly work to use diverse methods of ethnopoetic analysis such as close reading, performance studies (Bauman, Hymes), linguistic analysis (Mannheim, Nuckolls), and ethnographic contextualization (Galli, Uzendoski) to elucidate the aesthetics of Kichwa muskuy narratives. Chapter 1 examines muskuy as a source of gender-specific knowledge and authority conveyed in the narrative of a master ceramicist woman’s dream interaction with a Clay Master Spirit. Narrative skill is one manifestation of mature womanhood or manhood that is developed partially through muskuy. Through artful storytelling, a narrator demonstrates her feminine strength. Chapter 2 elucidates the central role of dialogue in articulating authority and credibility. In a narrative of a boy’s transformation into an anaconda, implication and allusion induce dialogic resonances (Bakhtin), while quotation and perspective-marking with “evidential” enclitics animate authoritative voices within the narrative. Additionally, interlocutors substantiate narrative information through commentary and story contributions. Chapter 3 compares a traditional muskuy narrative from the community of Sarayaku, Ecuador, to the same story transformed for digital media platforms that in turn give it the force of prophecy in activist contexts. Thus, strategic and creative modifications allow muskuy narratives to remain an authoritative source of knowledge for Runa as they are recontextualized for non-indigenous audiences. The truth and authority of muskuy narratives emerge from artistry that engages listeners’ imagination, memory and emotion. Affecting and aesthetically complex, these stories are an ancestral form that remains salient for Runa today.Item OF MUSES AND MONSTROSITIES: ENGLISH TRAVESTIE PERFORMANCES OF THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY(2018) Ginder, Brittany; Kim Lee, Esther; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation serves as an introduction to the performance genre of travestie. Unlike the popular breeches form in which an actress plays a female character who crossdresses as a man for a short duration of time but returns to her skirts by the end of a play, travestie performance is defined as an actress performing a male character on a public stage in male disguise for the entirety of a production. In this dissertation, I showcase how travestie questions the complex eighteenth-century English conceptions of normative gender roles, gender identity, and gender representation through performances of public undress that may have been the precursor to the modern burlesque genre. Through examining the case studies of Miss Margaret “Peg” Woffington, Mrs. Charlotte Charke née Cibber, and Mrs. Dorothy “Dora” Jordan, this dissertation analyzes the travestie genre through its connections to comedy, mythmaking, iconography, and the modern burlesque movement. I have chosen to utilize the spelling of travestie over the Italian and contemporary English spellings (travesti and travesty, respectfully) in accordance with the accepted spellings of the term within the eighteenth-century London theatrical landscape. I assert within this dissertation that the actresses who performed travestie purposefully chose this genre through their own theatrical awareness and business savvy. Emphasizing transhistorical perspectives and historiographical intervention, this dissertation reassesses and reinterprets contemporary views of these travestie actresses, using autobiography, biography, and narrative techniques to allow the long-gone voices of these actresses to speak for themselves. Muses for various artists and poets, the successful travestie actress lived within the liminal space between the fluidity of gender. Within their travestie performances, these actresses housed within their own bodies monstrous contradictions of gender that are explored in this dissertation through the interdisciplinary lenses of theatre historiography and gender studies.Item City of Grace: Power, Performance, and Bodies in Colonial South Carolina(2014) Shifflett, Matthew; Nathans, Heather S.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Colonial Charles Town, South Carolina, was widely reputed to be one of the most refined and genteel cities in the early British Empire. As its planters and merchants grew rich from the overseas rice trade, they sought to embody their new elite status by learning the courtly styles of European social dancing, using dances such as the minuet to cultivate a sense of physical "grace." This sense of grace allowed them to construct cosmopolitan identities and differentiate a social order that consolidated their power over the colony. Meanwhile, other social factions, such as the colony's large slave majority and the emerging class of middling tradesmen, sought their own share in controlling the vocabulary through which bodies might mean. "City of Grace: Power, Performance, and Bodies in Colonial South Carolina" puts colonial Charles Town's "bodies" into conversation in order to highlight how bodily behaviors such as dancing, posture, and comportment could organize power relations in an eighteenth-century British colony. This dissertation considers in turn the part that four groups played in the conflict over the values assigned to Charles Town's bodies: the wealthy elites who sought to use "grace" as a means to proclaim and ensure their status, the dancing masters who sought to capitalize on the elites' need for training, the African slaves whose syncretized performances of their own ethnically-specific dances troubled elite ideals of a graceful "white" body, and the emerging cohort of middling tradespeople and evangelical believers who critiqued the pretensions of elite manners. By using sources such as dancing manuals, paintings, and private letters, I put the colonial body back "on its feet," in order to understand the kinesthetic qualities of movement itself as a site for creating and transmitting meaning. Within this framework, I suggest that genteel grace was a strategy by which eighteenth-century elites sought to perform class status without betraying the artificiality of the performance.