Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
84 results
Search Results
Item Octavia's Brood: Riding the Ox Home(2016) Bowden Abadoo, Meghan Kamiche; Phillips, Miriam; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home was an evening-length dance concert performed October 15 and 16, 2015, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Inspired by the prophetic envisioning of Harriet Tubman and Octavia Butler, it explores race, otherness, ownership and story-telling from the perspective of Black women’s dancing bodies and histories. Borrowing its title from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, it utilizes visionary story-telling, where science fiction provides a foundation for imagining socially just worlds inhabited by richly diverse protagonists. This paper is a written account of the research by which I composed this immersive dance event, leaping back and forth through time, landing between antebellum Maryland of the mid-1800s and an unknown place at an unknown date of a foreseen future.Item Cosmopolitanism and National Identity: English-Language Poetry, 1820-1920(2015) Hoffmann, Natalie Phillips; Rudy, Jason R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through readings of English-language poems produced in Britain, Italy, India, and South Africa, my dissertation argues that poetry functions as an especially powerful tool for resisting and reshaping nineteenth-century nationalist and imperialist discourses. In the project, I examine the various poetic strategies--particularly the use of affect to promote cross-cultural sympathy and the blending of Eastern and Western forms--that transnational, English-language poets used to interrogate dominant understandings of nationality. Poets studied include Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Toru Dutt, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sarojini Naidu, and Rudyard Kipling. I contend that a school of English-language poets--men and women from diverse backgrounds working in Europe and the colonies--together played a special role in nineteenth-century culture by presenting to their global readership a cosmopolitan alternative to traditional nationalist narratives. Key to English-language poets' ability to offer such a radical reimagining of nationality was their ability to subvert, both through form and content, the imagined divisions among people upon which nationalist narratives rely. I understand environments rife with nationalist fervor--the Risorgimento period in Italy, the ascendency of Indian nationalism, and the Boer War years in South Africa--as locations of parallel experience for these poets. I read their work as foregrounding in important ways the increasingly global nature of the lived experiences and intellectual projects of nineteenth-century elites in both Eastern and Western cultures. By structuring the dissertation as a comparative reading of poetic challenges to dominant nationalist narratives occurring simultaneously in Europe and the colonies, my work participates in a scholarly conversation that reimagines as multidirectional the forces that shaped Indo-Anglian and other colonial relationships. My dissertation joins ongoing efforts to recuperate the voices of English-language poets in India, to better attend to the oft-marginalized political poetry of canonical British poets, and to pay equitable critical attention to the contributions of women poets. It also reinforces recent critical challenges to nationalist canonization practices by imagining a multinational school of poets that together articulate a more cosmopolitan understanding of national identity. The project aims to be of interest to scholars working in poetry, nineteenth-century Anglophone literature, postcolonial literature, and women's studies.Item Beyond the Beauty Salon: Sport, Women of Color and Their Hair(2011) Collins, Jennifer Elizabeth; Schultz, Jaime; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research concerning women of color in sport tends to center around several topics: barriers to participation, racial stereotyping, symbolic annihilation, and the intersecting axes of power that influence their involvement and representation. Furthermore, while there exists a rich body of literature that hair has inspired in black feminist scholarship, these works have overlooked the experiences of black female athletes. In this project I seek to bridge these two bodies of knowledge through focus groups and personal interviews with black female collegiate athletes. Specifically, I examine three issues related to hair in the context of black women's athletic experiences: 1) as a particular racialized, gendered, and sexualized expression of self; 2) as a signifier of "other" in sport and society; and 3) as a possible cultural barrier to specific athletic endeavors. By bridging the disconnect between the two fields, I will address the ways that hair is an embodied cultural form influencing the physical culture of women of color.Item SANNI KADDU : A LA REDECOUVERTE DU DISCOURS FEMINISTE AU SENEGAL(2011) Diop-Hashim, Aissatou N/A; Orlando, Valerie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Senegalese feminism of today has started a very long an arduous debate. Some critics are theorizing that there is no feminist theory in Senegal. Others will go even further, stating that given the absence of a feminist theory, it would be difficult to speak of true feminism in Senegal. However, a fairly thorough search brings us to the following conclusion: Senegalese feminism is a hybrid. It is between the mainly Nigerian, African feminism and French or Western feminism of the 1970s. In the field of literature it is akin to post-colonialism. Aminata Ndiaye, a young Senegalese writer said in an interview with the women's journal Amina that in terms of feminism, Senegal is still fifty years behind France. This is quite shocking, but completely correct. In terms of progress and theories, Senegal is still under the French influence. In addition, the lack of more recent theories to which many Senegalese feminists can identify with causes them still to refer to Simone de Beauvoir. This dissertation intends to take a look at these findings; it also intends to shed a light on Senegalese traditionalist practices while going to the rediscovery of feminism in Senegal. During our research, we have found it necessary to rename Senegalese feminism that we named famillisme in so far as it invites both men and women to remedy a situation which is far from ennobling women. It is therefore an invitation to best love Senegalese women in order to enhance unity and family welfare. We have identified two groups of feminists in Senegal. The first group, mainly composed of illiterate people, is concerned with the revolutionary aspect, i.e. protest campaigns, propaganda and awareness campaigns. They were designed to "wake up" their sisters to come out of their torpor. Their movement is reminiscent of the French Revolution. The second group, which is the main focus of the second part of this study, is the heart of famillisme. It consists of the intellectual elite and their take on the theoretical aspects of feminism and the dissemination of information through writing. This group consists both of exiles like writer Ken Bugul who will be the subject of the first part of this thesis. Other writers like Aminata Sow Fall remained in Senegal. They deplore and denounce the injustices through their writings. Ken Bugul, because of her status as an exiled writer, seems less worried about censorship of the Senegalese society which requires a measure of restraint on the part of women. She uses madness as a feminist weapon to combat patriarchal traditionalism. Her speech is full of indecent assaults and devoid of the euphemisms that are found in the writings of Aminata Sow Fall which advocate a fair sharing of roles and tasks between men and women for an improved universal status of women. A quite singular aspect which appears to be unique to the famillisme is the active involvement of feminist men in the liberation of women from patriarchal domination. Sembène Ousmane, who is rather known as the father of African Cinema is the feminist par excellence. His movie Moolaadé appears to be a nod to the concept of male domination of Bourdieu but with women in power. In giving us an overview of female domination in his last film Moolaadé whose analysis will close this dissertation, Sembène takes us to night school through his cinema. He shows one of the most disturbing of cultural and Islamic traditions in Senegal: female genital mutilation. Excision is the main theme which highlights the takeover of an extraordinary woman against a domineering patriarchal traditionalist society. Our study will follow these three pioneers of the famillisme or feminist discourse and their feminist roles in Senegal where women - traditionally standing in a circle as spectators - patiently await that the group of men sitting under the palaver tree enables them to "throw their voice/sanni kaddu" once the debate has ended.++++++ Le féminisme sénégalais de nos jours a fait couler beaucoup d'encre. Certains critiques théorisent qu'il n'y a pas de théorie féministe au Sénégal. D'autres iront plus loin, déclarant qu'étant donnée l'absence d'une théorie féministe, il serait difficile de parler de vrai féminisme au Sénégal. Cependant, une recherche assez poussée nous amène à la conclusion suivante: le féminisme sénégalais est hybride. Il se trouve à cheval entre le féminisme africain, principalement nigérian, et le féminisme français ou occidental des années 1970. Sur le plan littéraire il s'apparente au postcolonialisme. Aminata Ndiaye, une jeune écrivaine sénégalaise constate dans une interview avec le journal féminin Amina qu'en matière de féminisme, le Sénégal est toujours cinquante ans derrière la France. Cette remarque est assez choquante, mais tout à fait correcte. Le wagon du Sénégal est toujours à la remorque de la locomotive française. En plus, le manque de théories plus récentes auxquelles elles peuvent s'identifier fait que beaucoup de féministes sénégalaises font toujours référence à Simone de Beauvoir. Cette thèse se donne comme but de jeter le regarder sur ces constats, d'y jeter la lumière tout en allant à la redécouverte du féminisme au Sénégal. Au cours de nos recherches, nous avons trouvé nécessaire de rebaptiser le féminisme sénégalais que nous avons nommé famillisme dans la mesure où il invite aussi bien les hommes que les femmes à remédier une situation qui est loin d'ennoblir la femme et de la mieux aimer afin de parfaire l'unité et le bien-être familial. Nous avons identifié deux groupes de féministes au Sénégal: les analphabètes qui s'occupent de l'aspect révolutionnaire, c'est-à-dire les campagnes de protestation, les propagandes et les campagnes de sensibilisations. Elles ont pour but de « réveiller » leurs soeurs afin de les sortir de leur torpeur. Elles ne manquent de nous rappeler les françaises de la Révolution. Le deuxième groupe auquel s'intéresse cette présente étude constitue le coeur du famillisme. Il est constitué de l'élite, les intellectuelles qui s'occupent de l'aspect théorique et de la dénonciation à travers l'écriture. Ce groupe est constitué à la fois d'expatriées comme l'écrivaine Ken Bugul qui sera l'objet de la première partie de cette thèse, d'écrivaines restées au Sénégal qui, comme Aminata Sow Fall, subissent les injustices qu'elles constatent, déplorent et dénoncent grâce à leur plume. Ken Bugul, du fait de sa situation d'exilée, semble moins se préoccuper de la censure de la société sénégalaise qui exige une certaine retenue de la part des femmes. Elle utilise la folie comme arme féministe de lutte contre le traditionalisme patriarcal. Son discours est dépourvu de la pudeur que l'on retrouve chez l'écrivaine du terroir Aminata Sow Fall qui suggère un partage équitable des rôles et des tâches et une amélioration du statut universel de la femme. Un aspect assez singulier qui semble être propre au famillisme est la participation active des hommes féministes à la libération des femmes du joug patriarcal. Sembène Ousmane, qui est plutôt connu comme le père du cinéma africain est le féministe par excellence. Il semble faire un clin d'oeil à La domination masculine de Bourdieu en nous donnant un aperçu de la domination féminine dans son dernier film Moolaadé dont l'analyse clôturera cette thèse. Sembène nous amène à l'école du soir qu'est le cinéma pour nous montrer une des tares de la tradition culturelle et islamique au Sénégal : les mutilations génitales. L'excision en est le thème principal qui met en exergue la prise de pouvoir d'une femme extraordinaire contre une société traditionaliste patriarcale dominatrice. Notre étude suivra ces trois pionniers du famillisme ou discours féministe et leurs oeuvres à la recherche du féminisme au Sénégal où les femmes --traditionnellement debout en cercle comme des spectatrices-- attendent patiemment que le groupe des hommes assis sous l'arbre à palabres leur permette de « jeter leur voix/sanni kaddu» une fois le débat terminé.Item Reading Lolita in Tehran: An Opera Based on the Book by Azar Nafisi(2011) Greene, Elisabeth Mehl; Wilson, Mark; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Reading Lolita in Tehran brings Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir to the stage as a chamber opera, with a cast of eight singers, accompanied by flute, saxophone, piano, and cello. The libretto, co-written with Iranian-American poet Mitra Motlagh, retells Nafisi's experiences teaching Western literature after the Iranian Revolution, first in the classroom, and then in secret to a group of young women students. By reflecting the challenges of her reading group through the prism of Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen, Nafisi both paints a picture of the grim realities of Revolutionary Iran and shows how literature provides universal insights into the human condition. Through their experiences of love and loss, belonging and exile, Nafisi and her students find solace in literature; and through imagination the women create spaces denied to them by circumstances. The opera score draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including both the popular and folk music traditions of Iran, as well as music of the literature of Reading Lolita in Tehran, from Jane Austen to The Great Gatsby. Like the blending of past and present literary work in the novel, the music melds sounds from diverse geography and history into the contemporary opera form. The opera focuses on the six students in particular as representatives of the countless kaleidoscope stories of Iranian women seeking freedom. Their songs remind us that the simple liberties of reading and thought, education and identity, are precious and worth fighting for. Though the events take place in Tehran, the truths transcend all boundaries of language and culture.Item First Baby, First Year: Gratitude and Emotional Approach Coping as Predictors of Adjustment and Life Satisfaction during the Transition to Motherhood(2011) Piontkowski, Sarah; Hoffman, Mary Ann; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Becoming a mother is one of the most common major life transitions, with approximately 82% of the population of women in the United States having given birth by the age of 45. Although becoming a mother is generally thought of as a positive experience, the transition to parenthood can also present many challenges. This study examined the postpartum transition of 152 first-time mothers. Utilizing the stress and coping model, this study explored the role of gratitude and emotional approach coping on postpartum distress, postpartum adjustment, and life satisfaction. Data were collected using an online survey, and correlations, regression analyses, and mediation analyses were run. The findings revealed that women who reported higher levels of both gratitude and emotional approach coping also reported better postpartum adjustment, greater life satisfaction, and less postpartum distress. The health of both the mother and the baby also predicted better postpartum outcomes for mothers.Item SLAVE SHIPS, SHAMROCKS, AND SHACKLES: TRANSATLANTIC CONNECTIONS IN BLACK AMERICAN AND NORTHERN IRISH WOMEN'S REVOLUTIONARY AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL WRITING, 1960S-1990S(2010) Washburn, Amy Leigh; Rosenfelt, Deborah S.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores revolutionary women's contributions to the anti-colonial civil rights movements of the United States and Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. I connect the work of Black American and Northern Irish revolutionary women leaders/writers involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Black Panther Party (BPP), Black Liberation Army (BLA), the Republic for New Afrika (RNA), the Soledad Brothers' Defense Committee, the Communist Party-USA (Che Lumumba Club), the Jericho Movement, People's Democracy (PD), the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the National H-Block/ Armagh Committee, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), Women Against Imperialism (WAI), and/or Sinn Féin (SF), among others by examining their leadership roles, individual voices, and cultural productions. This project analyses political communiqués/ petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs of revolutionary Black American and Northern Irish women, all of whom were targeted, arrested, and imprisoned for their political activities. I highlight the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key leaders/writers: Angela Y. Davis and Bernadette Devlin McAliskey; Assata Shakur and Margaretta D'Arcy; Ericka Huggins and Roseleen Walsh; Afeni Shakur-Davis, Joan Bird, Safiya Bukhari, and Martina Anderson, Ella O'Dwyer, and Mairéad Farrell. These women address similar themes in their work either through direct communication (i.e., political communiqués and personal correspondence) and/or indirect expression (i.e., news coverage and auto/biographical responses to it). I document moments of transatlantic solidarity among them. This project also draws on interviews with selected writers for supplemental data in interpreting their personal histories and writings. This dissertation is concerned with tracing and analyzing the politics and prose/ poetry of Black American and Northern Irish women. Their cultural expressions concern revolutionary struggle. I use their work as a source of data and an object of analysis. My work establishes links between several areas: nation and anti-colonialism, race and anti-racism, gender and feminism, literature and genre, content and analysis, and theory and praxis.Item LES VOIX DU VOLCAN : L'ECRITURE DU MAL-ETRE DANS LE ROMAN FEMININ DE L'ILE DE LA REUNION(2010) Rebourcet, Severine Marie-Francoise; Orlando, Valerie K.; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In my dissertation I examine how Creole women in the Reunion Island confront problems of racial and social oppression in their novels from the 1970s to the 1990s. I focus on their particular preoccupations with the haunting persistence of colonial racism in the lives of Creole individuals. Their autobiographical accounts represent a sample of Reunionese postcolonial literature and the range of issues their novels address also reflects the tragic history of the island. In their testimonies, the authors especially stress the struggle against cultural censorship, self-denial, racial discriminations and, above all, against the destructuration of Creole identity. Even though I concentrate my study on three novels, Anne Cheynet's Les Muselés (1977) Rose-May Nicole's Laetitia (1986), and Monique Boyer's Métisse (1992), I draw parallels with other women writers' works from the French Caribbean, Mauritius and the United States. Thus I demonstrate that this inferiority feeling looms over any societies that suffered the cruelties of slavery and injustices of colonialism as the past suffering and traumas are passed from generations on.Item Self-compassion, hope, and well-being of women experiencing primary and secondary infertility: An application of the biopsychosocial model(2009) Raque-Bogdan, Trisha Lynn; Hoffman, Mary Ann; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Infertility is experienced by 10% of couples in the United States. This study examined the well-being of 119 women experiencing primary infertility and 53 women experiencing secondary infertility. Utilizing the biopsychosocial model, this study explored the biological variable of infertility type; the psychological variables of self-compassion, hope, subjective well-being, and fertility-related stress; and the social variable of online support group use. Data were collected using an online survey and correlations and regression analyses were run to assess for relationships between the variables of interest and for moderation and mediation. No significant differences were found in the reported levels of subjective well-being or fertility-related stress in the two groups of women. Yet the type of infertility moderated the relationship between hope and fertility-related stress and for women with primary infertility, self-compassion mediated the relationship between hope and positive affect and negative affect.Item Black South African Women Writers: Narrating the Self, Narrating the Nation(2010) Boswell, Barbara; Bolles, Lynn; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the ways in which Black women writers construct the South African nation in their fiction. Based on analyses of four novels, Miriam Tlali's Muriel at Metropolitan (1979), Lauretta Ngcobo's And They Didn't Die (1989), Zoë Wicomb's David's Story (2000), and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (1998), it examines how those most disenfranchised by the policy of apartheid in South Africa articulated, configure and re-imagine the nation through their writing. It also investigates how these women writers construct themselves as writing subjects in a society that has historically denied them creative and personal agency. I view Black women's writing as a form of activism and resistance to apartheid, and situate the production of their novels within the larger political context of twentieth century South Africa. The dissertation thus focuses on the ways in which the apartheid doctrine affected Black women's lives politically and as producers of writing. Drawing theoretically on Mamphele Ramphela's conceptualizations of space, Carole Boyce Davies' formulation of Black women writers as "migratory" subjects, and life course theory, I analyze life history interviews with four writers in an attempt to map the ways they transcended their "received" identities as laborers and reproducers of labor for the apartheid nation, to become authors of their own lives and works. I expand traditional feminist definitions of agency, arguing that, for these women, writing became an act that was cumulatively agentic, instilling in them increased personal agency. This outcome was the opposite of the apartheid's state intended goal of oppressing and silencing these writers. I further argue that in writing, the authors were engaged in creative re-visioning - a subject's ability to re-envision or reimagine what is possible for her to achieve within her lifetime. The dissertation then goes on to examine four novels produced by Tlali, Ngcobo, Magona, and Wicomb, emphasizing the ways in which these texts undermine unitary, masculinist forms of nationalisms, be these apartheid or emerging African nationalisms. I conclude by proposing a Black South African feminist literary criticism as a means for producing literary texts about Black women and as a methodology for interpreting such texts.