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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Blue Beard's First Wife(2020) Howell, Megan Heather; Fuentes, Gabrielle L; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A man who changes age at random following a failed suicide attempt. An inpatient at an upscale nursing home whose dementia erases her cruelty but not her past. A teenaged boy whose racist brother upends his best friend’s false sense of security. What each of these characters share in common is the women who fall into their lives, seemingly cursory interlopers whose repressed traumas inform the stories in "Blue Beard's First Wife." To survive, each woman must look to the past, investigating their lives and the lives of those around them while steering clear of the dangers the come with being too curious in a racist, misogynistic world.Item Collossus of Rutgers: The Visual and Print Media Legacy of Paul Leroy Robeson(2019) walsh, shane bolles; Williams-Forson, Psyche; Corbin- Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the most celebrated African American figures known worldwide, Paul Leroy Robeson was primarily erased from history books for almost a decade after he began speaking out about injustices stemming from the second Red Scare. Fewer still know of his formative years and early influences. This erasure can only be counteracted with targeted scholarship. As a project of reclamation, this American Studies dissertation joins scholarship in other fields that aim to restore Paul Robeson to his proper place in history with the hope of prompting a new wave of research on the subject. The youth and early career of Robeson is the targeted era (before his matriculation at the University of London in 1934) of this work. The central question around which this dissertation is organized is this: Through a close examination of the role that the skin and masculinity of Paul Robeson played in his early life and career, how can we come to understand the ways that the resulting gaze was imposed on his body, and how did Robeson himself cultivate the gaze of his own public image and cultural representation as a performance icon and “race man,” launching him on his way to becoming an advocate for rights of black people worldwide? To engage this research question, the methodologies of textual critical discourse analysis, Mora Beauchamp- Byrd's exhibition categorization and methodology, and Frederick Douglass's lectures on visual theories are utilized. All of these have directly assisted in the interpolation of the printed and photographic legacy of Robeson. Given the early career focus of this dissertation, archival materials from the following institutions provided the primary sources for this work: the Rutgers University libraries Special Collection and Archives, Temple University's Charles L. Blockson Afro-American collection, and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. With Robeson as an example of a multi-talented black cultural icon, textual discourse analysis demonstrates how to construct specific views of the social world that Paul Robeson inhabited in the early phase of his public life and how his career developments were portrayed in both the Black American and majority print media outlets of the era.Item Integrating Environmental Justice and Social-Ecological Resilience for Successful Adaptation to Climate Change: Lessons from African American Communities on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay(2016) Hesed, Christine Danielle Miller; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research concerns the conceptual and empirical relationship between environmental justice and social-ecological resilience as it relates to climate change vulnerability and adaptation. Two primary questions guided this work. First, what is the level of resilience and adaptive capacity for social-ecological systems that are characterized by environmental injustice in the face of climate change? And second, what is the role of an environmental justice approach in developing adaptation policies that will promote social-ecological resilience? These questions were investigated in three African American communities that are particularly vulnerable to flooding from sea-level rise on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I found that in all three communities, religious faith and the church, rootedness in the landscape, and race relations were highly salient to community experience. The degree to which these common aspects of the communities have imparted adaptive capacity has changed over time. Importantly, a given social-ecological factor does not have the same effect on vulnerability in all communities; however, in all communities political isolation decreases adaptive capacity and increases vulnerability. This political isolation is at least partly due to procedural injustice, which occurs for a number of interrelated reasons. This research further revealed that while all stakeholders (policymakers, environmentalists, and African American community members) generally agree that justice needs to be increased on the Eastern Shore, stakeholder groups disagree about what a justice approach to adaptation would look like. When brought together at a workshop, however, these stakeholders were able to identify numerous challenges and opportunities for increasing justice. Resilience was assessed by the presence of four resilience factors: living with uncertainty, nurturing diversity, combining different types of knowledge, and creating opportunities for self-organization. Overall, these communities seem to have low resilience; however, there is potential for resilience to increase. Finally, I argue that the use of resilience theory for environmental justice communities is limited by the great breadth and depth of knowledge required to evaluate the state of the social-ecological system, the complexities of simultaneously promoting resilience at both the regional and local scale, and the lack of attention to issues of justice.Item African-American Composers for the Concert Saxophone: A Look at Three Prolific Composers(2014) Perez, Brian Nicholas; Votta, Michael; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)African-American composers within the field of classical music have made very profound contributions to the literature. In the field of chamber music, Scott Joplin, William Grant Still, Adolphus Hailstork and other composers illustrious composers have created an established and well-documented body of repertoire for many orchestral wind instruments. The saxophone repertoire, however, has not been developed as fully due to its limited tradition as an orchestral instrument and its prominence in the tradition of jazz and popular music. African-American composers in particular appear to be significantly under-represented within the standard concert saxophone literature. My personal experiences with saxophone repertoire in academic settings, solo recitals, conferences and in surveys of standard repertoire from nationally-recognized saxophone teachers support this assertion. There are many African-American composers who have made substantial contributions to the body of repertoire for the concert saxophone. This dissertation examines the works of three prolific African-American composers for the concert saxophone; Dr. Yusef A. Lateef, Andrew N. White III, and Dr. David N. Baker. All have composed more than five separate works featuring the concert saxophone. This project comprises three recitals, each dedicated to one of the three composers selected for this dissertation. Each recital presented will present their compositions featuring the saxophone as a soloist with various types of accompaniment. The project also includes newly-created piano reductions of Dr. David Baker's works for saxophone and orchestra made collaboratively with Baker and arranger John Leszczynski.