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 Trans Space As Cultural Landscape--Transgender Women of Color in Washington, D.C.(2019) Anthony, A S; Parks, Sheri; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Transgender civil rights and public displays of trans visibility have come to the fore of the American imagination. To date, however, little work has thoroughly examined Black and Latinx trans women’s central role as experts in LGBT community-caregiving practices. As a result, scholarship and popular culture concerned with “the transgender tipping point” (Time May 29, 2014) generally endorse a narrative that characterizes transgender women of color primarily as celebrities, victims of transphobic violence, or historic figures of the LGBT liberation movement, if they are mentioned at all, making their everyday lives marginal or non-existent at a time when their presence in popular culture is exploding. Without an adequate fieldwork model, we undervalue the everyday lives and landscapes of transgender women of color in the United States, ultimately leading to a two-dimensional conceptualization of identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. Trans Space as Cultural Landscape—Transgender Women of Color in Washington, D.C, remedies this gap by creating and applying Bodies in spaces—the trans cultural landscape analysis fieldwork model. The trans model extends the work of Americanist Jeremey Korr (2002) to reimagine the study of trans space, place, and gender transition. It is divided into the following components: detailed site description, aesthetics, language and material culture, and community research. At the heart of Trans Space is an ethnographic study of Casa Ruby, a bilingual social service nonprofit in Washington, D.C. (casaruby.org). The trans model allows me to addresses the queer and trans problematics of my particular site: addiction, prostitution, and homelessness. The model then expands to examine the work of trans celebrities such as Laverne Cox in order to trace the circuitous paths of daily transition and sisterhood. The evolution of the following inquiry guides my commitment to cross-discipline methodologies and community involvement. Space stages the expansive possibilities of gender transition. In extending gender transition narratives to functions that do not apply to space, how do we know a trans space when we see it? And what do these spatial transitions and pop culture representations tell us about an American investment in identity and its tipping points?Item Making English Low: A History of Laureate Poetics, 1399-1616(2018) Maffuccio, Christine; Coletti, Theresa; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation analyzes lowbrow literary forms, tropes, and modes in the writings of three would-be laureates, writers who otherwise sought to align themselves with cultural and political authorities and who themselves aspired to national prominence: Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1367-1426), John Skelton (c. 1460-1529), and Ben Jonson (1572-1637). In so doing, my project proposes a new approach to early English laureateship. Previous studies assume that aspiration English writers fashioned their new mantles exclusively from high learning, refined verse, and the moral virtues of elite poetry. In the writings and self-fashionings that I analyze, however, these would-be laureates employed literary low culture to insert themselves into a prestigious, international lineage; they did so even while creating personas that were uniquely English. Previous studies have also neglected the development of early laureateship and nationalist poetics across the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Examining the ways that cultural cachet—once the sole property of the elite—became accessible to popular audiences, my project accounts for and depends on a long view. My first two chapters analyze writers whose idiosyncrasies have afforded them a marginal position in literary histories. In Chapter 1, I argue that Hoccleve channels Chaucer’s Host, Harry Bailly, in the Male Regle and the Series. Like Harry, Hoccleve draws upon quotidian London experiences to create a uniquely English writerly voice worthy of laureate status. In Chapter 2, I argue that Skelton enshrine the poet’s own fleeting historical experience in the Garlande of Laurell and Phyllyp Sparowe by employing contrasting prosodies to juxtapose the rhythms of tradition with his own demotic meter. I approach Ben Jonson along the path paved by his medieval precursors. In Chapter 3, I argue that in Bartholomew Fair Jonson blends classical comic form with unwieldy city chatter, simultaneously investing the lowbrow with poetic authority and English laureateship with tavern noise. Like Hoccleve and Skelton, Jonson reappears as a product and producer not only of the local literary system to which he was immediately bound, but of a national culture, in no small measure lowbrow, at least two centuries in the makingItem The World Is Old and New Again: Cultural Trauma and September 11, 2001(2011) Muller, Christine; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the emergent cultural aftereffects of September 11, 2001. I consider how popular US narratives from the decade following that day's events evidence an ongoing, pervasive struggle with certain of the hijackings' especially troubling features, manifesting September 11 as a cultural trauma. I distinguish cultural trauma as an intersubjective phenomenon from psychological trauma and its individualized emphasis. I also distinguish my approach from the dominant ways historical, cultural and literary studies have typically conceptualized trauma as a primarily Freudian-theorized, pathological reaction to extreme happenings. Rather, drawing on Janoff-Bulman's shattered assumptions model of psychological trauma, I define cultural trauma as a radical disruption of basic, common, taken-for-granted, culturally-generated and -structured beliefs about what constitutes a community's ordinary life. I focus on how the hijackings' shocking and well-publicized developments shattered assumptions fundamental to mainstream American understandings of daily life. To trace these shattered assumptions, I review ten popular culture texts: three popular press oral history collections - the 2002 September 11: An Oral History, the 2002 Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, and the 2007 Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 - as well as the 2002 Frontline documentary "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero"; the 2003 Tom Junod Esquire article "The Falling Man"; the mid-to-late-2000s television series Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward; the 2008 Christopher Nolan film The Dark Knight; and the 2007 Don DeLillo novel Falling Man. By assessing and comparing these texts' primary thematic concerns, I outline how each narrative, situated in varying media and genres, engages vulnerability in the forms of existential insecurity and the troubling of meaningful and ethical choice, exposing fragmented foundational beliefs in the wake of September 11. However, instead of reconstructing these fragmented pieces into an unequivocal new whole, these texts ambivalently instantiate that day's unresolved cultural fallout, serving to document the still evolving structures of feeling constituting this cultural trauma. Accordingly, this study evidences how popular culture serves as a site for recognizing and negotiating September 11 as a cultural trauma while suggesting how cultural trauma might be recognized and negotiated at other times of stark cultural change.Item The Bridges of Madison County and Iowa: Production, Reception, and Place(2005-05-12) Wahl, Gregory Ralph; Kelly, R. Gordon; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY AND IOWA: PRODUCTION, RECEPTION, AND PLACE Gregory R. Wahl, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: R. Gordon Kelly, Department of American Studies The 1992 Warner Books novel The Bridges of Madison County, the first by Robert James Waller, a University of Northern Iowa Management professor, was a "surprise" success, marketed as literary fiction through a "word-of-mouth" campaign of "handselling" in independent bookstores, which put it on the New York Times bestseller list. Once the love story became a bestseller, the story of its popularity began to appear in mass entertainment media, notably on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" and on the Oprah Winfrey Show. It sold over ten million copies and became the fastest-selling hardcover novel of its era. Bridges' pretension to literariness touched a nerve with New York cultural gatekeeping literary reviewers, who conflated its perceived sub-literary qualities with its Iowa origins, middlebrow readership, and even cultural disease. Readers, however, identified with and participated in the novel's realistic frame narrative, which constructed the story and its setting, Winterset, Iowa, as a text and place where true love was made manifest. Bridges was parodied for its perceived sexism and pretentious language. A movie adaptation was made by Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg, and Bridges-related tourism changed the nature of Winterset's economy and community. What can we learn about American culture from the unexpected, record-setting sales success of The Bridges of Madison County, situated as it was on the boundaries of art and popular culture and of local community and mass media? At each stage of the book's communications circuit--production, sales success, differing receptions by reviewers and readers, and reintegration into the setting of Iowa--the case of The Bridges of Madison County illustrates that cultural boundaries are contested and maintained in part by invoking place and region, that the power of mass media depends on the participation of individuals and local community, and that local communities will make their own power in the face of, and out of, the power of mass media.Item "HUNGRY TO SEE OURSELVES REFLECTED": IDENTITY, REPRESENTATION AND BLACK FEMALE SPECTATORSHIP(2004-10-12) George, Eva Marie; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While much has been written about the portrayals of Black women in popular culture, scholars have observed that little attention is paid to the experiences of Black women as cultural consumers. This analysis of Black female spectatorship examines theories related to this experience and the various relationships individuals may have with media. This study sheds light on the ways Black women's spectatorship is shaped by gender, race, class and sexual orientation. Through qualitative methods, we hear the voices of Black women in the Washington, D.C. area reflecting on various forms of popular culture, particularly film. Some of the media women responded to in this study include Waiting to Exhale, The Best Man, Jungle Fever, among others. Responses from a focus group, on-on-one interviews and questionnaires provide evidence of the ways in which Black women engage in multiple relationships with images they see in the media. Ultimately, many of the African American women in this study disregard negative images of Black women and purposely choose types of media that sustain their sense of self and help them maintain a positive identity.Item Songs of My Life: Five Approaches to Choreographic Explorations(2004-05-11) Singh, Daniel Phoenix; Rosen, Meriam; ArtThis written project explores five approaches to the dance performance event "Songs of My Life." The five approaches are based on developing the practical process, deriving from personal experiences, engaging women's perspectives, reorienting spectators and defining the role of art. This written work engages the performance event from a Women's Studies, Critical Studies and Cultural Studies perspective. The project works on deriving theory from the practice of dance and art, as well as using the existing theoretical models as a lens, to gain new perspectives on the choreographic process.