College of Arts & Humanities

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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A BAROMETER OF SCIENTIFIC CULTURE: THE DEBATED ROLE OF AMERICAN SCIENCE AT THE 1850’S SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
(2023) Buser, Allison; Woods, Colleen; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
During the initial decade of the Smithsonian Institution’s existence, its first secretary, Joseph Henry, sought to establish an institution for the advancement of science that defied popular understandings of scientific work in the United States. From the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, American science was infused with republican ideology and was widely expected to prioritize practical results that would directly benefit society at large. At the Smithsonian, Henry sought to establish a boundary between professional, theoretical science, conducted and distributed more selectively among experts, and wider public influence and demand for utilitarian scientific work. Examination of discourse in popular publications reveals that Henry’s plan created an ongoing public debate in the 1850s regarding the Smithsonian’s legitimate scientific mission. This included criticism of the Smithsonian publications program’s inaccessibility and lack of utility to the public as well as many alternative proposals for how the institution might be of better scientific use to Americans. Such expectations that Smithsonian research and resources would serve the general American population were also expressed throughout the correspondence of the Smithsonian Meteorology Project—the Institution’s first major scientific research initiative. Although Henry sought to create a boundary between theInstitution’s work and the public, the utilitarian demands of many of the project’s volunteer observers ensured that the practical goals of the public remained intertwined with Henry’s own goals to promote theoretical science in the development of the Smithsonian. The influential work of this extended scientific community was often made possible through the contributions of additional members of households. Close reading of the meteorological project correspondence reveals an extensive, although often officially unacknowledged, contribution from women and other individuals whose labor was often more fixed to the household. While the public volunteers of the project shaped the trajectory of the Smithsonian, the devalued labor of peripheral contributors to the Institution’s large-scale data work set important precedent for professional scientific frameworks at the end of the century. Overall, the relationship between the early Smithsonian and the public in the 1850s demonstrates that the process of establishing borders defining a professional/amateur dichotomy in American science was uneven. The Institution contended with republican expectations of the scientific public and its projects continued to rely upon contributors without formal or elite credentials who in turn demanded accessible and practical research and shaped scientific institutions. Despite Joseph Henry's contribution to the professionalization and specialization of science, the boundaries of science and who could participate in scientific research remained fluid through the mid-nineteenth century.
Pink Survival Porn and its Malcontents: Visual Breast Cancer Narratives in Contemporary American Media
(2020) Flanigan, Lauren Nicole; Walter, Christina; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The biggest problem with American depictions of breast cancer survivors in contemporary media is that they’re too pink, i.e. they represent the cheerful image of a white, heteronormative, cis-gendered woman of upper-to-middle-class means who easily overcomes her disease. Such patient depictions in photographic portraits, graphic novels, and television (ad campaigns or fictional episodes) suggest that only women who adhere to white feminine gender codes and sexual aesthetics can achieve survival. Meanwhile, BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and poor patients disproportionately die from breast cancer due to inaccessible or unequal care related to their lack of media representation as bodies that matter. Their truths are glossed over in the fantasy of what I call survival porn, which coopts and genericizes individual cancer experiences into a pink consumer kumbaya that benefits corporations rather than their disease-ridden constituents. This dissertation therefore examines the historical origins of pink ribbon culture, feminist health movements, and their visual entanglement with optimistic, white media metanarratives to determine why and how certain “survivors” become indoctrinated into sheroic narratives of overcoming the disease while “others” are written out of the picture altogether. Successful survivors are shown self-fashioning their personas in accordance with white, heteronormative standards of femininity judged appropriated by patriarchal medicine and cosmetic magnates. Counternarratives focusing on gender-bending these disease expectations, however, begin to chip away at the veneer of aesthetic survival, rescripting illness identities to be more inclusive of those on the fringes, for example: men, lesbians, and women of color; individuals whose inclusion within survival narratives help uncover causal determinants of breast cancer, like environmental toxins. My analysis of these personal, more plural narratives create space in the dominant, pink visual discourse for non-white and gender-fluid folx who likewise deserve to live a considered life, as defined by Audre Lorde in her Cancer Journals. Whether living with or meeting their ends from breast cancer, my academic inquiry into survival ultimately calls for an ethic of pragmatic optimism and authentic corporeal representation to allow patients with various diseases and disabilities, regardless of age, class, gender, race, or sexual orientation, to ensure greater health equity and quality of care in the United States.
RACE, GENDER, AND CLOSURE IN LATE VICTORIAN FICTION
(2020) Butler, Virginia Lynn; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
While the study of closure in Victorian fiction has been marked by astute interventions in gender theory, these insights often fail to take an intersectional approach, particularly when it comes to the racial dynamics of the expanding British Empire. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction studies how ethnicity, foreignness, and race complicate our preconceived notions of gendered closure that often posit the narrative options for women as a moralistic system that rewards with marriage or punishes with death. With the expansion of the Empire, the Victorian Novel expanded its ability to depict foreign space; however, our understanding of gendered closure has not taken a sufficient correlative leap to include women of color or ethnic bodies that exist outside of the purview of the British domestic sphere. By analyzing the closural ends for English characters in foreign space, the conclusions of hybrid characters and hybridized space, and the fates of characters and spaces subject to imperial control, this project aims to further develop our understanding of narrative closure for Victorian fiction, ultimately demonstrating the limitations of the marriage/death binary for female characters. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction shows the rhetorical violence of being forgotten within the text yet reveals the ways in which these lapses express how the line between Victorian and Modernist genre expectations blur, ultimately demonstrating the ideological instabilities of what we perceive as Victorian narrative mainstays of closure themselves.
LIBERTY, GENTILITY, AND DANGEROUS LIAISONS: FRANCOPHILIA IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC, 1775-1800
(2020) Mahoney, Nicole; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation investigates the various and occasionally competing streams of French culture generated in several different arenas – print culture, polite society, marriage, and gender performance – in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. My work makes the case that Francophilia was both consequential to early American culture and a continuing source of gentry power in the post-revolution years of the United States. Analysis of American architectural spaces, decorative arts, literature, and cultural landscapes reveals that aristocratic urban Americans fashioned and displayed ideologies, from the personal to the political, by way of the pageantry of French gentility. From Boston to New York to Philadelphia, affluent Americans used the performance and spectacle of French luxury to enhance their cultural prestige and political authority at home. Despite contradictions and ambiguities in Franco-American relations, Francophilia remained a powerful way for elites, especially women, to assert aesthetic propriety and cosmopolitanism in the 1780s and 1790s. These early Americans, seeking ways to present themselves as genteel, erudite, and worldly, saw copying French culture and performing it as a way to make themselves—and sometimes their new nation—appear culturally sophisticated. My dissertation therefore challenges scholarship that judges Anglicization and Anglo culture by its capacity to create uniquely American sensibilities and identities. In particular, French-language periodicals, salons, sociability, aristocratic émigrés, and libertine philosophies in the United States highlight how Americans in the highest echelons of society reproduced, used, and consumed French gentility to express cultural refinement and perform cosmopolitan identities, recasting themselves as more than provincial former British subjects. French proclivities and Francophilia could, therefore, be mobilized by patrician Americans as another form of self-fashioning. Even as news of the increasing violence of the French Revolution reached the United States and the posture of American political allegiances shifted in relation to France, the cultural capital of French elegance did not fade in the American imagination.
“A Beautiful Mind: Faces, Beauty, and the Brain in the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1780-1870”
(2018) Walker, Rachel; Lyons, Clare A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In the years surrounding the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, Americans began critiquing slavery and arguing for women’s intellectual equality. Yet by the early decades of the nineteenth century, white male scientists increasingly described the minds and bodies of white men as innately and unalterably superior to those of white women and African Americans. How did early Americans reconcile this Enlightenment and Revolutionary commitment to universal human equality with the very real persistence of inequality in their society? To answer this question, “A Beautiful Mind” focuses on physiognomy: a popular transatlantic science predicated on the idea that facial features revealed people's inner nature. Because most individuals in early America believed the head and face were the physical features that best revealed the internal capacities of individuals, this project begins from the premise that we cannot comprehend how Americans understood human difference or navigated social relationships unless we unravel the connections they made between faces, bodies, and brains. At the most basic level, it argues that physiognomy constituted an influential scientific discourse and widespread social practice—a technology of character detection that people used to rationalize the hierarchies that defined their worlds. Through this new science of beauty, many Americans suggested that social inequalities were not only necessary facts of life, but also empirically verifiable realities. Perhaps the minds and faces of some people were simply better than others, they posited, and perhaps there were superior human specimens who truly deserved the social, political, and economic dominance they currently retained. Yet even as some people used this popular science to argue for white supremacy, justify gender inequities, and enforce class hierarchies, numerous Americans manipulated physiognomy’s slippery language for a wide array of purposes, using it to undermine existing inequities. This dissertation highlights their voices and experiences, showing how women and people of color created unique forms of scientific knowledge and shaped the trajectory of American intellectual thought. In doing so, it not only asks scholars to rethink what might have counted as science in the early republic; it also challenges us to reimagine who might have counted as a scientist.
HALF OF HUMANITY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY, ALSO: WORKS FOR VIOLIN BY WOMEN COMPOSERS
(2018) Colgate, Laura; Salness, David; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The intent of this dissertation is to increase recognition of prominent and lesser-known women, living and deceased, composing high-quality violin literature. This performance dissertation consists of three recitals featuring works for violin solo or chamber works including violin by twenty-two women composers, living and deceased, and program notes containing pertinent biographical and compositional information. Many shorter compositions were included in an attempt to give further recognition to as many women as possible. Although women composers are still outnumbered by men, it is evident that more and more women are becoming successful in their careers as composers. More women are being recognized by established institutions, having their works recorded, performed by major orchestras, and receiving honors and commissions. However, it is clear that much work is still to be done before women composers are to be given the same recognition as their male counterparts. It is my intention to not only make these works more accessible but also to bring to everyone’s consciousness the marginalization of women composers in the classical music field and increase awareness of the lack of effort on the part of presenters, organizations, and musicians towards gender equity. It is my hope that this dissertation will energize and mobilize others to create a level playing field on which women composers are fairly represented.
Barriers and Facilitators to Homeownership for African American Women with Physical Disabilities
(2016) Miles, Angel Love; Thornton Dill, Bonnie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation fills an important gap in the literature by exploring the social, economic, and health characteristics and experiences of members of a social group that has been otherwise under-examined: African American women with physical disabilities. It raises questions about homeownership to facilitate a better understanding of the relational aspects of gender, race, class, and ability related inequalities, and the extent to which African American women with physical disabilities are, or are not, socially integrated into mainstream American society. It uses grounded theory and develops a Feminist Intersectional Disability analytical framework for this study of homeownership and African American women with physical disabilities. The study found that African American women with physical disabilities experience barriers to homeownership that are multiple, compounding and complex. It suggests a research and social policy agenda that considers the implications of their multiple minority status and its impact on their needs.
Life Uncharted: Parenting Transgender, Gender-Creative, and Gay Children
(2016) Vooris, Jessica Ann; King, Katie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Gender non-conformity is often seen as an indication of a future queer sexuality, but children are thought to be too young to actually be gay or trans. Life Uncharted: Parenting Transgender, Gender-creative, and Gay Children seeks to answer questions about what it means to be a "transgender," "gender-creative," or "gay" child, and examines the experiences of families who parent against the norm, raising children who break assumptions about the body, gender, identity and desire. Drawing from media analysis, ethnography of parent blogs and family gender conferences, along with interviews with 28 families, I argue that these parents engage in "anticipation work" as they manage anxiety and uncertainty about their children's behavior, attempt to predict and manage their children's futures, and explain their decisions to others. While television documentaries offer simple narratives that often reify binary expectations of gender, and explain that transgender children are "trapped in the wrong body," my ethnographic research and interviews shows that defining a transgender or gender-creative or gay child is more complex and it is not always clear how to separate gender expression, identity, and sexuality. As children socially transition at younger ages, when memory is just beginning to form, their relationships to the body and the notion of being "transgender" is in flux. Parents emphasize being comfortable with ambiguity, listening to children and LGBTQ adults, and accepting that it’s not always possible to know what the future brings. These children’s lives are unfolding and in process, changing our notions of childhood, queerness and transness.
The Issue with Issues Management: An Engagement Approach to Integrate Gender and Emotion into Issues Management
(2016) Madden, Stephanie; Sommerfeldt, Erich; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Using sexual assault on college campuses as a context for interrogating issues management, this study offers a normative model for inclusive issues management through an engagement approach that can better account for the gendered and emotional dimensions of issues. Because public relations literature and research have offered little theoretical or practical guidance for how issues managers can most effectively deal with issues such as sexual assault, this study represents a promising step forward. Results for this study were obtained through 32 in-depth interviews with university issues managers, six focus groups with student populations, and approximately 92 hours of participant observation. By focusing on inclusion, this revised model works to have utility for an array of issues that have previously fallen outside of the dominant masculine and rationale spheres that have worked to silence marginalized publics’ experiences. Through adapting previous issues management models to focus on inclusion at the heart of a strategic process, and engagement as the strategy for achieving this, this study offers a framework for ensuring more voices are heard—which enables organizations to more effectively communicate with their publics. Additionally, findings from this research may also help practitioners at different types of organizations develop better, and proactive, communication strategies for handling emotional and gendered issues as to avoid negative media attention and work to change organizational culture.
Bodies on the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the US-Mexico Border Industrial Complex
(2016) Perez, Cristina Jo; Rowley, Michelle V; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Bodies On the Line: Violence, Disposable Subjects, and the Border Industrial Complex explores the construction of identity and notions of belonging within an increasingly privatized and militarized Border Industrial Complex. Specifically, the project interrogates how discourses of Mexican migrants as racialized, gendered, and hypersexualized “deviants” normalize violence against border crossers. Starting at Juárez/El Paso border, I follow the expanding border, interrogating the ways that Mexican migrants, regardless of sexual orientation, have been constructed and disciplined according to racialized notions of “sexual deviance." I engage a queer of color critique to argue that sexual deviance becomes a justification for targeting and containing migrant subjects. By focusing on the economic and racially motivated violence that the Border Industrial Complex does to Mexican migrant communities, I expand the critiques that feminists of color have long leveraged against systemic violence done to communities of color through the prison industrial system. Importantly, this project contributes to transnational feminist scholarship by contextualizing border violence within the global circuits of labor, capital, and ideology that shape perceptions of border insecurity. The project contributes an interdisciplinary perspective that uses a multi-method approach to understand how border violence is exercised against Mexicans at the Mexico-US border. I use archival methods to ask how historical records housed at the National Border Patrol Museum and Memorial Library serve as political instruments that reinforce the contemporary use of violence against Mexican migrants. I also use semi-structured interviews with nine frequent border crossers to consider the various ways crossers defined and aligned themselves at the border. Finally, I analyze the master narratives that come to surround specific cases of border violence. To that end, I consider the mainstream media’s coverage, legal proceedings, and policy to better understand the racialized, gendered, and sexualized logics of the violence.

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