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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Item SYNERGIZING SHADOWS AND SCREENS: LIGHTING AND MEDIA DESIGN FOR A BICYCLE COUNTRY(2024) Garcia, Luis M; Mezzocchi, Jared; Chandrashaker, Amith; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following thesis explores the artistic ideas, concepts, design process, and execution of Luis Manuel Garcia’s lighting and media design for the University of Maryland - College Park’s production of A Bicycle Country. The production opened Friday, November 10th, 2023 in the Kogod Theatre at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. A Bicycle Country was written by Nilo Cruz, with direction by Fatima Quander, scenic design by Sofía Olivar, costume design by Becca Janney, and sound design by Justin Schmitz.Item DISINFORMATION THAT ENTERTAINS: THE ALT-RIGHT’S USE OF POPULAR AND POLITICAL CULTURE STRATEGIES(2024) Montgomery, Fielding Edmund; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project takes seriously the nested relationship of popular culture and political culture, highlighting how that relationship has promulgated alt-right disinformation in the long Trump era. Throughout this study, strategies of conspiracy, horror, and dog whistles are examined, as well as considering audiovisual concepts like realism and mimesis. Such alt-right disinformation establishes reactionary frames of racism, misogyny, and anti-governance. This work looks at both sides of the popular/political culture relationship, examining cinematic films, political campaign advertisements, and social media posts. I conclude by offering satire as one potential counterstrategy against alt-right disinformation that also resides in the nested relationship between popular and political culture.Item Odd Characters: Queer Lives in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore(2020) SCHMITT, KATHRYN; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Queer history in Baltimore began long before the twentieth century. People who diverged from societal norms of gender and sexuality were always present in Baltimore’s history, and they can be seen through media representations and popular press of the time period. Even when representation of queerness in media was less common, stories of people who diverged from gender and sexual norms were still distributed to the public. Media representations provided inspiration and information to people who did not have access to a group of like-minded people through a distinct subculture. Queer Baltimoreans drew from media representations, early stages of a developing subculture, or their own personal thoughts and feelings to inform their gender and sexual identities. Despite the legal and social measures restricting these people from living their lives as freely as they might wish, they still found individualized ways to live life outside of gender and sexual norms.Item The Symbolist Impulse in American Art across Media circa 1900(2020) Eron, Abby Rebecca; Ater, Renée; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the Symbolist movement in American art in the years around 1900. Symbolism was an antinaturalistic tendency that prioritized imagination and the intangible psychological realm. A reaction against Realism (and Impressionism, considered Realism’s logical extension), Symbolist art appears otherworldly, fantastic, and obscure. Works gravitate towards shared themes—the femme fatale and femme fragile, dreams, the duality of life and death, anguish, and mystical visions. Symbolism was not an organized movement in the sense of artists’ membership in a particular association but rather a trend in literary, artistic, and intellectual circles. While Symbolism has generally been considered from a European perspective, this dissertation describes a vital Symbolist impulse in American art through an evaluation of works by four artists: Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934), Alice Pike Barney (1857–1931), Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), and George Grey Barnard (1863–1938). Each specialized in a different medium: photography, pastel, painting, and sculpture, respectively. This dissertation attends to surface and technique, and it argues that the animating tension of Symbolism lies in the relationship between the material and the immaterial. Alongside imagery and historical context, the dynamism of materiality and immateriality points to the evanescent yet undeniable presence of Symbolism in the United States. Though Käsebier, Barney, Tanner, and Barnard worked independently of each other, grouping them allows for a comparative analysis across media and enables contextualization beyond solo biographical accounts.Item Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular(2018) Young, Kalima Y; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On September 15, 1955, Jet, a national Black magazine, printed the image of Emmitt Till’s battered, disfigured corpse on its cover. Images such as Emmitt Till’s corpse are visual testimonies of Black pain, wounding and death. This imagery has been used for racial control and subjugation since the era of lynching photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, Black pain, wounding and death imagery has also been used for Black liberation purposes, such as the photos and film of Black citizens in Birmingham being attacked by police dogs and sprayed with high-pressure fire hoses. These images helped spur anti-segregation and the voting rights activism in the Black American civil rights movement of the mid 20th century. Contemporary videos capturing U.S. police officers killing Black Americans have forced many to acknowledge the disproportionate numbers of Black Americans targeted by state violence. These videos have sparked recent civil rights protests in cities across the nation, including Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, and have galvanized online social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, which illuminates Black women’s experiences of police violence. Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular asks: What does it mean to be Black and to be the subject, witness and consumer of Black pain, wounding and death imagery? What impact do these images have on Black collective identity formation and Black cultural production? Using embodied image schema analysis, discussion group data, in-depth interviews, textual analysis, and auto-ethnography, this project examines viral videos of Black pain, wounding, and death and Black Cultural Workers’ (BCW) responses to these visual texts. An afro-futurist examination, this project grapples with the concept of Black life in response to the anti-blackness that has structured the world (Wilderson 2010) since the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, framing Black life as existing in/and out of time. By unpacking the role of spectacle, surveillance, and consumption on Black Americans’ witnessing practices, identity, and cultural production, Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular illustrates the ways Black people navigate anti-Blackness to live fully and vibrantly under the specter of death.Item The Textualization of Pat Tillman: Understanding the Relationships Between Person, Discourse, and Ideology(2011) Herbig, Arthur William; Gaines, Robert N; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a critical examination of the ways in which the life and death of Pat Tillman were shaped into a discursive Pat Tillman. This is not a project that examines the life led by the person Pat Tillman. The discursive Pat Tillman can be found in the pages of magazines, on television, invoked by politicians, and even memorialized in song. It is Pat Tillman, the discursive creation, that is my focus. In this project I take for granted that Pat Tillman only existed in places like the pages of books or on film. What is not lost on me and should not be lost on the reader of this project is my own participation in this process. With this project I have entered into the very discourses that I seek to critique. This is an analysis of the existence of a Pat Tillman that many people still know and the ideas that help shape how that existence is communicated. My critique focuses on the existence of a discursive Pat Tillman as a rhetorical phenomenon, drawing upon scholarship that can inform an understanding of how the life of Pat Tillman became the material for public discourse. My analysis interconnects Michel Foucault's (1972) work on knowledge and discourse with Michael Calvin McGee (1990) referred to as rhetorical fragments, in order to provide a foundation for understanding the discursive existence of Pat Tillman. Using how discourse producer connected various facts, stories, and images with conceptions of heroism, masculinity, and the American Dream, I reveal how the life and death of Pat Tillman was used as the material to represent political and cultural positions that exist external to that life. Through an analysis of the various news reports, books, documentaries, blogs, and other mediated texts that were produced in response to the life and death of Pat Tillman, this study presents a clearer picture of what is meant by "fragmentation" in critical analysis.Item The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival as a Theatrical Event(2007-08-08) Bain, Carolyn; Hildy, Ph.D., Franklin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On December 29 of 1938, Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams), little known American playwright, encountered the city of New Orleans. Through his engagement with the city's culture of multiple morés, Williams discovered in himself a personal freedom and theatrical productivity that changed the landscape of dramatic literature for the twentieth century. The phenomenon associated with Williams's identity and his experience with New Orleans as participant and spectator did not end with Williams's death, February 23, 1983; it continues today through the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, drawing thousands of attendees and celebrating its 21st-anniversary March 28 through April 1, 2007. This dissertation consists of six chapters accompanied by three integral videotexts that evidence a framework for understanding the theatrical contexts that inform the festival's processes and outcomes. The dissertation investigates the festival as a case study of the notion of theatrical eventness. The concept of eventness emerged in theatre studies discourse through an international colloquium, the Theatrical Event working group, within the International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT/IFTR). This dissertation represents an approach to bringing the study of festival into theatre studies through a discussion of its multi-layered communications and its creative outcomes. Chapter One situates the object of study as the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and questions how theatricality frames communication among attendees while it informs the identity of the festival. Accompanying Chapter One is a videotext summarizing the festival's origins and events. Chapter Two reviews the extra-theatrical influences on theatre studies and the development of the concept of festival as a theatrical event. Chapter Three examines the theatrical context of Williams's encounter with New Orleans. In Chapter Four, the "Stella Shout-off" contest mediates the past and present by eventifying a moment from theatrical history. A videotext evidences the theatricality of the contest. Chapter Five looks at performance and theatrical communications evident in the panels and the master classes. Accompanying the text, a video substantiates the theatricality of Williams's legacy through his relationship with Maria St. Just. In Chapter Six, the dissertation concludes by focusing on the festival's outcomes as the result of the festival's theatrical eventness.Item Strategies in International Broadcasting: A Grounded Analysis of Communication Values Across Cultures(2006-06-05) Swartz, Brecken Chinn; Cai, Deborah A.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a cross-cultural examination of strategic communication values that drive journalistic decision-making. Several issues are addressed: 1) developing tools to engage in systematic producer-centered qualitative media research across cultures , 2) testing a comprehensive grounded category scheme to characterize media producers' strategic presentational values, 3) broadening discussion of the influence of culture on media decision-making by moving beyond national culture and looking also at age, gender, organization, and level of training, 4) working methodologically with a three-tiered inductive approach to structure analysis of interview data, and 5) examining the utility of these qualitative tools cross-culturally by testing the framework with both Western and Chinese international broadcasters. Fifty American, British, and Chinese international feature reporters were interviewed at the Voice of America, the BBC World Service, and state-run Chinese international broadcast agencies (China Central Television, China Radio International, and the Xinhua News Agency) to identify patterns in their journalistic decision-making. Journalists completed semi-structured interviews along with a freelisting task and a selection task to further characterize their strategic presentational values within simulated free and constrained contexts. This study moves beyond classical gatekeeping research to propose a set of ten strategic communication categories (aesthetics, breadth, convenience, depth, emotionality, freshness, germaneness, helpfulness, incisiveness, and justice) that facilitate discussion of content and presentational style beyond the yes/no of story selection based on newsworthiness criteria. The gatekeeping paradigm is extended by comparing the complex decisions driving the production of mediated messages to the multi-faceted process of preparing food for the consumption of others, as both are strategic endeavors that profoundly affect the wellbeing of individuals and communities. This research provides a new direction to debates on cross-cultural differences in mass communication. Data in this study reveal a notable pattern for Chinese journalists (both in China and in the West) to emphasize the value of justice in their responses, although data suggest that Chinese journalists tend to equate this value with complete objectivity and neutrality in contrast with Western journalists' tendency to consider issues of broader social justice. Developments in modern international propaganda broadcasting are also explored.