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 Working Literacies: Gender, Labor, and Literacy in Early Modern England(2022) Griffin, Danielle; Enoch, Jessica; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Working Literacies” explores the literacy abilities and practices of early modern working women, paying attention to the ways that ideologies of patriarchy and labor as well as the institutionalization of poor relief mediated their engagements with literacy. By examining little-studied archival material such as administrative records, literary ephemera, and petitions, “Working Literacies” nuances assumptions about working women's (il)literacy in the period, showcasing the multiple layers of literate ability that women leveraged as available means in making arguments about their lives as economically precarious workers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In centering the reading and composing habits of pre-modern working women, this dissertation provides historical depth to intricate relationships of gender and class in histories of rhetorical education, economic systems, and labor activism.In my three major chapters, I analyze little-studied literacy artifacts of three sites: 1) curricular and administrative materials from charity schools and orphanages; 2) ephemeral reading materials such as popular chapbooks and ballads; and 3) petitions that address working conditions for women. Although these sites may seem disparate, they present compelling evidence about the literacy of working women at different points in their lives: learning literacy skills, reading as evidence of literacy, and the use of those literacies in the act of petitioning. Furthermore, “Working Literacies” illuminates that ideologies of gender, labor, and literacy were complexly interconnected: lower-class children learned literacy skills in ways that sought to make obedient and industrious workers and wives, yet working women made inventive use of those literacy skills to engage representations of and forward arguments about their lives as workers and their gendered workplaces. In demonstrating the intricate interrelationship between class and gender in theories and practices of literacy, “Working Literacies” enters into and energizes conversations about women and labor as well as histories of literacy and rhetorical education.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 WHICH TEAM DO YOU PLAY FOR?: VISIBILITY AND QUEERING IN BRAZILIAN SOCCER(2019) Snyder, Cara Knaub; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Brazilians designate their country “O País de Futebol” (The Country of Football) with a singular vigor. But from its earliest years, the sport has been defined along masculine lines; women in Brazil were actually banned from playing soccer for four decades (1940 - 1979). The exclusion of women, gay men, and trans athletes has come under considerable challenge in the past two decades. This dissertation traces how marginalized groups have claimed access to soccer, and what it means for processes of visibility, assimilation, and ultimately, queering the game itself. Combining ethnographic, archival, and visual methods, the project unfolds over three case studies focused on women, trans, and gay players, respectively. The first chapter presents a history of Brazilian women’s soccer: using media sources and interviews, it tracks tensions between women athletes’ demands to be seen and the gendered forms of disciplining that have accompanied their increased visibility. Such disciplining has contributed to the whitening and feminization of women’s soccer, as seen in the case of the Paulistana tournament, and to the subsequent migration of Brazil’s top athletes. These migrant players have since used their transnational networks to jockey for recognition and a more equitable distribution of resources. My second chapter offers an ethnography of Brazil’s first trans men’s soccer team, the Brazilian Meninos Bons de Bola (MBB, or Soccer Star Boys), to explore futebol as a site for combating invisibility and violence, creating transness, and queer worldmaking. Using a combination of focus groups, ethnographic observations, and interviews, I explore how team members theorize oppression, survive transphobia, and thrive. My third chapter analyzes the challenges facing the Brazilian BeesCats, a cis gay men’s soccer team, as they form the first Brazilian contingent to participate in the international Gay Games. Drawing from ethnographic data from the 2018 Paris Gay Games, I examine the ethnosexual frontiers of this international LGBT sporting event. Ultimately, I argue, the athletes described in this dissertation make claims on their national sport as part of deeper struggles for belonging. In the context of a culturally rightward turn in Brazil, they are also queering futebol and subverting gender ordering.Item City of Hope and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign: Poverty, Protests, and Photography(2017) Bryant, Aaron E; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have produced rich materials on the civil rights movement since Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. These resources generally offer the familiar narratives of the period, as they relate to King’s earlier campaigns as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This includes research on demonstrations in Alabama, Mississippi, Washington, and Memphis. Few studies offer insights on King’s final crusade, the Poor People’s Campaign, however. As an original contribution to civil rights research, the following study offers an overview of King’s antipoverty crusade to contextualize the movement’s impact on America’s past and present. This study presents new insights on the movement by introducing previously undiscovered and unexamined archival materials related to the campaign and Resurrection City, the encampment between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial that housed campaign participants. Photographs, architectural drawings, and other visual materials supplement evidence collected from primary documents and other archival sources. While the investigation of written records and printed materials helps the study construct a chronology of events to frame a historical narrative of the campaign, graphic materials presented in the study add eyewitness perspectives and visual evidence to help shape the study’s conclusions. Perceptions of the Poor People’s Campaign were unfavorable as media coverage fed national fears of riots and civil disorder. Additionally, national memory recorded the efforts of the campaign’s leadership as inadequate in filling the void left by King’s assassination. King’s antipoverty campaign, however, had its merits. It was a microscope on poverty and a critique that focused public attention on poverty nationwide. It was a catalyst to important federal and grassroots programs that laid the groundwork for later legislation and social change. The campaign was also a precursor to subsequent civil and human rights movements. In addition to bringing social concerns related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic justice to the public fore, King’s antipoverty crusade introduced age, gender, and quality-of-life issues to a national discourse on equality. Additionally, the campaign represented a change in sociopolitical activism as protest movements shifted from civil rights to human rights campaigns. Equally important, however, the campaign was the final chapter of King’s life and, conceivably, his most ambitious dream.Item Picturing Devotion in Dutch Golden Age Huiskerken(2018) Harrington, Margaret; Wheelock, Arthur K; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was officially Protestant, Catholics made up nearly one-third of the population. To circumvent laws prohibiting public worship, Dutch Catholics celebrated Mass in private homes converted into lavishly decorated huiskerken (house churches). Unfortunately, most huiskerken have been destroyed or poorly documented, and previous scholarship has examined altarpieces out of their historical contexts. This dissertation examines the decorative programs of two well-documented huiskerken: St. Bernardus in den Hoeck in Haarlem, rebuilt in 1638 and part of a large community of lay religious women (kloppen) in Haarlem, and ’t Hart, founded in 1663 in Amsterdam, and preserved today as the Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder (Our Lord in the Attic). This is the first English-language study of the complete decorative programs of these two huiskerken and their liturgical functions, and I argue that devotional paintings are best understood as pieces of these decorative programs, which included embroidered textiles, illustrated sermon manuscripts, and liturgical silver. I employ reception theory to show that the imagery in these two huiskerken aided the celebration of Mass and meditation of laypeople, especially lay religious women. The examples of St. Bernardus and ’t Hart demonstrate that the decorative programs of huiskerken are largely indebted to lay religious women, who acted as patrons and creators of devotional objects. I prove that crafts like embroidery and inexpensive engravings, commonly considered “low” art, in fact served as creative sources for “higher” art forms like paintings. Furthermore, I conclude that the use of imagery in huiskerken is more closely related to medieval devotional practices than has previously been assumed.Item "Je ne vous dirai point, mon très cher fils" Correspondance de Catherine de Charrière de Sévery 1780-1783(2016) Lanz, Anne-Marie; Benharrech, Sarah; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the principles of education imbued in a three year correspondence between an eighteenth century woman and her teenage son from the French speaking region of Vaud, current day Switzerland. Despite her great respect for the literature and ideas of the new pedagogues of the Enlightenment, especially J.J. Rousseau and Mme de Genlis, Catherine de Charrière de Sévery maintained the traditional perspective of education of the Ancien Régime. To explore the concepts of education and instruction through the epistolary practice, this research is based on the corpus of 107 letters that Mme de Sévery wrote to her son Vilhelm between 1780 and 1783. Additional documents - among them Mme de Sévery’s diaries - from the particularly rich archival holdings of this aristocratic family have been used to complement her correspondence. Most previous studies on family correspondence have dealt with mothers to daughters, or fathers to sons, whereas this research is centered on letters between a mother and her son. The location of this family – Lausanne and the Pays de Vaud – provides a particular regional perspective due to two factors: immersion into a region uniformly Protestant, and the dual-influence of Germanic and French cultures. The study analyzes the educational principles that appear throughout Mme de Sévery’s letters by comparison with three literary works of the 18th century: a familiar correspondence, the Lettres du Lord Chesterfield à son fils (1776); the fundamental education treatise by J.J. Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’Éducation (1762); and a pedagogical treatise written by Mme de Genlis as an epistolary novel, Adèle et Théodore, ou lettres sur l’éducation. Using letters as the main tool to guide her son’s upbringing, Mme de Sévery highlights the moral and family values that are most important to her and leads him to find his place in society.Item Faucets and Fertilizers: Interpreting Technological Change in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico, 1946-1988(2015) Walker, Joshua Charles; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Faucets and Fertilizers: Interpreting Technological Change in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico, 1946-1988 argues that peasant farmers in Oaxaca were key actors who helped to oversee the technological modernization of their villages in the twentieth century. From the 1940s to the 1980s, federal and state development programs sought to introduce new tools like chemical fertilizers, water faucets, roads, and mechanical corn grinders to villages in the countryside. These programs were often unevenly distributed and poorly designed, forcing peasants to rely on old skills and customs in order to acquire and use the technologies they wanted. As peasants learned about the benefits of the technologies, they also learned to use them to challenge the power of family patriarchs, village elders, and federal leaders. Far from being the passive victims of modernization described in the historiography of rural Mexico, Oaxacan peasants participated in technological change and used new tools in an attempt to overcome problems with low crop production and restricted mobility.Item Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing and the Origins of the New Economic Divide (1968-1985)(2015) Windham, Anna Lane; Greene, Julie M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: KNOCKING ON LABOR'S DOOR: UNION ORGANIZING AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NEW ECONOMIC DIVIDE (1968-1985) Anna Lane Windham, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Dissertation directed by: Professor Julie Greene, Department of History The 1970s were a pivotal decade for the creation of twenty-first century economic inequality, and the loss of union power was one important driver away from shared U.S. prosperity. Yet why did U.S. labor grow so weak? Much recent scholarship shifts blame for labor's decline to unions and the working class, and asserts that private-sector workers were simply no longer trying to organize by the mid-1970s. The dissertation instead paints the 1970s as a decade of working-class promise and reveals a previously-unstudied wave of half a million workers a year who tried to form unions in the private sector. Many of these workers were the women and people of color who had long been excluded from the nation's best jobs and from some unions, yet who had recently gained new access through Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Once these workers got the coveted jobs, many went knocking on labor's door. This dissertation explains how after World War II union organizing became the narrow door through which workers could access the most secure tier of the U.S. employer-provided social welfare system: collective bargaining. Increased resistance to union organizing among employers by the 1970s, however, thwarted these workers' organizing attempts. When fewer workers could access unions, the stage was set for growing economic precarity and inequality. This dissertation features four case studies: the largest union election ever in the South which was among Newport News, Virginia shipyard workers in 1978; campaigns in 1974 and 1985 by Cannon Mills textile workers in Kannapolis, North Carolina; the 1979 campaign among 5300 department store at Woodward & Lothrop in Washington, DC; and the women office workers' group "9to5" in Boston who forged a new kind of labor organizing. Sources include government statistics, oral history, local and national union records, business organization archives, polling, periodicals and previously unexamined anti-union consultant records.Item Writing Oceanic Bodies: Corporeal Representations in the Works of Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, and Chantal T. Spitz(2013) Frengs, Julia Lynne; Orlando, Valerie K; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Oceanic women's bodies have been objects of fascination throughout centuries of Western literature. European voyagers of the eighteenth century lauded the exotic Tahitian female body, while in the nineteenth century, the Kanak (indigenous New Caledonian) body was frequently dehumanized and regarded as uncivilized. Indeed, much Western literature prior to the second half of the twentieth century has portrayed an imagined, culturally produced Oceanic body that became a stereotype in what Edward Said would call an Orientalist discourse. This dominant Orientalist discourse has, until recently, overshadowed the voices of Oceanic peoples. This project examines the representation of the body in the texts of three contemporary Francophone Oceanic women writers who successfully communicate their individual perceptions on Oceanic identity. Since the 1980s, Kanak writer Déwé Gorodé (1949), Caledonian writer Claudine Jacques (1953), and Tahitian writer Chantal T. Spitz (1954) have produced an explicitly Oceanic perspective and style in a writing that is distinct from other French and Francophone literatures. This project examines violence, specifically sexual violence, and treatments of the damaged body in the literature of Gorodé, Jacques, and Spitz, who turn the body into a political instrument. The display of sexual violence in these works forces the body into a public position, fostering a discussion and critique of the politics of Oceanic communities. Additionally, this dissertation discusses the political body, which is often either represented as in isomorphism with the land, or as rupturing the confinement endured in colonial-imposed institutions. Also addressed are the fragile silence and enunciations of identity in the texts of Jacques, Gorodé, and Spitz. Because both the Kanak and Tahitian cultures have a strong oral tradition, the question of silence imposed by the Western privileging of the written word features heavily in Oceanic writing, but as this project will reveal, the silence that has permeated the communities of French-speaking Oceania is a complicated and delicate silence. The aim of this work is to examine the contemporary configurations of an Oceanic body in the works of Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, and Chantal T. Spitz: a body that transgresses boundaries, destabilizes myths, and refuses objectification.Item Art comme archive dans (Archives du nord)(2012) Phair, Elise; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Archives du nord est l'histoire d'une humanité où la présence de l'auteur est évidente non dans la forme traditionnelle d'un personnage, mais dans les opinions et l'imagination insérées dans ses réflexions sur l'art et son analyse de l'art comme témoignage de l'Histoire et de la pensée humaine. Ce mémoire explore le discours sur l'art dans Archives du nord et montre en quoi il est un témoignage historique selon Yourcenar, ses perspectives sur l'Histoire de la pensée, et comment art reflet sa propre identité, liée aux cultures française, flamande, et européenne en général. Ces réflexions sont fondées sur des peintures, des sculptures, et dans quelques cas, des photographies. Yourcenar donne à l'art une place importante dans les archives qui forment la base de son oeuvre, car les tableaux et les portraits sont des témoignages visuels de l'identité individuelle et universelle, propre à ses personnages et générale à tout le monde à la fois. Archives du nord is a story of humanity where the author's presence is felt through the opinions and use of imagination included in her reflexions on art and her analysis of art as a testimony of human thought, rather than in the form of a traditional character. This thesis explores the discours on art in Archives du nord and reveals how Yourcenar considers it historical evidence, her perspectives on human thought, and how art reflects her own identity as it is linked to French, Flemish, and European culture in general. These reflexions are based on paintings, sculpture, and in some cases, photographs. Yourcenar gives art an important position among the archives that provide the basis of her work, for paintings and portraits are visual testimonies to both individual and universal identity, relating to her characters and to humanity in general.