The Politics Of Feeling And The Work Of Belonging In Us Immigrant Fiction 1990 - 2015, Lauren Silber

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Politics of Feeling and the Work of Belonging in US Immigrant Fiction 1990 – 2015” presents readers with a distinct optic: if we are to fully grasp contemporary US racial politics, we must recognize the narrative work emotion performs in popular US diasporic fiction. Comparing the work of authors who have become mainstays in the multi-ethnic US literary canon such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, Lan Cao, Achy Obejas, Cristina Garcia, Kiran Desai, and Nora Okja Keller, I explicate how these popular authors exhume the complex entanglements of racialization, US empire, and global capitalism by narrating the …

A Tangled Web: Quakers And The Atlantic Slave System 1625 – 1770., Kate Freedman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation re-contextualizes the Quakers’ history as anti-slavery pioneers by exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the British West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world. Quakers were driven by their faith to foster a spirit of equality inside and outside of their meetings. They were among the first European religious sects to allow women to preach, to oppose violence and war, and, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth-century, to ban the practice of enslaving other human beings within their membership. Yet the Quakers …

The Texture Of Reading / Reading Textures: Poetic, Visual, Material, And Inter-Medial Dimensions Of Textuality In Arabic Poetry, French Picturebooks, And North American Bookarts, Lara Matta

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a comparative study of the poetic, verbal, visual and material dimensions of textuality. It asks the following questions: what does texture look like in our literary context? What does an attention to layers and fragility convey about or add to our reading experience? And how can they relate to the experience of loss? I argue that an engagement with textures may help account for a layered multidimensionality and that structural imageries—whether in relation to organic matter or textile or overlay—allow for the intersection of materiality and conceptuality in intricate patterns. I offer a poetic reading of intermedial …

Charting The Terrain Of Latina/O/X Theater In Chicago, Priscilla M. Page

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a rich tapestry of Latina/o/x theater in Chicago. Through in-depth interviews, I use first-voice narratives to construct four decades of Latina/o/x theater history with the artists who were founding directors and/or members of these companies: Latino Chicago, Latino Experimental Theater Company, Teatro Vista, Teatro Luna, and Urban Theater Company. My aim with this project is to listen carefully to Latina/o/x artists in Chicago so that I can play a role in amplifying their voices as they articulate their experiences in this Midwestern city they call home. I organized my findings into three chapters and have kept the artists’ …

"The Whole Nation Will Move": Grassroots Organizing In Harlem And The Advent Of The Long, Hot Summers, Peter Blackmer

Doctoral Dissertations

“The Whole Nation Will Move” provides a narrative history of grassroots struggles for African American equality and empowerment in Harlem in the decade immediately preceding the era of widespread urban rebellions in the United States. Through a street-level examination of the political education and activism of grassroots organizers, the dissertation analyzes how local people developed a collective radical consciousness and organized to confront and dismantle institutional racism in New York City from 1954-1964. This work also explores how the interests and activities of poor and working-class Black and Puerto Rican residents of Harlem fueled the escalation of protest activity and …

The Privilege Of Blackness: Black Empowerment And The Fight For Liberation In Attala County, Mississippi 1865-1915, Evan Ashford

Doctoral Dissertations

Post-Civil War historiography paid minimal attention to the rural Afro-American impact on Southern social, economic, and political institutions prior to the 20^th century. This dissertation addresses this deficit. The Privilege of Blackness: Black Empowerment and the Fight for Liberation examines how Afro-Americans in rural Mississippi empowered themselves via their mentality, interracial interactions, landownership, labor diversification, education and suffrage as a means to fight for individual and racial liberation. The Privilege of Blackness: Black Empowerment and the Fight for Liberation in Attala County, Mississippi 1865-1915 makes the claim that freedom grounded Afro-American peoples claim to their inalienable rights guaranteed by …

Rhotic Variation In The Spanish Spoken By Puerto Ricans In Puerto Rico And Western Massachusetts, Alba Arias Alvarez

Doctoral Dissertations

The Spanish trill is known to present a wide range of phonetic variation in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS), attested not only on the island but in the diaspora. Combining auditory and acoustic analysis, this research project studies acoustic data on onset /r/ in Holyoke, MA, the city with the largest per capita population of Puerto Ricans living outside the island. The aim of this dissertation is to analyze whether there is trill variation in the PR community in Holyoke, and, whether it mirrors the variation found in Puerto Rico. Special attention is paid to glottal, velar, or uvular /r/ realizations. …

Epic And Identity: Exploring Genre And Understanding The Self In The Middle High German 'Spielmannsepen', Rachael A. Salyer

Doctoral Dissertations

The cluster of anonymous Middle High German epics known as the Spielmannsepen presents an interesting challenge to notions of genre and identity in the Middle Ages. This project explores some of the issues surrounding those notions in three particular texts, including König Rother, Orendel, and St. Oswald. Discussions of genre and identity complement one another in this work because each functions as a means of categorization. Questions surrounding the poems’ manuscript traditions and presumed composition dates are analyzed, and aspects of the eponymous heroes’ identities are also examined.

Creating A Symbol Of Science: The Development Of A Standard Periodic Table Of The Elements, Ann Robinson

Doctoral Dissertations

It is probably a surprise to most people that the periodic table they remember from high school chemistry is not the only periodic table – and never has been. Currently there are probably over a thousand different forms. The table in your chemistry textbook or on the wall chart in your chemistry classroom is not the periodic table. It is simply the most commonly used form. In fact, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the international standards-making body for chemistry, has stated that although they encourage the use of this form, they will not endorse any one …

Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses And Star Culture In East Germany, Victoria Rizo Lenshyn

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that multiple stakeholders in East Germany (GDR)—the fans, artists, and state— adapted the star phenomenon to help validate GDR socialist culture at home and abroad, and to bridge seemingly contradictory elements within the dualistic context of the global Cold War: the individual and collective, the ordinary and extraordinary, idealism and reality, the past and present, tradition and progress, East and West. As public figures, GDR stars offered audiences multiple points of identification and helped the enlarged working class navigate its new dominant social position in GDR social life. Officially, stars offered an engaging performance of …

Developing Musicianship And 21st Century Learning Skills Using The Lisk “Creative Director” Series, Thomas Reynolds

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Extrinsic Phrases In Early-Classical Sonata Forms, Rebecca Long

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to introduce, identify, and document a set of syntactic insertions in sonata forms that I call extrinsic phrases. At its most basic, “extrinsic phrase” refers to any phrase-length insertion between the transition and secondary theme of a sonata-form movement. This concept encompasses several terms (or examples thereof) from current writings about sonata forms. However, unlike those terms, I purposefully define extrinsic phrases broadly so that they act as a generic option for an analyst. Instead of attempting to create a long-range view of extrinsic phrases across the whole of sonata-form writing, this initial work on extrinsic phrases …

The Experience Of Chinese Students Enrolled In Graduate Music Education Degree Programs In The United States, Kailimi Li

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the experience of Chinese graduate students enrolled in music education master’s and doctoral degree programs in the United States. Specifically, it explored participants’ perceptions of (a) their educational experiences (past and present), (b) the challenges they faced, (c) their strategies for success, (d) the benefits they experienced as international graduate students in the United State, (e) the effect of this experience on their thinking, self-perception, and behavior, and (f) how they planned to move forward or move on following this experience. Participants were six native Chinese graduate students enrolled at the time …

Exploring The Easy Road To Nominalism, Jordan Kroll

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation is divided into three self-contained chapters, each of which explores some facet of nominalism. The overall aim is to explicate and defend a nominalist approach that recognizes the utility of talking about, or presupposing the existence of, abstract objects even if no such objects exist. The first chapter begins with a question: why is talk about abstract mathematical entities so useful in describing and explaining the physical world? Here is an answer: talk about such entities is useful for describing and explaining the physical world insofar as there is some appropriate structural similarity between them and the target …

“To Weigh The World Anew”: Poetics, Rhetoric, And Social Struggle, From Sidney’S Arcadia To Shakespeare’S Theater, David Katz

Doctoral Dissertations

To Weigh the World Anew examines moments of rhetorical exchange in romances written by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Mary Wroth, arguing that these texts portray formal oratory as either unethical or inefficacious, while simultaneously depicting poetic or theatrical discourses as productively intervening between interlocutors of diverse social statuses. These exemplary episodes show fiction successfully mediating between different classes and genders, creating a demarcation between poetry and competing forms of eloquence and participating in the emergence of the poetical from the rhetorical. Ultimately, the repeated depiction of poesis as an efficacious form of mediation in self-reflexive romance shows …

Literary Culture In Early Christian Ireland: Hiberno-Latin Saints’ Lives As A Source For Seventh-Century Irish History, John Higgins

Doctoral Dissertations

The writers of seventh-century Irish saints’ Lives created the Irish past. Their accounts of the fifth-and-sixth century saints framed the narrative of early Irish Christianity for their contemporary and later audience. Cogitosus’s Life of Brigit, Muirchú’s and Tírechán’s accounts of Saint Patrick, and Adomnán’s Life of Columba have guided the understanding of early Irish history from then until now. Unlike other early texts these Lives are securely dated. Composed as tools in the discourse regarding authority in seventh-century Irish ecclesiastical and secular politics, they provide historical insights not available from other sources. In the seventh century Armagh and Kildare …

The Mismatch Problem For Act Consequentialism, Robert Gruber

Doctoral Dissertations

I present the mismatch problem for Act Consequentialism, and I critically evaluate some popular solutions before offering my own solution to a specific version of the problem. The mismatch problem arises for Act Consequentialism when a group could have done better, but no individual in the group had an alternative with a better outcome. In such cases, the theory delivers mismatched verdicts: it condemns what the group does, but it cannot condemn any of the individual acts. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I explain exactly how this problem works. In the next four chapters, I identify a variety …

"No Seas Can Now Divide Us": Captains' Wives, Sister Sailors, And The New England Whalefishery, 1840-1870, Amanda L. Goodheart

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1840 and 1870, nearly three hundred whaling captains’ wives accompanied their husbands at sea aboard New England whaleships. Unlike previous scholarship which has analyzed these women solely within the context of mid-nineteenth century domesticity, this study argues these women effected real and lasting change within their communities and the New England whalefishery. By going to sea with their husbands, women like Mary Brewster, Susan Veeder, and Elizabeth Marble defied longstanding gendered traditions wherein men hunted whales at sea and women supported those efforts ashore. In doing so, they joined the ranks of the sister sailors, a term first created …

Adapting For A New Audience: Ta'zieh-Between Two Rivers, Nikoo Mamdoohi

Masters Theses

This thesis is the written portion of my experience as a director, staging an adaptation of the traditional Iranian theater form, Ta’zieh, for my thesis project. I start with a brief description of our adapted performance, followed by the inspirations that led to the creation of the piece. I then trace the evolution of the idea from the initial stage to the final performance. I describe the adaptation process in three sections, the story, form, and practice. In each section, in a comparative manner, I write about the ways in which Ta’zieh is traditionally done and elaborate on our decisions …

Interpreting Dreams: Directing An Immersive Adaptation Of Strindberg's A Dream Play, Mary-Corinne Miller

Masters Theses

This written portion of my thesis documents how I, as director, conceptualized, devised and staged an immersive adaptation of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, with the support of a large team of collaborators including: assistant directors, dramaturgs, designers, stage managers, and actors. In this document I attempt to synthesize the discoveries I made in this process regarding the challenges and experience of directing immersive theater, including the importance of giving up directorial control and relying on my collaborators as partners in the creation of the production.

I begin with an introduction to the research I conducted into the field of …

How Students Of Japanese Perceive And Use Technology, David Rubino

Masters Theses

The role of technology in education has expanded to a near universal reality. In foreign languages the field of Technology-enhanced Language Learning, has long sought to effectively implement instruction with these tools, and often to great success, often through the guise of Computer-assisted Language Learning. However, most studies investigating the student perception of class structures incorporating technology are based on what instructors have implemented.

Students, the counterparts of instructors, often own more than one technological tool and will often employ these tools in their studies. For learners of foreign languages, certain aspects of technology are selected for various tasks based …

Remains To Be Seen: Recollecting Memory, Nathanael Kooperkamp

Masters Theses

Abstract

Remains to be Seen, a multi-media installation, provides the opportunity for reconfiguration, re-contextualization and re-remembering of visual memory. Geoffry Cubit, a historian of memory, has noted that “memory has no fixed, stable, unitary meaning to which we can invariably recur: it has always been, and legitimately, a concept in flux and under review”.[1]My work in this exhibition (and as discussed throughout this paper) addresses the unstable and revisionist nature of memory—both culturally and individually. Additionally, I attempt to address how memory (collective, visual, familial and individual) is implicated in the creation of selfhood, of personal narrative, …

Play In The Woods: The Role Of The Dramaturg In Facilitating A Holistic, Slow Theater-Making Process, Claudia Nolan

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I document the ideas behind and my process for Play in the Woods, an experiment in slow theater-making that serves as a model for how dramaturgs can facilitate sustainable, holistic methods of performance. This model is grounded in feminist theater practices and the aesthetic of poor theater. In creating the performance of Play in the Woods, I as dramaturg invited participants to serve as co-creators, individually crafting pieces that examined fairytales and the role those stories have played on their lives. The performance was held out of doors at the Amethyst Brook Conservation Area on …

Die Bedeutung Der Defa Film Library Im Ostdeutschen Erinnerungsdiskurs, Konstanze Schiller

Masters Theses

The relation between memory and identity is significant, particularly if an identity-establishing entity such as a state has vanished. In the context of GDR memory, this pertains to the type of memory discourse: what is remembered, how, and by whom? What are the differences in the discourse about East German memory between the US and Germany?

Based on approaches of the Aleida Assmann’s approaches to individual, collective, and cultural memory this thesis seeks to examine the notion and impact of archives in collective memory processes and to analyze the extent to which the medium of film as a concrete and …

Apprendre Et Enseigner Avec La Bienveillance : Pour Une Nouvelle Pedagogie Française, Amena Moinfar

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on reflections made my contemporary thinkers in France concerning the wellness of children through their times in French public schools. Journalists, educators, parents seem to agree that the current French pedagogy instilled in the Education nationale system can no longer be acceptable and needs profound change. If academic performances are important, they cannot be the only center of interest in French schools. Instead, these writers propose and advocate for a pedagogy where wellness, benevolence and personal happiness occupy a crucial place.

The purpose of this thesis is to identify these voices and to take into account the …

A Study Of The Intertexts In The Stone Of Goddess Nüwa (Nüwa Shi 女娲石), Zhimo Li

Masters Theses

As a novel on contemporary issues (shishi xiaoshuo 时事小说), the unfinished novel The Stone of Goddess Nüwa (Nüwa shi 女娲石; 1904-1905) recounts a story about new women’s attempts to save the nation, which is a reflection of late-Qing China. From a historical perspective, I aim to provide a study of the Nüwa stone and characterization of new women in the novel with the help of multiple intertexts. My thesis explores how the stone and the characterization elaborate the theme and design of the novel: new women saving the nation, which includes radical ideas for women and national salvation …

Queer Temporality And Aesthetics In Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge: A Dramaturgical Exploration Of The Play At Umass Amherst, Gaven D. Trinidad

Masters Theses

This master’s thesis documents the dramaturgical exploration of the spring 2018 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater’s production of gender non-conforming performance artist Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge. The thesis is separated into two parts. The first half focuses on my dramaturgical analysis of Mac’s play and its exploration of queer temporality and queer embodiment, asserting the importance of queer aesthetics in American drama and its vital role in shaping the future of LGBTQIA+ politics in the United States. The second half includes reflections on rehearsal processes and performances, giving readers and fellow artists examples of the potential …

Motion As Music: Hypermetrical Schemas In Eighteenth-Century Contredanses, Alison N. Stevens

Masters Theses

An important part of the recent growth in scholarship on meter focuses on reconstructing 18th-century listening practices. Danuta Mirka (2009) studies contemporary accounts of meter in theory treatises to build a model of 18th-century metric listening, while Stefan Love (2016) takes a corpus studies approach, arguing that surveying repertoire provides a more accurate view of meter than 18th-century theorists. But despite the known debt that much 18th-century art music owes to dance and dance music, Mirka and Love only briefly mention dance. In touching so lightly on dance, these and other authors overlook the more fundamental connection between meter and …

Studies On L2 Acquisition Of Chinese Verbs Of 'Change' By English Speakers, Baoqing Qian

Masters Theses

When Chinese language learners reach intermediate level, approximately in the second year of their Chinese study, they start to encounter near-synonyms, words that have the same translations in English, and characters that look alike. These words are often called 易混淆词 yi hunxiao ci “easily confusable words” by Chinese scholars. This lexical acquisition study researches a group of near synonyms about Chinese verbs of ‘change’, which either express a stative change (where an argument which expresses the result of the change is required) or causative change (where an argument which expresses the instigator or cause of the change is required). The …

Transit, Christopher Janke

Masters Theses

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution.

The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes …