Spectacular horizons: the birth of science fiction film, television, and radio, 1900-1959

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Sounds of the Compact City: A Musical Urban Ethnography of Toyama City, Japan

My dissertation explores the sonic and musical aspects of social life in Toyama City, a Japanese city of about 400,000 people that has recently been connected to Tokyo by a high-speed rail line. To support an aging and shrinking population while moving toward greater environmental sustainability and resilience in the face of a changing climate, the Toyama City government has enacted a series of programs termed the “Compact City Plan” to improve ease of access to public transportation and vital facilities while encouraging older residents to live in designated “residence encouragement zones” close to major transportation hubs. Drawing on extended in-person engagement, correspondence, and examination of online materials, I discuss the interplay of music, sound, and the natural and constructed environment. What emerges is a picture of social life in the city, animated and given meaning by individuals, communities, and patterns of movement in both its everyday life and in moments of celebration or catastrophe. This dissertation includes a detailed exploration of the sensory experience of the Toyama City center, an overview of several musical webs that rely on the movement of people into, out of, and within Toyama City, an overview of other webs that have coalesced around key individuals, and an account of several important festivals that occurred or were cancelled in 2019–2020. Tying these threads together is a discussion of the co-constituency of the human-made and natural environments and the ways that social worlds rise and fall from them. This is a study of both the connections and interruptions that characterize life in Toyama City. Part-way through my fieldwork period, I had to return to the U.S. as the spreading COVID-19 pandemic threatened safety, travel, and the operations of everyday life. This shift to remote fieldwork, however, also allows attention to Toyama’s connections and self-presentation to the rest of the world. Toyama is both similar to other small cities and unique, and this study of the city’s diverse sonic and musical life across multiple genres and in both local and virtual domains provides a model for making sense of the material life of a small city

Jane Donawerth papers

Jane Donawerth has been a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, since 1975. The papers cover the years between 1974 and 2009 and document Donawerth's activities at the University of Maryland in the Women's Studies Program, the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, the Composition/Rhetoric Program, and various appointments and committees within the English department. Included in the collection are correspondence, memoranda, meeting agendas and minutes, grant proposals, flyers, syllabi, clippings, notes, publications, budgets, curriculum vitae, course descriptions, course proposals, newsletters, programs, and reports

Ideals, Aesthetics, and Practices of Professionalization in the Tokyo Jazz Scene

In the early twenty-first century, jazz has a history in Japan of approximately 100 years. In contemporary Tokyo, Japanese musicians demonstrate their right to access jazz performance through a variety of musical and extra-musical techniques. Those accepted as fully professional and authentic artists, or puro, gain a special status among their peers, setting them apart from their amateur and part-time counterparts. Drawing on three months of participant-observation in the Tokyo jazz scene, I examine this status of puro, its variable definition, the techniques used by musicians to establish themselves as credible jazz performers, and some obstacles to achieving this status. I claim two things: first, aspiring puro musicians establish themselves within a jazz tradition through musical references to African American identity and a rhetoric of jazz as universal music. Second, I claim that universalism as a core aesthetic creates additional obstacles to puro status for certain musicians in the Tokyo scene

Bridging the Gap: Fourth Grade Before-School Computer Math Lab and Its Impact on California Standardized Test Scores

The purpose of this study was to determine the correlation between participation of low achieving math students in a before-school computer math lab and how their participation affected the fourth grade California Standardized Test (CST) math scale scores at San Joaquin Elementary School. Students participated in the lab based their below proficient performance on multiplication facts tests. The lab was available from January through April in both 2010 and 2011. Students used interactive computer software called IXL. The focus in the lab was for students to master their multiplication tables (0 through 12). To evaluate if there was a statistically significant change in the CST scores because of the treatment, an Abbreviate Interrupted Time Series analysis was applied. The two years before the lab was implemented, the two years with the lab in place and the year after the lab was discontinued were compared. A t-test evaluation of the mean scores in a year-by-year comparison was run. The Levene Test using Homogeneity of Variances test was run which showed similar variances. For this reason, the ANOVA was then used along with the Tukey HSD post-hoc test to identify which groups showed a significant difference from each other. There was a significant improvement in the CST mean scores for fourth grade at San Joaquin Elementary School during the years the treatment was in place. By extending the school day and using interactive computer software together they showed a positive impact on student's CST scores