ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Acknowledgements
I offer my sincerest thanks to all who helped this dissertation on its long journey.
I offer my great thanks to my advisor and mentor, Franklin J. Hildy, to the members of
my committee, Karen Bradley, John Fiscella, Lawrence W. Mintz, and Heather S.
Nathans, and to all the faculty of the University of Maryland that I have had the great
pleasure of working with on this research, among them Carol Burbank, Merle Collins,
and Judith Markowitz. I offer my thanks to several organizations and their faculty/staff
that were especially generous throughout my research. The David Driskell Center for the
Study of Africa and the African Diaspora provided essential money and support for travel
to archives in Detroit, Albuquerque, Atlanta, and Cambridge. The staffs of the Detroit
Institute of the Arts, the University of New Mexico, the Center for Puppetry Arts, and the
Harvard Theatre Collection were surprisingly helpful. Special thanks go to: Melissa
Hurt, who provided photographs of inaccessible private-collection marionettes from the
Federal Theatre Project, Lawrence Baranski, who dedicated a portion of an especially
busy period in the Detroit Institute of the Arts’s schedule to allow me direct access to its
archive, as well as providing electronic copies of a number of collection photographs, and
Lawrence Senelick, who not only opened the remarkable collection at his home and
provided copies of the Royal Marionette playbill, but has, in our occasional meetings,
provided feedback and contacts that have been instrumental to this work.
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