Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection
2015–2016
Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection
75th Anniversary
Annual Report
2015–2016
© 2017 Dumbarton Oaks
Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC
ISSN 0197-9159
Cover photograph: he founders of Dumbarton Oaks, Robert
Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss, in the Rose Garden at the
“Quod Severis Metis” bench. his was taken the year of their 30th
wedding anniversary.
Frontispiece: he Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in spring 2016
www.doaks.org/about/annual-reports
Contents
From the Director
Director’s Oice
7
13
Academic Programs
Fellowship Reports
Byzantine Studies
21
39
71
Garden and Landscape Studies
Pre-Columbian Studies
Library
81
99
109
Publications
Museum
129
Gardens
141
117
Friends of Music
147
Facilities, Finance, Human Resources, and Information
Technology 151
Trustees for Harvard University, Executive Committee,
Honorary Ailiates, Senior Fellows, and Staf 161
From the Director
75 Years!
In 2015–2016, Dumbarton Oaks celebrated its irst three-quarters of a
century as a research institute. We took many measures to guarantee
a properly pyrotechnic commemoration. To single out only a few, we
staged special exhibitions in the garden, the research library, and, most
elaborately, the museum, with a rolling display of seventy-ive objects.
On the web, we shared that same number of posts on a Dumbarton
Oaks anniversary blog. One major means of signaling our coming of
age was a Wintersession course for Harvard undergraduates on the
topic of “Culture and Power: Art, Philanthropy, and Diplomacy in
America,” which was initiated in 2015 and repeated in January 2016.
he anniversary happiness was highlighted by a special concert to
mark the oicial date of our institutional birth. he evening of song
and speeches featured a composition commissioned for the occasion
from Caroline Shaw, who, in the preceding year, had inaugurated a
residency for early-career musicians. In 2015–2016, the new program
built on its success with a second resident, Matthew Aucoin.
What exactly did all the hoopla mark and mean? On November
1, 1940, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss hosted a black-tie reception to solemnize two interconnected events. First, they commenced
their four-step transfer of their estate to Harvard. In this initial
stage, they conveyed to the university both the physical grounds of
Dumbarton Oaks and a generous portion of the funds. Second, they
founded a study program in Byzantine art and culture. Out of modesty, the donors forwent any naming opportunity, but they laid out
with great rigor the causes that impassioned them. In doing so, they
embedded a cultural institution within a facility for higher learning.
The irst-loor gallery in Dumbarton Oaks in 1940, at the time of the
transition from residence to institution.
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he humanities and arts specialize in transmitting all sorts of things
across time. hanks to libraries and teaching, Dumbarton Oaks likewise stores and increases knowledge and memory. We safeguard
funds in endowments and objects in museums. Perhaps most importantly, we perpetuate positive passions across decades and even centuries. Love of the past, other cultures, and beauty is more needed
than ever. It is the best corrective to self-contented and self-righteous
ignorance, which is the night soil that fertilizes seedbeds for misunderstanding, suspicion, and hate. In contrast to the lazy easiness
of unknowingness, love and knowledge require and display true
strength and discipline.
At the celebratory concert, Dumbarton Oaks brought together
fellows and staf from within our community. From outside, we gathered old friends and new. Among these friends and allies could be
counted cultural attachés, close supporters from law and architecture,
faculty members from DC-area universities, and directors and staf
of museums, institutes, and associations. Special appreciation was
owed to cherished colleagues in teaching and administration from
Harvard who made the trek from Massachusetts to DC hose loyalists included Diana Sorensen, who would later step down from the
deanship in Arts and Humanities; Mathilda van Es, associate dean
of the same division; and colleagues from the faculty John Dufy, Ioli
Kalavrezou, and Michael Puett. One inal name that bears mentioning is Peter Riley, who helped realize the dream to acquire and renovate a building at 1700 Wisconsin Avenue NW. Now the Fellowship
House, that beautiful building has enabled such new programming as
the Early-Career Musician Residency. I cannot imagine a more amicable or appropriate group of people with whom to have fêted a special day, or a more itting location, since the reception following the
concert took place in the new building.
he festivities were deeply rooted in the essence of Dumbarton
Oaks. By the intent of the founders, their former estate has become
an inspiringly and elegantly complex place. Our establishment serves
and preserves the humanities and arts. As both real and metaphoric
gardeners, we cultivate cultures that we are charged to protect and
propagate through such disciplines as art history, history, and philology. At the same time, we endeavor to beneit international and
national communities, Washington, and Harvard. he balancing
act can become demanding but it is unfailingly rewarding. Owing to
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the library and collections, Dumbarton Oaks attracts ever more residential fellows and other scholars in Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and
Garden and Landscape studies. It sponsors lectures and conferences,
summer schools, and other such events. It publishes major books. In
a delicate equilibrium, the institution opens to the public its museum
and formal gardens. It hosts monthly concerts. In all these ambitions,
we aspire to be what one visitor described as “God’s temple, and a
tribute to beauty.”
he overarching theme for the anniversary was “Preserving the
Past, Inspiring the Future.” Under that heading, our website stated,
“he United States was struggling to emerge from a prolonged economic downturn. Europe had to contend with extremist groups that
made the future deeply worrisome. he humanities were the last thing
on the minds of most people.” hose words transport us to 1940–1941,
the irst year in which Dumbarton Oaks operated under the aegis of
Harvard University, ater its git by the donors. While celebrating the
three-quarters of a century during which we have supported our special slices of the humanities and arts, we pondered the state of our
ields through three lenses: how did they look on the eve of the Second
World War, what is their current condition, and what prospects do
they have in coming years?
What did our donors believe? From the vantage point of one- half
decade later, Robert Bliss wrote in the forty-ith anniversary report
of Harvard’s class of 1900: “As the depression increased and Nazism
gained control of Germany we knew war was a certainty and that inevitably this country would be sucked into the cataclysm. So we faced
the future squarely and decided to transfer Dumbarton Oaks to the
University in 1940. To ease the wrench, we assured each other . . . that
to give up our home at our own time to assure the long range realization of our plan was the way of wisdom. hus we are enjoying the
transformation of Dumbarton Oaks into an institution—the only one
of its particular sort in existence.” hese powerful words still ring true.
Between 1940 and now, the museum world, diplomats, journalists, and broader circles of Washington have become ever better
acquainted with Dumbarton Oaks, and we with them. For the success of the January Wintersession course, we were grateful for collaborations with the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian museums,
Phillips Collection, George Washington University and Textile
Museums, Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens, Kreeger Museum,
from the dir ector
9
and others. We were likewise grateful to area public schools for shaping formal bonds with us that enabled school visits to our gardens.
hanks to prudent management by Harvard, thinking back on
seven and a half decades makes me only more optimistic about the
future. We can look forward to many more anniversaries. he institution is poised for even bolder advances. By improving residential
housing and increasing library study areas, we have positioned ourselves to beneit more deserving individuals than ever. We aim to
achieve greater outreach, to share the knowledge and beauty of which
we are fortunate stewards, and to perpetuate the ields we embody.
In strengthening ourselves to serve the future, we will forsake nothing that has made this institution the special place it has been. To
hear the festive birthday concert, we sat in the McKim, Mead &
White–designed Music Room, where the 1926 grand piano signed by
Paderewski stands as a monument. Taken together, all the ediices and
grounds, objects, and staf, fellows, and visitors of Dumbarton Oaks
function as an integrated whole to support our mission. he basis for
this totality was three loves—love between two people, love for a place
they made, and love for a cause, which can be put most simply as the
humanities and arts. hese positives remain embedded in our nature.
A large mosaic that graces the loor of the foyer at the entrance of
the main complex depicts a woman lourishing a lower. It proclaims
in Greek Apólausis, meaning enjoyment. A great historian of late
antiquity, Peter Brown, deines this concept as “the shared enjoyment
of the good things in life . . . a precious collective ritual, a celebration of the will to survive.” his time and place defy facile comparison
with Antioch in late antiquity, but on the evening of the concert we
heeded the mosaic by enjoying and celebrating together. As any birthday party should do, the concert mixed new and old. Like Dumbarton
Oaks as a totality, it channeled the past through the present into the
future. he Dover Quartet played the world premiere of Caroline
Shaw’s Dumbarton Oaks commission, Plan & Elevation (he Grounds
of Dumbarton Oaks). Aterward we savored the strains of Mozart’s
viola quintet in C minor. My gratitude knows no bounds, to the Dover
Quartet for performing, to all who were present for being in the Music
Room to hear, to the Blisses and my university for making it all imaginable, and to the colleagues who labor tirelessly to bring to fruition
our distinct and distinctive share in the dreams of the humanities and
arts. Enjoy!
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from the dir ector
11
Director’s Oice
75th Anniversary Overview
Dumbarton Oaks was oicially inaugurated on November 1, 1940, and
its 75th Anniversary has provided an occasion for celebration, relection, and initiatives looking to the future. No sooner was the ink dry
on the paperwork to inalize the Blisses’ transfer of Dumbarton Oaks
to Harvard University, than Robert wrote Mildred a congratulatory
note, proclaiming that the newly founded research library and collection would stand as “a delight to all who visit it and a great resource
to those who are fortunate enough to work there.” hree-quarters of
a century later, the research institute, museum, and gardens continue
to serve as both delight and resource.
Festivities began with a gala celebration on the day of the anniversary. Director Jan Ziolkowski observed in remarks delivered before
a concert and reception: “If ever we needed to ensure that learners
were exposed to diferent modes of expression and interpretation, and
to art and scripture from outside their own heritages, it would be now.
And so here we stand, those of us in the humanities and arts, ready
as ever to contribute, eager as ever to engage with new publics in new
media by interrogating afresh old and new beauty alike.” he concert featured the debut of a new work by composer, singer, and violinist Caroline Shaw, who was Dumbarton Oaks’s irst Early-Career
Musician in 2014–2015. Titled Plan & Elevation (he Grounds of
Dumbarton Oaks), the piece was inspired by the composer’s residency
in the Dumbarton Oaks research community, and each of its ive
movements evoked a diferent area of the gardens. he Dover String
Caroline Shaw introduces her composition Plan & Elevation (The Grounds
of Dumbarton Oaks).
13
James Carder talks to visitors about the museum exhibition 75 Years/75 Objects.
Quartet performed the composition alongside Mozart’s sprightly
second viola quintet, with Shaw on viola. he concert was followed by
a festive reception in the Oak Room of the new Fellowship Building.
A number of digital projects marked the anniversary online, in
a bid to make the institution’s history and contributions to scholarship accessible to a wider community. he Dumbarton Oaks 75th
Anniversary Blog assembled a vast amount of material on aspects of
the institution’s past. Seventy-ive posts, two per week, ranging from
the property’s colonial-era history to its modern lunchtimes, were
published between September and May. In the online exhibit entitled
Garden Perspectives, a swipe of the mouse seamlessly transformed
historical photos of the gardens into modern views from exactly the
same vantage point. (he exhibit took material form in the Catalogue
House of the garden, not far from the cherry trees.) An ongoing
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dumbarton oaks
Chinese ambassador Cui Tiankai with John Beardsley, Alison Hardie, and
Jan Ziolkowski.
initiative solicited materials relating to Dumbarton Oaks’s history
from the public at large.
he museum marked the anniversary with an ambitious rotating exhibition, 75 Years/75 Objects, that placed a spotlight not only on
some of its most remarkable works of art but also on the ways in which
the museum engages with them to advance the public’s understanding of curation and scholarship. Each month adopted as its thematic
lens a verb—Researching, Reconstructing, Collecting, Reinterpreting,
Conserving, Reuniting, Pondering, Questioning, and Revealing—that
captured essential aspects of the curators’ work to bring artworks to
life. Over the course of nine months, seventy-ive objects were featured,
ranging from some of the museum’s most famous pieces (such as the
Birthing Figure) to some of its least known, such as a photograph owned
by the Blisses of a New York nightclub called Dumbarton Oaks! he
museum also held a special conference, “Private Collecting and Public
Display: Art Museums in the Nation’s Capital in the Early Twentieth
Century,” which set Dumbarton Oaks’s formation in the local context
of the many museums and cultural institutions created by philanthropists around the same time.
Dir ector’s Office
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All three study programs staged events to assess the state of their
respective ields between Dumbarton Oaks’s founding and the present, ranging from panel discussions among fellows, staf, and institutional ailiates (Byzantine Studies), to invited lectures (Pre-Columbian
Studies), to special discussion sessions at the College Art Association
and the Society of Architectural Historians annual meetings (Garden
and Landscape Studies). he study programs also canvassed former fellows, ailiates, and staf to compile an online bibliography of inluential
books and articles produced with institutional support, further documenting the institution’s contributions to the three ields. he conclusion of the year was marked by a new initiative, the Dumbarton Oaks
Humanities Fellowships, which—in collaboration with distinguished
local institutions—will encourage new generations of the best Harvard
graduates to consider careers and vocations in the humanities.
Executive Committee Meeting
he annual meeting of the Dumbarton Oaks Executive Committee
took place on hursday, April 21, 2016. he meeting was convened by
Diana Sorensen, dean of Arts and Humanities Division of the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences, and included committee members Mathilda van
Es (administrative dean for Arts and Humanities), Ioli Kalavrezou
(Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Art), Michael Puett
(Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History), homas Cummins
(Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and
Colonial Art), Jan Ziolkowski (director of Dumbarton Oaks), and
Yota Batsaki (executive director of Dumbarton Oaks). he committee reviewed the academic and institutional programs that took place
over the previous year, including the 75th anniversary concert and
exhibitions.
Institutional Collaborations
In spring 2016, Dumbarton Oaks continued the tradition of collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, organizing two events that
complemented the exhibition Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the
Hellenistic World (December 13, 2015–March 20, 2016). he ity works
on display surveyed the development of Hellenistic art as it spread
from Greece throughout the Mediterranean between the fourth and
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Ioli Kalavrezou and Jonathan Shea at the “Afterlives of Alexander in the
Byzantine World” event at the National Gallery of Art.
irst centuries BC. he irst event was held at the National Gallery of
Art on February 11, 2016. Ioli Kalavrezou, Dimitris Kastritsis (2013–2014
Byzantine Studies fellow and lecturer at the University of St. Andrews),
and Jonathan Shea (Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Byzantine
History) presented perspectives on “he Aterlives of Alexander in
the Byzantine World.” he second collaboration was an illustrated
talk, “From Olympus to the Streets of Constantinople: he Byzantine
Retirement of the Ancient Gods,” delivered by Anthony Kaldellis (professor of classics at Ohio State University) on March 3, 2016.
On April 8 and April 9, 2016, Dumbarton Oaks hosted the conference entitled “Private Collecting and Public Display: Art Museums
in the Nation’s Capital in the Early Twentieth Century” (jointly
organized with the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of
Georgia). Cofunded by the Wilson Center for the Humanities and
Arts, University of Georgia, and Dumbarton Oaks, the conference
explored the aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological sources that
shaped art collecting in early twentieth-century America, focusing on
collections in Washington, DC.
Dir ector’s Office
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On April 13, 2016, German ambassador Peter Wittig and his wife,
Huberta von Voss-Wittig, hosted a book discussion of the recent
Dumbarton Oaks publication Letters of a Dead Man, the irst full
English translation of a remarkable volume by the early nineteenthcentury traveler, landscape designer, and author Prince Hermann von
Pückler-Muskau. Director of Garden and Landscape Studies John
Beardsley and Linda Parshall, the book’s editor and translator, discussed aspects of Pückler’s career and letters.
he Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies and the Garden
and Landscape Studies program collaborated with the Environmental
Film Festival in the nation’s capital to screen the ilm Containment.
Part wake-up call, part observational documentary, part graphic sci-i
novel, Containment tracks imaginative attempts to plan for a radioactive future. he screening in the Oak Room at 1700 Wisconsin Avenue
on March 23, 2016, was followed by a question-and-answer session
with director Peter Galison, professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University.
Director’s Learned Societies Meetings
On February 25–27, 2016, Ziolkowski attended the Medieval Academy
of America annual meeting in Cambridge.
Ziolkowski also attended the 51st International Congress on
Medieval Studies, held in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on May 11–15. On
the evening of hursday, May 12, he hosted a reception to introduce
attendees to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.
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Academic Programs
Dumbarton Oaks was pleased to receive a record 250 fellowship and
project grant applications across the three areas of study in 2015–
2016. Dumbarton Oaks awarded ity fellowships: twenty-three in
Byzantine Studies; sixteen in Garden and Landscape Studies, including the inaugural Mellon Fellows in Urban Landscape Studies; and
eleven in Pre-Columbian Studies. An Early-Career Musician, two visiting scholars in Byzantine Studies, one visiting scholar in Garden and
Landscape Studies, one director’s visiting scholar, three Dumbarton
Oaks Medieval Library residencies, and a Mellon Practitioner
Residency in Urban Landscape Studies contributed to the academic
community by being in residence for a portion of the academic year.
Over the summer months, six departments welcomed a total of twelve
interns from Harvard University. Dumbarton Oaks also awarded
eight project grants, iteen one-month research awards, and twelve
short-term predoctoral residencies.
Byzantine Studies
Fellows
Leslie Brubaker, University of Birmingham, “he Virgin Mary in
the Byzantine World, 400–1200” (spring term)
Mary Cunningham, University of Nottingham, “he Virgin Mary
in the Byzantine World, 400–1200: Images, Texts, Relics, and
Ceremony”
Stig Frøyshov, University of Oslo, “he Horologion in
Constantinople and Peripheries: Palatine, Secular, and Monastic
Contexts”
Wintersession students examine rare books from the collection
at Hillwood.
21
Dumbarton Oaks fellows at the annual pumpkin-carving party at the
director’s residence.
Jefrey Hamburger, Harvard University, “From Cross to Cruciix:
Berthold of Nuremberg’s Dominican Rereading of Hrabanus
Maurus’ In Honor of the Holy Cross”
Yuri Marano, Collège de France, Monde Byzantin, “he Privileged
Burials of Early Byzantine Greece (Early Fourth to Early
Seventh Century CE)”
Fabio Pagani, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and
Humanities, “Studying Plato at Mystra: New Perspectives on
Gemistos Pletho and His School”
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Nikolaos Zagklas, University of Silesia, “heodore Prodromos:
Writing Poetry and Schedography in Twelth-Century
Constantinople”
Junior Fellows
Ludovic Bender, University of Fribourg, “Hermitages and RockMonasteries of Laconia (Eleventh–Fiteenth Century): he
Landscape of Monasticism in a Byzantine Region”
Siren Celik, University of Birmingham, “A Historical Biography of
Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425)”
Bradley Hostetler, Florida State University, “he Function of Text:
Byzantine Reliquaries with Metrical Inscriptions, 843–1204”
Academic Progr ams
23
Roman Shliakhtin, Central European University, “he Image of the
Seljuk Turks among the Byzantine Literati of the Eleventh and
Twelth Centuries”
Summer Fellows
Anne-Catherine Baudoin, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, “he
Greek Gospel of Nicodemus in the Context of First-Millennium
Culture”
Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, Wittenberg University, “Feeding
Asceticism: he Archaeology of Byzantine Monastic Kitchens”
Branislav Cvetković, Regional Museum of Jagodina, Balkan Studies
Institute, “Between Power and Demise: Reliquary of Barbara
Frankopan Branković”
Reyhan Durmaz, Brown University, “Texts, Authors, and Holy Men
between Christian and Islamic Hagiographical Traditions”
Roberta Franchi, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest,
“Reading the Life of Olympias: A Case for Female Deaconesses at
Constantinople”
Przemyslaw Marciniak, University of Silesia, “Hermippos,
Hermodotos, and Musokles: A Study of the hree Byzantine
Dialogues”
Mark Masterson, Victoria University of Wellington, “Same-Sex
Desire among Elite Men during the Time of the Macedonians”
Brian Matz, Carroll College, “Patristic Citations in the Filioque
Controversy of the Middle Byzantine Period”
Phillip Mazero, Saint Louis University, “Frontier Politics: VenetoByzantine Relations, Civic Identity, and Imperial Hegemony,
697–1126”
William R. Tyler Fellows
Nathaniel Aschenbrenner, Harvard University, “Rome Contested:
Byzantine, Humanist, and Holy Roman Discourses of Empire in
the Fiteenth Century”
Coleman Connelly, Harvard University, “Appropriating the Greek
Past in the Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement”
David Ungvary, Harvard University, “he Anxiety of Artiice:
Latin Poetic Culture in the Early Medieval Mediterranean, ca.
500–700”
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Byzantine fellows and staf for the 2015–2016 academic year.
Project Grants
Smaragdi Arvaniti, University of Athens, “Recording Material
Culture at the Shën Mëri Church, Labovo: An Unexplored
Religious Center of Byzantine Alban”
James Crow, University of Edinburgh, “Apalirou Environs Project”
Ine Jacobs, University of Edinburgh, “Kostoperska Karpa Regional
Archaeological Project”
Noah Kaye, University of Oregon, “Between Constantinople and
hessalonica: he Justinianic Settlement at Molyvoti, hrace”
Athanasios Vionis, University of Cyprus, “Settled and Sacred
Landscapes: Byzantine Rural Archaeology in Koinou, Cyprus”
Visiting Scholars
Claudia Rapp, University of Vienna (fall term)
Jonathan Shepard, University of Cambridge (spring term)
Academic Progr ams
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One-Month Research Awards
Kristofel Demoen, Ghent University, “he Paradeisos Ascribed to
John Geometres: Sources and Metaphrastic Technique”
David Dunsenbury, Catholic University of Leuven, “Nemesius of
Emesa and the Genesis of Christian Anthropology”
Dimitri Korobeinikov, University at Albany, State University
of New York, “From Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire:
Paphlagonia and Western Pontos, 1061–1461”
Dimitra Kotoula, Greek Ministry of Culture, “Art, Politics, and
Eschatology in the Burial Chapel of Lay Monastic Founders in
Byzantium, 11th–14th Centuries”
Anne McClanan, Portland State University, “Humor in the Great
Palace Mosaics: New Avenues of Interpretation”
Arseniy Petrov, Russian State University for the Humanities, “‘he
Saviour in Majesty’ in Russian Art of the Fourteenth and
Fiteenth Centuries: Origin and Meaning”
Andrea Rhoby, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for
Medieval Research, “he Chronicle of Constantine Manasses,
German Translation”
Rustam Shukurov, Moscow State University, “Greeks in Muslim
Anatolia, ca. 1100–ca. 1400”
Luigi Silvano, University of Turin, “Interpreting Odysseus’ Travels
in Fourteenth Century Byzantium: Manuel Gabalas”
Foteini Spingou, Pontiical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
“Medieval Texts on Byzantine Art and Aesthetics (1081–
ca. 1330s)”
Short-Term Predoctoral Residencies
Sarah Simmons, Florida State University
Baukje van den Berg, Leiden University
Shukurov Rustam, Moscow State University
Alice Lynn McMichael, Graduate Center, City University
of New York
Cioli Lorenzo, Università di Roma
Lauren Wainwright, University of Birmingham
Werner de Saeger, University of Oxford
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Garden and Landscape Studies
Fellows
Tom Conley, Harvard University, “Mapping River and City in
France, 1600–1640”
Philip Jacks, George Washington University, “‘To Make it a Great
Entrepot’: he Story of Baltimore’s Locust Point” (spring term)
Linda Jewell, University of California, Berkeley, “Gathering on
the Ground: Experiencing Landscape in American Outdoor
heaters” (fall term)
Tamara Sears, Yale University, “Wilderness Urbanisms:
Architecture, Landscape, and Travel in Precolonial India”
Junior Fellows
Camille Behnke Shamble, University of Virginia, “Growing
Children Out of Doors: California’s Open-Air Schools and
Children’s Health, 1907–1917”
Shuichi Wanibuchi, Harvard University, “A Colony by Design:
Nature, Knowledge, and the Transformation of Landscape in the
Delaware Valley, 1680–1780”
Summer Fellows
Timothy Baird, Pennsylvania State University, “Landscape
Materiality: Innovation and Convention from Modernism to the
Present”
Francois Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, Florida State University, “‘If
Eve Had a Spade in Paradise. . . ’: Elizabeth von Arnim and Her
Gardens (1898–1914)”
Josepha Richard, University of Sheield, “he Gardens of Lingnan:
Valorizing the hird Garden Culture in China”
Yichi Zhang, University of Technology, Sydney, “he Parlor of
the Metropolis: Public Parks and Open Space in the British
Concessions of China, 1842–1937”
Mellon Fellows in Urban Landscape Studies
Christina Milos, University of Hannover, “Anticipatory
Urbanization Strategies for In-Situ Oil Sands Extraction in
Nigeria” (fall term)
Academic Progr ams
27
Alpa Nawre, Kansas State University, “Adaptive Land-Water Edges
in Indian Cities” (spring term)
Kara Schlichting, Queens College, City University of New York,
“he Nature of Urban Coastal Resiliency: Twentieth-Century
Governance, Environmental Management, and Design” (spring
term)
David Wooden, District Department of the Environment,
“Washington’s Sewer History: Ideological, Technological, and
Environmental Evolution” (fall term)
Mellon Practitioner Residency in
Urban Landscape Studies
Gary Hilderbrand, Reed Hilderbrand LLC
William R. Tyler Fellows
John Davis, Harvard University, “he U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
and the American Landscape, 1865–1904”
Deirdre Moore, Harvard University, “Indigenous Knowledge and
Breeding of Cochineal Insects in Eighteenth-Century Colonial
Mexico”
Project Grants
Alison Carter, University of Sydney and University of Wisconsin–
Madison, “Beyond Rice Agriculture: he Garden Agriculture of
Angkor Wat”
Kimberly Mercurio, Harvard University, “he A. E. Bye Land
Surveys”
Visiting Scholar
Alison Hardie, Leeds University, “he Dumbarton Oaks Anthology
of Chinese Garden Literature”
One-Month Research Awards
Giorgia Aquilar, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II,
“Imperfect Landscapes for the Evolutive City: New Ecological
Paradigms in the Work of Michael Van Valkenburgh”
Michelle Sauer, University of North Dakota, “Gardens, the Rhetoric
of Desire, and Lesbian Space in Late Medieval Dream Visions”
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Garden and Landscape fellows and staf for the 2015–2016 academic year.
Margaret Goehring, New Mexico State University, “houghts
about Late Medieval Ornament and the Opening Miniature for
Guillaume de Machaut’s ‘Dit dou Lyon’”
Short-Term Predoctoral Residencies
Brett Culbert, Harvard University
Kate Wersan, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Pre-Columbian Studies
Fellows
Christopher Beekman, University of Colorado, Denver, “Out of
Many, One: Collective Governance and Its Visual Ramiications
in Pre-Columbian Jalisco, Mexico”
William Fash, Harvard University
Academic Progr ams
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Pre-Columbian fellows and staf for the 2015–2016 academic year.
Takeshi Inomata, University of Arizona, “Ritual and Politics at the
Preclassic Maya Center of Ceibal, Guatemala”
Daniela Triadan, University of Arizona, “he Development of Social
Inequality at the Preclassic Maya Center of Ceibal, Guatemala”
Junior Fellows
Erika Brant, University of Virginia, “he Dead Rose from the
Ground: Ancestors and Political Authority in a Post-Collapse
Andean Society (1000–1450 CE)”
Rebecca Mendelsohn, University at Albany, State University of New
York, “he Early Mesoamerican City of Izapa and the Southern
Maya Region”
Jennifer Saracino, Tulane University, “Shiting Landscape:
Depictions of Environmental and Cultural Disruption in the
Mapa Uppsala”
Summer Fellows
Kirby Farah, University of California, Riverside, “Palace and Home:
Creating and Maintaining an Elite Identity at Postclassic Xaltocan”
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Anastasia Kalyuta, Russian Museum of Ethnography, “Discovering
the Mysteries of the Oztoticpac Land Map: Paleography and
Translation of Nahua Land Cadastre”
Matthew Looper, California State University, Chico, “Deer Imagery
in Ancient Maya Art”
David Reed, University of Michigan, “Maya in the Middle”
Project Grants
Steve Kosiba, University of Alabama, “he Roots of the Inca State:
Ritual Practice and Sacred Space at Huanacauri (Cuzco, Peru)”
One-Month Research Awards
María Florencia Becerra, Instituto de Arqueología, Universidad de
Buenos Aires, “Mining and Metal Working during Inca Times:
A Comparative Analysis”
Christina Torres-Rouf, University of California, Merced, “Travelers
and Trade: Mobility in the Formative Period Atacama Desert
(500 BC–AD 500)”
Short-Term Predoctoral Residencies
Daniela La Chioma Silvestre Villalva, University of São
Paulo, Brazil
Fernando Danta Marques Pesce, Universidade Estadual de
Campinas, Brazil
Elena Iourtaeva, Harvard University
Institutional Fellowships and
Academic Appointments
Early-Career Musician Residency
Matthew Aucoin, Harvard University
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library Residencies
Johanna Kramer, University of Missouri
Hugh Magennis, Queen’s University Belfast
Robin Norris, Carleton University
Academic Progr ams
31
Director’s Visiting Scholar
he director invited Professor Michel Zink to Dumbarton Oaks in
2015–2016. Professor Zink teaches French and Occitan medieval literature at the Collège de France. Since 2011, he has been secretary
of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres at the Institut de
France. He has authored more than twenty-ive books on medieval
literature, principally religious literature, troubadour’s poetry, and
literary theory.
Wintersession Course
In January 2016, Dumbarton Oaks continued its Wintersession
course. Instituted in 2015, the week-long session brought thirteen
Harvard undergraduates to Washington, DC, to study the interaction
of cultural diplomacy, philanthropy, and sot power. Led by director
Jan Ziolkowski, the course, “Culture and Power: Art, Philanthropy,
and Diplomacy in America,” was intended for students with interests in twentieth-century cultural and art history as well as those
with career goals in cultural, academic, and nonproit institutions.
In addition to seminars and visits to local museums, the course featured talks by distinguished administrators, curators, and directors
of cultural nonproits. Speakers included Stanley Katz, professor
in public and international afairs, Princeton University Center for
Arts and Cultural Policy Studies; Dodge hompson, chief of exhibitions, National Gallery of Art; John Wetenhall, director, George
Washington University Museum and Textile Museum; and Asen
Kirin, associate professor of art, University of Georgia.
Wintersession Students
Brittany Ellis ’19
Mireya Hernandez ’17
Gal Koplewitz ’17
Elizabeth Keto ’18
Luke Kelly ’19
Charlie Krumholz ’19
Yousra Neberai ’18
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Jessika Nebrat ’18
Nancy O’Neil ’17
William Oh ’18
Audrey Shi ’17
Alexandra Walsh ’18
Sarah Wu ’19
Wintersession students explore the archives of Smithsonian Folkways
with associate director Dr. Atesh Sonneborn.
Undergraduate Class Visit
Ioli Kalavrezou, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Art, and
students Veronika Poier, Kelsey Keldridge, Juliette Calvarin, and Sara
Price were hosted by Gudrun Bühl on November 12–14, 2015. he visiting class discussed and studied objects in the Byzantine galleries,
viewed the Byzantine manuscript collection, and visited object storage to handle and examine several objects from the collections.
Postbaccalaureate Fellowships
In 2014–2015, Dumbarton Oaks developed a new program of postbaccalaureate fellowships for recent Harvard graduates interested in
exploring careers in the humanities. hese one-year appointments,
which can be renewed for a second year, encourage recipients to apply
their research skills and introduce them into the professional worlds
of curators, librarians, archivists, and nonproit administrators.
Academic Progr ams
33
Spencer Lenield graduated from Harvard College in 2012 with an
AB in history and literature. He then attended Oxford from 2012
to 2015 on a Rhodes Scholarship. Since coming to Dumbarton
Oaks as media fellow in September 2015, Lenield has worked
on a range of video and writing projects. In addition to being
responsible for public media, Lenield is currently working on
digitizing and editing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autograph letters in the Rare Book Collection.
Rebecca Frankel graduated from Harvard College in 2015 with an
AB in classics. As postbaccalaureate fellow in Medieval Latin,
she assists in the preparation of various medieval-themed volumes for publication.
Jessica Salley is a 2014 graduate of Harvard College, where she
completed a joint concentration in history and Near Eastern languages and civilizations. At Dumbarton Oaks, she serves as the
postgraduate fellow in communications and outreach, within
the Director’s Oice. Her key projects have been those that help
Dumbarton Oaks strengthen ties to the communities of which it
is a part—Harvard, Washington, DC, and the broader scholarly
and public audiences.
Postdoctoral Fellowships
he postdoctoral fellowships are three-year appointments designed
to engage early-career scholars in research and publication at
Dumbarton Oaks.
Jeanne Hafner (PhD, University of Virginia, 2008) is Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies. Before lecturing in the department of the history of science at Harvard
University, Hafner was a visiting fellow at the Harvard
Graduate School of Design, the ETH in Zürich, the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Center for
Metropolitan Studies at the Technical University in Berlin.
At Dumbarton Oaks, she coordinates the scholarly, publication, and outreach activities of the Urban Landscape Studies
Initiative, funded by a ive-year Mellon Foundation grant.
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Bryan Cockrell (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2014) is
researching and supporting the development of a catalog of jade,
metal, and shell museum objects from Central America and
Colombia. he catalogue not only will proile over 200 objects
from the Dumbarton Oaks Collection but also will present the
latest archaeological research in the region and explore connecting threads such as human origins, technological transmission,
and the representation of fauna in various media.
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowships
Konstantina Karterouli (PhD, Harvard University, 2015) is postdoctoral fellow in Byzantine art history. Working in Image
Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Karterouli researches collection materials in order to better situate the collections in their
intellectual and scholarly contexts and to advise on digitization
priorities.
Jonathan Shea (PhD, University of Birmingham, 2010), postdoctoral
teaching fellow in Byzantine history, oversees the publication
of the Online Catalogue of Byzantine Seals. He also teaches at
George Washington University; his courses include a survey on
the crusades and a course on “he Heroic Age of Byzantium” in
the tenth century.
Elizabeth Williams (PhD, New York University, 2015), postdoctoral
teaching fellow in Byzantine art history, coordinates the online
catalogue of late antique and Egyptian textiles at Dumbarton
Oaks. She also teaches at George Washington University. Her
teaching fellowship allows her to bridge the university and
museum environments, a unique opportunity that fosters close
object study as well as interaction with scholarly, student, and
public audiences.
Postgraduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities
Lain Wilson (Princeton University), manages a number of digital humanities projects, including the Online Catalogue of
Byzantine Seals. He is pursuing his PhD in Byzantine history,
numismatics, and sigillography.
Academic Progr ams
35
2015 Summer Internships for Harvard Students
Director’s Oice
Gladys Kisela ’17, Outreach Media
Elizabeth Keto ’18, Public Programming and Outreach
Samuel Shapiro ’18, Ephemera Acquisitions
Katherine Borrazzo ’18, 75th Anniversary Social Media
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
Eric Nemarich, rising Classics G2
Yun Ni, rising Comparative Literature G4
Hope Patterson ’18
Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives
Hannah Firestone ’16, Oral History
Museum
Alexandra Walsh ’18, Byzantine Collections Catalogue
Margaret Vo ’17, Oral History
Pre-Columbian Studies
Hannah Yang, MLA ’16, Orientation Gallery Exhibit
Publications
Nathan Cummings ’18, Annual Report
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Fellowship Reports
Byzantine Studies
Fellows
Leslie Brubaker, University of Birmingham, “he Virgin
Mary in the Byzantine World, 400–1200” (spring term)
During my four months at Dumbarton Oaks, I completed two articles, delivered three public lectures (Brown University, Catholic
University, and the University of Virginia), revised and expanded two
chapters of a book on the cult of the Virgin in Byzantium (coauthored
with Mary Cunningham), and completed much of the research for
the remaining two chapters. Both Mary and I beneited enormously
from the opportunity to work closely together for a sustained period.
Among our key indings about the material culture associated with
the Virgin Mary: irst, there is far more early (pre-600) material on
the Virgin Mary than has been recognized, but the recent hypothesis
that a painting of a woman at the well in the baptistery from Dura
Europos (ca. 250) represents the earliest image of Mary is demonstrably incorrect; second, there is great variety in the form of this material, but speciic media (e.g., liturgical silver and textiles) demonstrate
discrete approaches to picturing the Virgin; and third, the material
produced in the regions around Rome and Constantinople was, from
the earliest period, distinctly diferentiated.
Mary Cunningham, University of Nottingham, “he Virgin
Mary in the Byzantine World, 400–1200: Images, Texts,
Relics, and Ceremony”
My fellowship was primarily spent working on a forthcoming book
(coauthored with Leslie Brubaker) entitled he Virgin Mary in the
The Byzantine reading room in the Main House, 1953.
39
Byzantine World, ca. AD 400–1204: Images, Texts, Relics, and Ceremony.
My part of the project included work on the Marian relics in
Constantinople (a robe and a belt), festal and occasional sermons, hagiography, and various polemical texts that concern the Virgin Mary.
Although the book is not inished, we were able to make signiicant
progress on our respective parts. In addition to revising four existing
chapters, I was able to carry out new research on middle Byzantine
hymnography and poetry. he completed project will be submitted to
Cambridge University Press. Other projects completed in the course of
the fellowship included correcting the proofs of “he Interpretation of
the New Testament in Byzantine Preaching: Mediating an Encounter
with the Word,” an article that will appear in he New Testament in
Byzantium, edited by D. Krueger and R. S. Nelson. homas Arentzen
and I submitted a proposal for an edited volume—based on the proceedings of a workshop on the Virgin Mary at the International
Conference on Patristic Studies, Oxford, in August—to Cambridge
University Press.
Stig Frøyshov, University of Oslo, “he Horologion in
Constantinople and Peripheries: Palatine, Secular, and
Monastic Contexts”
My project concerned the adoption and evolution in Constantinople
and its peripheries of the Jerusalem Book of Hours (Horologion)
until the time of the Fourth Crusade, with particular emphasis
on the ecclesiastical contexts for its use (monastic, palatine, and
patriarchal). he project had two distinct parts: until the tenth
century, no Greek Horologion manuscripts for Constantinople
seem to have been preserved, but in the eleventh and twelth centuries, we encounter Horologion manuscripts clearly relating
to Constantinople. My project evolved into a broad study of the
Hagiopolites oice in Constantinople until about the eleventh century. From the outset, my hypothesis was that the Hagiopolites
Divine Oice in Constantinople had been practiced not only by
monasteries, but also by palatine and secular, or even patriarchal,
churches. Study of nonmonastic hymnographers makes it safe to
deduce that the Hagiopolites rite was used at the Great Palace, at
least in some of its churches, from the eighth century onwards. he
question of the use of Hagiopolites in patriarchal churches is more
complicated. I found that a considerable number of hymnographers
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belonged to the patriarchal clergy of Hagia Sophia, including many
patriarchs. Could Hagiopolites have been an oicial, second rite
of the patriarchate, besides the primary Ecclesiastes rite of Hagia
Sophia? he inclusion of stichera and kanons (Hagiopolites hymn
genres) in Ecclesiastes services found in eleventh-century sources
precludes the simple conclusion that Hagiopolites hymnography by
necessity implies the full Hagipolites rite.
Jefrey Hamburger, Harvard University, “From Cross to
Cruciix: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Dominican Rereading of
Hrabanus Maurus’ In Honor of the Holy Cross”
Most of my fellowship was devoted to a book on medieval diagrams,
speciically those of the Dominican Berthold of Nuremberg, who,
in the late thirteenth century, rewrote and expanded In honorem
sanctae crucis, by the Carolingian polymath Hrabanus Maurus.
Using this case study to trace the transformation of attitudes toward
images from the early to the late Middle Ages, I drated my book,
tentatively entitled From Cross to Cruciix: Berthold of Nuremberg’s
Reconiguration of Hrabanus Maurus’ Treatise on the Cross, to be
published by the University of Chicago Press. he book will use the
reception of Hrabanus to examine the shit from sign to body and
transcendental sign to historical narrative in medieval art. My fellowship year enabled me to read broadly, not only on the integration of
narrative and diagrammatic modes of representation in the medieval
West but also on the discourse on diagrams in ields as varied as contemporary philosophy, artiicial intelligence, Bildwissenschat, and
the history of science. his reading will enable me to situate my study
in current humanistic scholarship on the diagram.
Yuri Marano, Collège de France, Monde Byzantin, “he
Privileged Burials of Early Byzantine Greece (Early Fourth to
Early Seventh Century CE)”
During my fellowship, I explored the emergence of Christian society in early Byzantine Greece, focusing on ad sanctos burials, the
tombs of individuals buried near the body or relics of a saint or
martyr. Ater collecting evidence for the most recent discoveries, I
framed the phenomenon within the Christianization of the diocese of
Macedonia. hrough the analysis of funerary inscriptions, I considered the composition of the local ruling class and its involvement in
Fellowship R eports
41
church building. he appearance of ad sanctos burials highlights the
growing prestige of the Church and its ability to mobilize resources.
Well attested in rural basilicas, ad sanctos burials challenge the idea
of Christianization and church building as a principally urban phenomenon. he burials hint at a Christian aristocracy, living both in
towns and in the countryside, that represented its status through
association with relics. My project ofers very promising streams of
inquiry. Because it is located midway between East and West, Greece
is a perfect case study for the dynamics of Christianization, and it is
my intention to integrate the Greek data with other Mediterranean
evidence in a comparative perspective.
Fabio Pagani, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and
Humanities, “Studying Plato at Mystra: New Perspectives on
Gemistos Pletho and His School”
My research investigates Byzantine intellectual history at the end
of Paleologan period. Against the widespread assumption that the
Byzantine Middle Ages were unable to produce original philosophical speculation, I focused my attention on Gemistos Pletho and
his school operating at Mystra in southern Greece. Pletho and his
school have been the object of conlicting ideological interpretations,
particularly when it comes to the relationship between philosophy
and Christianity. Against this background, I have brought to the
discussion a methodology based on the combination of philology,
paleography, and textual criticism. Gemistos reappropriated the
legacy of ancient Platonism by producing a text of Plato consistent
with his own philosophical ideas. he result of this work is a better
understanding not only of Gemistos Pletho, but also of how the reappropriation of antiquity interacted with the creation and spread of
new ideas.
Nikolaos Zagklas, University of Silesia, “heodore
Prodromos: Writing Poetry and Schedography in TwelthCentury Constantinople”
I spent my fellowship term expanding my doctoral thesis, “Writing
Poetry and Schedography in Twelth-Century Constantinople,” into
a book manuscript. he prospectus has been accepted by Oxford
University Press. his book will be the irst critical study of a corpus
of ninety-five neglected poems of various genres by Theodore
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Prodromos, the most skilled and celebrated poet in twelth-century
Constantinople. It explores the circulation of these poems within
the historical and sociocultural context of the Komnenian period
and beyond. It demonstrates that many of these poems, when viewed
in the context of Prodromos’s innovative schedographic project,
served many functions. It will, thus, illustrate for the irst time that
Prodromos’s roles as court poet and teacher were inextricably linked
and of signiicant importance for understanding his poetic crat.
I also completed an article on the relationship between prose
and verse in twelth-century Byzantine literary culture. his is the
irst detailed study to explore works written in mixed form (the socalled prosimetrum), twinned works (in prose and verse), and triplets
of works (in prose, verse, and schedography), as well as the phenomenon of polymetry. Moreover, I translated and discussed a group of
poems by heodore Prodromos, Niketas Eugenianos, and Gregory
of Corinth for the forthcoming Medieval Texts on Art and Aesthetics
(edited by Charles Barber and F. Spingou); completed an article that
includes the editio princeps of six anonymous poems preserved in a
fourteenth-century manuscript; and began a chapter that examines
the various trends of verse satire in the Komnenian and Palaiologan
periods for a companion to Byzantine Satire (edited by I. Nilsson and
P. Marciniak).
Junior Fellows
Ludovic Bender, University of Fribourg, “Hermitages and
Rock-Monasteries of Laconia (Eleventh–Fiteenth Century):
he Landscape of Monasticism in a Byzantine Region”
My dissertation focuses on the landscape of Byzantine Laconia
(Peloponnese), which was comprised of numerous religious foundations, among which are several rock monasteries and many smaller
hermitages built in caves and isolated settings. he project considers the interactions of isolated hermits and established communities, the relationships of large monasteries to smaller foundations,
the interweaving of monastic and agricultural economies, and the
demarcation of sacred landscapes using a geographic information
system (ArcGIS) to support the analysis. I documented these monuments and their natural settings between 2012 and 2015, using threedimensional models with Structure from Motion photogrammetry
(Agisot Photoscan).I completed my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.
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43
I analyzed the monuments, their function, and their reuse. Paintings
and inscriptions helped me to understand the identity of donors,
painters, and ascetics who dwelled in such places. I studied their relation to one another, to local communities, and to the landscape, especially with regard to the selection of monastic sites and patron saints.
My project contributes to the full knowledge of cave chapels, hermitages, and rock monasteries of Laconia, thus improving our knowledge
of Byzantine monastic networks in rural landscapes. he new technologies used to support my work will be made available to a wider
audience interested in this region.
Siren Çelik, University of Birmingham, “A Historical
Biography of Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425)”
During my year at Dumbarton Oaks, I completed and submitted
my doctoral dissertation to the University of Birmingham. My dissertation is a new biography of the emperor and author Manuel II
Palaiologos (1350–1425). It ofers a complete analysis of Manuel’s
oeuvre for the irst time and attempts to construct an in-depth portrait of Manuel as a ruler, writer, and personality. Manuel was a proliic writer who produced a corpus of thirty-three works consisting
of letters, rhetorical exercises, orations, dialogues, poems, prayers,
sermons, and ethico-political and theological treatises. Most of these
works have not been studied, and some remain unedited. I analyzed
Manuel’s philosophical and theological thought and discussed his
literary style and innovations, his classical allusions, and his wit.
Where itting, I made comparisons between Manuel and ancient and
Byzantine authors. I also showed Manuel as a private individual, discussing his relationships with intellectuals and his family. I considered his enemies, his piety, and his favorite pastimes, as well as other
aspects of his everyday life, military campaigns, and travel. I also
analyzed the socioeconomic and political history of Manuel’s reign,
incorporating Ottoman sources with Greek and Western ones.
Bradley Hostetler, Florida State University, “he Function
of Text: Byzantine Reliquaries with Metrical Inscriptions,
843–1204”
I inished and defended my dissertation, which charts a paradigm
for understanding the forms and functions of Middle Byzantine
reliquaries, focusing on those inscribed with metrical inscriptions,
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or epigrams. hese texts provide valuable evidence for how the
Byzantines viewed, interpreted, and handled reliquaries, and how
they accessed relics. As my research questions evolved, I developed
two additional dissertation chapters on relic accessibility and on
ekphrastic epigrams. My dissertation also contains a catalogue of all
epigrams associated with Middle Byzantine reliquaries. I completed
the translations and received valuable feedback from my colleagues,
speciically Nikolaos Zagklas, whose work on twelth-century poetry
greatly informed my research.
I began drating three new chapters for a book based on my dissertation. One presents the various material and medieval textual
sources on Middle Byzantine reliquaries; a second examines how
relics were labeled in Byzantium; and a third contextualizes the use
of relics and reliquaries in battle. I also inished an article on the
tenth-century Limburg Staurotheke. I completed two essays, “Image,
Epigram, and Nature in Middle Byzantine Personal Devotion,” in
Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of
Place, 500–1500 (edited by R. Bartal, N. Bodner, and B. Kühnel), and
“Reliquary Epigrams,” in Byzantine Texts on Art and Aesthetics, vol.
3: From Alexios I to the Rise of Hesychasm (1081–ca. 1330) (edited by C.
Barber and F. Spingou).
Roman Shliakhtin, Central European University, “he Image
of the Seljuk Turks among the Byzantine Literati of the
Eleventh and Twelth Centuries”
While at Dumbarton Oaks, I inished my dissertation on the
identity of the Turks that the Byzantine literati constructed in the
eleventh and twelth centuries. Byzantine literati of the eleventh
century used a set of labels that became the basis for the identity
projected upon the Seljuk Turks. Ater the shocks of the eleventh century and the turbulent reign of Alexios I Komnenos, the Byzantine
court literati reinvented the Turks of Asia Minor as “the Persians,”
inscribing them in the imagined universe of the Komnenoi. Ater the
disastrous battle at Myriokephalon, they recognized the territorial
and political domination of the Turks in Asia Minor. All through
the period in question, they described the frontier zone that separated the Roman Empire and the polities of the Turks. his crossable boundary zone was always present in the literary imagination,
leaving little ground for the discussion of the “symbiotic” relations
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45
between Constantinople and Ikonion. My dissertation demonstrates
that the identity projected by the Byzantines on the Turks had some
analogs in the self-identiication of the Great Seljuks and the Turks
of Asia Minor. A product of the highly educated Constantinopolitan
literati and intended for a Byzantine audience, this ascribed Turkish
identity proved persistent and inluential for the construction of
other medieval Mediterranean identities. It afected the emerging identity of the “Turks” expressed by Crusader sources, the Late
Byzantine image of the Turks, and last, but not least, the presentation
of the Turks of Anatolia.
Summer Fellows
Anne-Catherine Baudoin, École Normale Supérieure,
Paris, “he Greek Gospel of Nicodemus in the Context of
First-Millennium Culture”
During my fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, I worked on the Apocryphon known as Acts of Pilate or Gospel of Nicodemus in its Byzantine
context. I gathered material on Joseph of Arimathea, a igure from
the canonical Gospels who appears in the Acts of Pilate as the irst
witness of the Resurrection and who gives testimony to his encounter with the resurrected Christ. I studied the peculiar elements of this
narrative, especially the chronology of the events and the JewishChristian background of Joseph’s experience. I traced rewritings
or allusions to it in Greek, Georgian, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Arabic
literature—the two last ones being particularly of interest because
there is no known version of the Apocryphon in those languages—
as well as in Eastern and Western iconography. Traditions do not
know political borders, and examining the difusion of this narrative improves our understanding of how noncanonical elements
spread in the Christian world—in Byzantium and its surroundings.
I also worked on the earliest witness of the Acts of Pilate, which is a
Latin palimpsest of the ith century (Vienna, ÖNB 563). Its phrasing
is particularly close to Greek. Studying its linguistic peculiarities,
I compared the text with the extant Greek versions and prepared a
reconstruction hypothesis of the source text used by the translator.
I also examined the extant chapters of the Gospel of Matthew transmitted by the same manuscript, which are a so far unstudied witness
of the Vetus Latina.
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Darlene Brooks Hedstrom, Wittenberg University, “Feeding
Asceticism: he Archaeology of Byzantine Monastic
Kitchens”
My work documented and analyzed the archaeological remains of
built cooking spaces in early Byzantine monasteries in the Eastern
Mediterranean. Drawing upon theoretical models from household
archaeology and materiality, I examined the designs and constructions
of monastic kitchens to reconstruct how the spaces convey the history
of monastic life deined by the centrality of meal production in communal and private kitchens. Previous studies of Byzantine feasting and
fasting have greatly enhanced the story of monastic eating habits, while
the use of microarchaeology at many excavation projects highlights the
story that can be told from the evidence of seeds, pollen, and ceramic
cooking wares. I assembled a large corpus of monastic sites from Egypt,
Gaza, Judea, and Syria with kitchen installations. he sites difer signiicantly in their construction materials, but each helps explain how
ingredients were combined to make meals. Egyptian monastic sites
ofer an impressive range of ovens, ire-pits, and braziers. he Egyptian
material complements stone oil and wine presses, mills, and refectories
found at Judean and Gazan monasteries. Together the sites complement the information from Byzantine legal treatises, cookbooks, literary texts, and visual representations of cooking. I beneitted from using
the impressive ICFA archives to study early twentieth-century images
of monastic kitchens and food preparation from expeditions to Egypt,
Israel, and Syria. his ethnographic evidence and an extensive catalogue of archaeological sites provided substantial material for drating
a book prospectus and a chapter on what constitutes a “kitchen” when
looking at archaeological evidence in Byzantine monasteries.
Branislav Cvetković, Regional Museum of Jagodina, Balkan
Studies Institute, “Between Power and Demise: Reliquary of
Barbara Frankopan Branković”
During my fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, I continued my research
on the reliquary of the Despotissa Barbara Frankopan Branković,
now kept in the Franciscan monastery at Tersatto, Croatia. he complex structure and chronology of its parts required research in several
areas, and I have now resolved with certainty questions of the technical and stylistic diversity of what were originally more than forty relic
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47
frames, now joined in one whole. Comparable material in scattered
museum and monastery collections shows that the present content of
the object represents a much later combination of smaller and older
reliquaries and other items. Paleographic and metalwork evidence
indicates that several relic frames were produced in the court workshop of the earlier generations of the Branković dynasty. Analysis of
the formal features of the well-preserved frames provides fresh data
on issues of relic display, especially in comparison with the reliquary
of Saint Marina in the Museo Correr in Venice. I have found new
information about the provenance and dissemination of the inscription (a prayer to the Holy Trinity) on the rim of the panagiarion. he
most important part of my research was related to establishing the
identity of relics belonging to the neomartyrs. My research provides
a context for part of the reliquary against the political and religious
background of the Balkans in the later Middle Ages.
Reyhan Durmaz, Brown University, “Texts, Authors, and
Holy Men between Christian and Islamic Hagiographical
Traditions”
I study Christian and Islamic hagiographical traditions in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages for my doctoral research. I am currently
working on the transmission of a ith-century Syriac hagiographical
text, he History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qentos and Priest
John of Edessa, by Muslim transmitters and historians of the Islamic tradition. Ater being shortened and given an Islamic resonance through
multiple transmissions, the Syriac story was eventually incorporated
into the Sīra (biography) of Prophet Muhammad written by Ibn Ishāq
(d. 768). he story of Paul and John is about the ascetic endeavors of two
holy men mostly in Syria but also in Italy, South Arabia, and northern Iraq. In the Islamic tradition, however, the abridged version of the
story is used to narrate the conversion of South Arabia to Christianity.
My summer fellowship enabled me to expand on the sociopolitical circumstances in late antiquity under which this transmission took place.
With the help of primary sources in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic, I was
able to trace variations of the story within the Christian tradition and
its transmission to the Islamic milieu in the seventh century. In light
of the secondary scholarship that explores similar phenomena in other
contexts, I explored the role of oral tradition and storytelling in the
ancient world, which brought a new dimension into my research.
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Roberta Franchi, Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
Budapest, “Reading the Life of Olympias: A Case for Female
Deaconesses at Constantinople”
What was the social and economic status of wealthy widows in the
Christian community during the fourth and ith centuries? To
what extent can sources help us to relect on their roles? To answer
these questions, I am preparing a new critical edition, with introduction and commentary, of the Greek Life of Olympias. Olympias
was a deaconess at Constantinople in the ith century whose story
demonstrates much about widowhood and diakonia in late antique
society. his edition is based on four extant Greek manuscripts and
the Narratio Sergiae. Sergia was an abbess who saved the relics of
Olympias that rested in the monastery of Saint homas in Brochthoi
when it was burned by Persian soldiers. She convinced the patriarch
of Constantinople to deposit the relics in the monastery of Saint
Olympias. Her account of the translation of the relics of Olympias
(BHG 1376) is a valuable source of information. hese texts—the Life
of Olympias and the Narratio Sergiae—will be published in the Italian
series Biblioteca patristica.
Przemyslaw Marciniak, University of Silesia, “Hermippos,
Hermodotos, and Musokles: A Study of the hree Byzantine
Dialogues”
My original plan was to spend the summer with three dialogues—
Hermippos, Hermodotos, and Musokles—which were once ascribed
to John Katrares and, therefore, dated to the Paleologean period.
Neither the dating nor the authorship of these dialogues could be
conclusively ascertained, however. But I did succeed in reading the
texts and preparing a working Polish translation of Hermodotos. And,
as always happens, the wonderful library tempted me, and I (un)fortunately succumbed to this temptation, thus inishing other projects.
I wrote irst drats of two chapters of my book on Byzantine satire,
“Byzantine Satirical Katabaseis” and “What is Byzantine Satire,”
focusing mostly on twelth-century literature but occasionally referring to the later texts, such as iteenth-century Mazaris’ Journey to
Hades. I also reworked and submitted for review an article on Against
an Old Man with a Long Beard, a satire by heodore Prodromos; this
paper was recently accepted for publication by Byzantine and Modern
Greek Studies.
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49
Mark Masterson, Victoria University of Wellington,
“Same-Sex Desire among Elite Men during the Time of the
Macedonians”
While at Dumbarton Oaks, I worked on a book project concerned with
same-sex desire between men in the Macedonian period (late 800s to
1000s). he project has moved forward gratifyingly, as I now have a
solid three-chapter structure consisting of (1) what the tenth-century
portrait (synthesized from various histories) of the ninth-century
founder of the dynasty, Basil I, can tell us about the relation between
authority and same-sex desire in the tenth century; (2) what the role of
same-sex desire was in the epistolary networks around emperors Basil
II, John I Tzimiskes, and Nikephoros II Phokas; and (3) what sexual
dynamics were perceptible in the portraits of two warrior-emperors,
Basil II and Nikephoros II Phokas. Looking forward to my conclusions, I will be asserting that same-sex desire was very much present at
this time on the basis of its presence in a variety of genres (historiography, epistolography, hagiography, etc.); this leads to a further conclusion that same-sex desire cannot be let out when elite male culture in
the Macedonian period is being considered.
Brian Matz, Carroll College, “Patristic Citations in the
Filioque Controversy of the Middle Byzantine Period”
The eventual break in communion between Greek- and Latinspeaking Christians was due in no small measure to the debate over
the propriety of the Latins inserting ilioque into the Nicene Creed’s
statement regarding the Holy Spirit’s procession. Regional use of an
interpolated creed by Latins had deinitively begun as early as the
Council of Toledo VIII (653), though likely even earlier, and evidence
suggests it was in common use among the Franks by the mid-eighth
century. My work at Dumbarton Oaks focused on the literature of the
late eighth through the late ninth centuries. Prior to the fellowship, I
had focused on the use of patristic sources in twelve texts composed
during the later part of this period (867–890). Due to Photius’s role
at that time, I had treated this as a separable group of literature. But
during the fellowship, I traced the use of patristic sources in the literature across the entire time period (790–890). his study has revealed
a greater dependency of the later Latin sources on the earlier ones
than previously recognized. Consequently, I have expanded the list of
relevant literature from twelve to thirty-two texts. In the coming year,
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I expect to complete a translation of these thirty-two texts and a study
of the role of patristic literature within them.
Phillip Mazero, Saint Louis University, “Frontier Politics:
Veneto-Byzantine Relations, Civic Identity, and Imperial
Hegemony, 697–1126”
At Dumbarton Oaks, I conducted research for my dissertation, which
analyzes relations between Venice and the Byzantine Empire from the
election of the irst doge to the eruption of the irst Veneto-Byzantine
war. During this foundational period, Venice grew from a sparsely
populated collection of island settlements into one of the most prosperous mercantile cities in the Mediterranean. his process depended
in large part on maintaining amiable relations with the Byzantine
imperial government, which enabled Venetian access to critical eastern markets. hey were important enough for the Venetians occasionally to risk war with the Byzantine Empire. Scholarship has tended
to overemphasize the centrality of trade in dictating the course of
Veneto-Byzantine relations, however. My research seeks to provide a
more complete picture by examining the evolution of Venice and its
connections to the empire within the broader context of Byzantine
frontier trends. Dumbarton Oaks’s assortment of published archeological studies in the Upper Adriatic and Venetian lagoon was
especially beneicial to my eforts to ill in the voids in both the
chronicle record and my previous research in Venetian and Croatian
state archives. I also examined its extensive collection of seals to track
administrative changes along the empire’s periphery. I was able to
complete the irst chapter of my dissertation and substantial sections
of two others.
Garden and Landscape Studies
Fellows
Tom Conley, Harvard University, “Mapping River and City in
France, 1600–1640”
At the forefront of the research stands completion of a book-length
project that includes chapters on the theory and practice of the garden
at the beginning of the Bourbon Monarchy (roughly, 1594–1610). he
guiding hypothesis was—and still is—that, rife with contradiction as
Fellowship R eports
51
it must be, the ideology of the French nation under une loy, une foi,
un roy owed to the reshaping of economic policy in agronomy and the
design of chateaus and their gardens. Given the uncommonly pertinent resources in the Special Collections, under guidance of Linda
Lott, research was devoted to praedial writings and garden design in
the context of domestic architecture.
I undertook a protracted study of Olivier de Serres’s héâtre
d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) that witnessed about thirty
re-editions throughout the seventeenth century, was revived in the
early years of the Napoleonic regime, and came forward once again
during the occupation of France (1940–1944) before witnessing a reedition in 2001. Its fortune demonstrates how, in the century in which
it was irst to lourish, Serres’s treatise not only meshed with the
“Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism” but also served the centralizing designs of state reason (raison d’état); how, later, it gained populist appeal; then how, under Philippe Pétain, whose correspondence
with the Bliss family (ca. 1927–December 1940) is revealing, its revival
was engineered to embody the ethic of travail et patrie; and how, read
again (in the current of Pierre Lieutaghi’s ample introduction), it now
serves economy and ecology. Serres has become so central to the project that an anthology of the thousand-page treatise in English translation may be pitched for a collection under the Dumbarton emblem.
Because Serres establishes garden policy, I worked through
architectural treatises (Philibert Delorme and Jacques Androuet du
Cerceau) in which the parterre belongs to a highly motivated application of design theory. Mobilizing Cartesian logic, it igures in a shit by
which, given the arrival of material from newly discovered lands, the
medicinal garden gives way to a botanical counterpart—what might be
imagined as outdoor Wunderkammern. For this aspect of the research,
I consulted the holdings of brodeurs Pierre Vallet and André Mollet.
On this point, more is to follow. In sum, what was envisioned to be a
chapter may now become a book.
Philip Jacks, George Washington University, “‘To Make it
a Great Entrepot’: he Story of Baltimore’s Locust Point”
(spring term)
Arriving in January, I was hoping to complete the inal two chapters
of a manuscript, but as it happens, I met with architect Chris Pfaele
only in late spring to plan out the inal portion of a book on the
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adaptive reuse of the 1923 grain elevator and his designs for Silo Point.
he four-month fellowship term was extraordinarily productive in
allowing me to gain a much deeper understanding of ields outside my
discipline: the grain trade, railroad business, and land management
within Baltimore during the critical period of 1814–1831. I had spent
the better part of a year systematically gathering letters and reports
from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s (B&O) company archives
at their Mount Clare Museum. Here at Dumbarton Oaks, I’ve been
combing period newspapers—the Baltimore American, Washington
Intelligencer, Baltimore Sun, and Niles Register. Other sources yielded
troves of unpublished material: the B&O Collection of the National
Museum of American History, the Robert Garrett Family Papers
of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the John W.
Garrett correspondence in the Maryland Historical Society, and
Illinois Central Railroad Company Archives at the Newberry Library
in Chicago. hese led me to recast several parts of the book’s narrative. Given the scarcity of visual evidence regarding the early woodcrib elevators, I was particularly excited to discover E. F. Baldwin’s
drawings for industrial buildings at the Locust Point terminus, as well
as a set of working drawings for an unknown elevator by Camden
Yards (destroyed) from the 1880s. Equally important are the set of
plats by James Carroll for the route of the railroad into Baltimore.
hrough dialogue with colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks, I came to
read more widely and to reconsider the scope of the book. here are
essentially three tracks—the genius loci of Locust Point itself, the stories of immigration and habitation, and technological innovation of the
railroad and grain elevator. But I haven’t yet done ine-tuned research
into the connections between Baltimore and its economic rivals—
Brooklyn, Bufalo, Philadelphia, and Chicago. I may not change the
title of the book, but its geographic context has expanded considerably.
Similarly, I’ve come to consider a larger readership than just architectural or urban historians. To that end, I’ve reconigured the longer
chapters with subsections into a series of smaller vignettes.
Linda Jewell, University of California, Berkeley, “Gathering
on the Ground: Experiencing Landscape in American
Outdoor heaters” (fall term)
I completed the irst two chapters of Gathering on the Ground, a book
with twenty case studies of outdoor theaters drawn from a previous
Fellowship R eports
53
exhibition. he irst chapter covers the early twentieth century, when
wealthy patrons and volunteers built theaters to bring culture and
nature simultaneously into the lives of all Americans. he second chapter examines how the New Deal programs of Franklin Roosevelt continued this tradition by building outdoor theaters in the nation’s parks.
his commitment to providing citizens with experiences in nature
encouraged designers and cratsmen to respond to the particulars of
the landscape in each theater’s design.
I also completed background research for a new case study—
Beatrix Farrand’s Lovers Lane heater at Dumbarton Oaks. With
ield measurements, drawings, and photographs from Dumbarton’s
archives, I veriied the dimensional data necessary for illustrative
drawings and reconstructed Farrand’s sequence of incremental design
decisions between 1924 and 1927, including her on-site consultations
with playwright Joseph Lindon Smith, a leader in the outdoor drama
movement. his work uncovered how the symmetry of the original
proposal was subtly adjusted to the topography and a large walnut
tree to give the particulars of this landscape a role in its inal design.
Tamara Sears, Yale University, “Wilderness Urbanisms:
Architecture, Landscape, and Travel in Precolonial India”
My fellowship year was dedicated to expanding the theoretical and
methodological framework for my second book, which focuses on the
relationships among architecture, landscape, mobility, and travel in
Southern Asia. he project initially began as a study of the relationship between rivers and temple urbanism in central India at the turn
of the irst millennium, but it has since grown to span a vast chronology, extending from ca. 650 to the present day. At its heart is a range
of important yet overlooked sites that originally emerged as outposts
along north-south routes. In addition to facilitating trade, pilgrimage, and military campaigns, these places played a vital role in linking
inland cities to the seaports that connected India to a wider world.
On a theoretical level, I have worked to ind new ways to bridge the
gap between precolonial histories and presentist modes of inquiry
by turning attention to the central role that landscapes have played
not only in the distribution and forms of monuments but also in the
politics, perception, and (re)production of place over the longue durée.
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hrough conversations this year, I have become more immersed in
the pragmatics of landscape and in thinking through lenses of design
and environmental management in order to broaden my approach.
Given that landscape is rarely foregrounded in discussions of preMughal Indian architecture, I was also very grateful for the perspectives of scholars in other ields, whose comments have sharpened my
discussion in many enduring and valuable ways.
Junior Fellows
Camille Behnke Shamble, University of Virginia, “Growing
Children Out of Doors: California’s Open-Air Schools and
Children’s Health, 1907–1917”
During the fellowship year I completed critical progress on my dissertation. I revised and expanded my project using library materials on school gardens, playgrounds, and healing gardens; California
landscape architecture; and Progressive-era gardens and ethics.
Participating in the interdisciplinary Mellon Initiative in Urban
Landscape Studies also enhanced my research by encouraging relationships between landscape design practices and history. My dissertation, the irst detailed study of American open-air schools,
examines the relationship between landscape architecture and building design, considering how these innovative educational facilities
simultaneously relected and shaped Progressive-era reforms related
to children’s health and welfare as well as more problematic American
discourses surrounding nationalism and racism. his project focuses
on the peak of the movement in California, from 1907–1917, in which
single-story modern school structures with integrated gardens and
permeable pavilion classrooms transformed the state’s educational
landscape. As such, this project contributes to an understudied area
of landscape history, while also considering the movement’s complex position at the intersection of environmental design, education,
medicine, and technology. It is signiicant to a wide audience because
it examines how the landscapes of childhood were shaped, both in
their design and everyday experience, by gendered, racial, and class
dynamics. Finally, it also has contemporary signiicance, as it demonstrates the importance of space and landscape to the educational
experience and campaigns for greener and healthier school design.
Fellowship R eports
55
Shuichi Wanibuchi, Harvard University, “A Colony by
Design: Nature, Knowledge, and the Transformation of
Landscape in the Delaware Valley, 1680–1780”
My dissertation project explores the ecological consequences of the
British colonization of the Delaware Valley in the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Focusing on a distinctive set of ideas and technologies—urban and regional planning, agricultural improvement, a new
art of surveying and mapmaking, natural history, and political economy—the project argues that Britain’s imperial design and technology
made a huge impact on the landscape and environment of the Delaware
Valley throughout the colonial period. My junior fellowship allowed me
to make great progress on research, writing, and inishing chapters of
my dissertation. At the library and the Rare Books Collection, I could
scrutinize materials pertaining to horticulture, agriculture, and natural
history, which were produced in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England and North America and were used by colonists. In particular,
my reading of horticultural treatises in the Rare Books Reading Room
led me to conclude that the works of the Hartlib circle heavily inluenced Quaker colonists in early Pennsylvania in terms of the introduction of crops and farming methods into the soil of the region. And the
original copy of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida,
and the Bahama Islands amazed me and gave me a lot of new information. Lastly, the academic community of Dumbarton Oaks gave me a
lot of pleasure, as I could converse with scholars from multiple disciplines as well as contemporary practitioners.
Summer Fellows
Timothy Baird, Pennsylvania State University, “Landscape
Materiality: Innovation and Convention from Modernism to
the Present”
Garrett Eckbo’s 1959 Alcoa Forecast Garden was created through a
symbiotic relationship between manufacturer and designer resulting
in publicity for the designer and increased sales of a postwar product
(aluminum) for the manufacturer. his cyclical borrowing of materials from other ields seems to correspond to periods of greater innovation, while periods of less innovation seem to correspond with more
insular times, in which landscape architects failed to engage other
ields for material information.
My research project began with this Eckbo garden, a masterfully
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detailed “outdoor room” and a relection of one of the primary characteristics of the emerging California style of modern American
landscape architecture, the indoor-outdoor relationship. his led
to an investigation of the material expression of other American
Modernists such as Robert Royston, Dan Kiley, James Rose, and
homas Church. While at Dumbarton Oaks, I have investigated the
work of Fletcher Steele, a transitional igure between the Beaux-Arts
and modernism in landscape architecture. From Steele, I have begun
to study the French modernist designers—Gabriel Guevrekian, the
Vera brothers, Pierre-Émile Legrain, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Tony
Garnier—who heavily inluenced Steele, who in turn disseminated his
thoughts on these French designers through several articles. Taking
note of Steele’s writings, the American modernists continued to be
inluenced by them for years to come, as evidenced by the innovative
material expression that characterized their work.
Francois Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, Florida State
University, “‘If Eve Had Had a Spade in Paradise . . .’:
Elizabeth von Arnim and Her Gardens (1898–1914)”
One of the most unexpected literary successes of the period before
the First World War was Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a chronicle of the life of the English spouse of a Prussian aristocrat in their
Pomeranian Schloss, where she created a garden in her own image—
wild and free. It became rapidly known that the author was a British
woman in her thirties, Mary Beauchamp, who had become Gräin von
Arnim-Schlagenthin upon her marriage. She published twenty highly
successful novels under the pen name “Elizabeth,” working until
her death in 1941. Her literary oeuvre was rediscovered in the 1980s
thanks to Virago Press, which republished her novels under the name
Elizabeth Von Arnim. Historians of literature hence read her works,
focusing on issues of feminine writing, but no one has endeavored
to study what the German garden represented for contemporaneous garden writers and creators (such as Ellen Willmott or Gertrude
Jekyll) and, more generally, for the women who identiied in droves
with her brand of “gardening feminism.” his is what I did during
my sojourn at Dumbarton Oaks, ater having studied the sources of
the novel in the Arnim literary archive at the Huntington Library in
May 2015. An article entitled “A Garden of One’s Own: Elizabeth and
Her German Garden” will present the results of this research, along
Fellowship R eports
57
with an unknown chapter of the “German Garden” that I discovered
during the course of my research.
Josepha Richard, University of Sheield, “he Gardens of
Lingnan: Valorizing the hird Garden Culture in China”
I am a doctoral candidate studying the nineteenth-century gardens of
the Guangdong province, which are at the origin of a regional garden
culture known as Lingnan. I initially intended to focus my research
on representations of Lingnan and Beijing gardens in both Western
and Chinese sources (pictorial and written). I fulilled this objective with the help of the rich Chinese garden collection at the library,
notably in the Rare Books Reading Room. I also collected a substantial amount of Western travel accounts of China and broadened my
knowledge of the history of China trade, especially from the point
of view of American traders. Moreover, I took the opportunity to
advance my knowledge of the existing literature on Chinese gardens,
both in Chinese and Western languages, in order to ofer a thorough
literature review in my introductory chapters.
Yichi Zhang, University of Technology, Sydney, “he Parlor
of the Metropolis: Public Parks and Open Space in the British
Concessions of China, 1842–1937”
I came to Dumbarton Oaks to advance research for my dissertation,
which is a comparative study of the multiple relationships between
social activities and the natural contexts of public space in the seven
British Concessions in China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Xiamen, Hankou,
Guangzhou, Jiujiang, and Zhenjiang. I examine urban landscapes as
sites of encounter between Britain and modern China, focusing on
social activities in emergent public parks, where people not only confronted problems resulting from colonialism but also forged ideas
about urban modernity. I explore the formation and nature of public
parks in the British Concessions in China, and consider the forms
of sociability and political ideas that became associated with them.
Although I have made exhaustive use of twenty-seven libraries and
archives in the United Kingdom, China, and Australia to obtain primary documents, the rich resources of Dumbarton Oaks, as well as
interlibrary loans, ofered a great number of valuable new sources on
gardens and urban history, which I have been able to use to develop
new ideas and to organize the materials I have already collected.
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Mellon Fellows in Urban Landscape Studies
Christina Milos, University of Hannover, “Anticipatory
Urbanization Strategies for In-Situ Oil Sands Extraction in
Nigeria” (fall term)
Nigeria’s future will be shaped, in part, by the twin forces of urbanization and resource development. A key emerging resource expected
to accelerate urbanization in southern Nigeria is the 140 km oil
sands belt that stretches across Edo, Ondo, Ogun, and Lagos states.
Estimated by Nigeria’s Ministry of Mines and Steel Development to
contain 32–47 billion barrels of oil, Nigeria’s reserves of oil sands are
the largest in Africa, and sixth largest in the world. Anticipating how
resource development might spur urbanization and restructure landscapes in developing countries such as Nigeria poses a critical global
challenge. Seeking to improve policy and planning mechanisms to
respond to this challenge, my research asks two key questions: How
might Nigeria’s future oil sands industry transform regional urban
landscapes? What are potential transformative actions and decision
points that may structure this future landscape? he research examines two historical cases: Canadian oil sands development and urban
impacts, and Nigeria’s oil industry development and urban impacts
in the Niger Delta. hese cases are used as precedents to anticipate
potential scenarios for future oil sands development. During the fellowship term at Dumbarton Oaks, I studied in detail the territorial,
environmental, urban, and social impacts of Nigeria’s oil industry.
his research will play a critical role in shaping knowledge products
intended to raise awareness among Nigerian policy makers regarding the challenges that oil sands extraction poses to Nigeria’s urban
landscapes.
Alpa Nawre, Kansas State University, “Adaptive Land-Water
Edges in Indian Cities” (spring term)
he Mellon Fellowship in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton
Oaks has been a remarkable experience that has allowed me to
develop a better understanding of the lexibility and sociocultural
performance of urban land-water edges in India. During my fellowship term, I studied the data collected during my ield studies and
developed three papers. he irst compares the ponds (talaab) and
river edges (ghat) in India to synthesize aspects that enable them to
act as vibrant social spaces; the second analyzes the role of religious
Fellowship R eports
59
architecture at the talaab water edges; and the third explores the dual
role of ghat infrastructure as a hybrid object and subject in the landscape. he Mellon Midday Dialogues were especially helpful, as they
enabled me to connect with a practitioner with whom I am collaborating on a joint presentation on water landscapes for liveable cities at
the American Society of Landscape Architects 2016 Annual Meeting.
he fellowship has helped me not only to further the design understanding of urban water infrastructure as social landscapes but also
to develop a broader perspective on better water management strategies in urban development.
Kara Schlichting, Queens College, City University of New
York, “he Nature of Urban Coastal Resiliency: TwentiethCentury Governance, Environmental Management, and
Design” (spring term)
While the coastal zone can be deined by landscape and its dynamic
system of morphology and hydrography, it is also a construct, an idea
imposed on a landscape to delineate governance powers. As a fellow, I
investigated how the concept of the coastal zone was irst developed in
federal legislation in the 1970s, framing the littoral as a public utility in
need of management and the location of substantial economic investment in need of protection. hrough my research, I realized that—to
understand how governance intersected with the material nature of
the littoral—it was necessary to reframe the chronology of the coastal
zone. he 1930s–1950s underscores work in environmental studies and
coastal engineering that 1970s governance initiatives overshadows:
hurricanes and the US Army Corps of Engineers’ (the corps) eforts
to protect coasts from them. his history is deined not by legislation
by but the environment. In studying hurricanes, the corps irst conceptualized the particular vulnerabilities of southern New England’s
coastal zone. As a result, in 1957, the corps embarked on an ambitious hurricane-unique comprehensive survey of Narragansett Bay,
Rhode Island. My research led me to two realizations that will frame
future work. First, the corps’s work in the 1930s–1950s was frequently
based on a conceptual binary that problematically disconnected the
littoral’s land-water environments. Second, diferent frameworks
developed around two deinitions of coastal hazards: short-term,
violent hazards (such as hurricanes), and long-term incremental hazards (such as sea-level rise or beach erosion). Due to these difering
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evaluations, government agencies saw diferent things as being at risk,
which inspired diferent modes of protection.
David Wooden, District Department of the Environment,
“Washington’s Sewer History: Ideological, Technological, and
Environmental Evolution” (fall term)
his project researched the origins of the District of Columbia’s sewer
system. Most modern cities share some common histories regarding
their development of sewer management techniques, but the district’s
history has some unique characteristics due to its comparatively recent
founding as a city by the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, its
location on a tidal river, and its governmental structure as a capital
city lacking self-government for most of its existence. he site of the
district is directly related to its proximity to planned water infrastructure. Prior to becoming president, George Washington believed that
a navigable Potomac River providing a connection to the emerging
country’s frontier resources via the Ohio River was a national imperative. He made personal investments in a commercial enterprise, the
Potowmac Company, to realize his vision. When Congress gave him
the mission to select a site for the nation’s capital, he appointed a commission comprised of fellow investors. he commission selected a site
at a portage along the Potomac River where a world capital emerged
from tidal mud lats. he planned canal system was intended to extend
into the city, transporting goods and resources vital to the growth
of an ambitiously planned metropolis. he canal to the Ohio River
became the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal but never reached its
intended destination to the west. he canal’s arm into the city became
the Washington City Canal and the capital’s original and accidental
sewer. Construction of the canal started shortly ater the city’s founding along the courses of two existing streams: Tiber Creek and James
Creek. Woefully underfunded and poorly constructed, the canal
was mostly unnavigable and became the terminus for the city’s surface runof and raw sewage. Known for its “accumulation of stagnant
sewerage and ilth” and as “a disgusting spectacle—a disgrace to the
city and the nation,” the canal was entombed underground by the late
nineteenth century and was largely lost from memory. As it was transformed from open sewer to subterranean tunnel, the canal became the
origin from which today’s sewer gradually expanded as the city grew to
Pierre L’Enfant’s planned extents and beyond.
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61
Pre-Columbian Studies
Fellows
Christopher Beekman, University of Colorado, Denver,
“Out of Many, One: Collective Governance and Its Visual
Ramiications in Pre-Columbian Jalisco, Mexico”
During my fellowship, I developed a book on collective governance in
Mesoamerica circa 100 BC–AD 500. My case study is the Tequila valleys of highland Jalisco, where my archaeological research has identiied an association between corporate groups and speciic buildings
within a larger architectural template. his association forces us to
reassess characteristics of western Mexico that are attributed to a lack
of sociopolitical complexity—the absence of sculpture aggrandizing individual rulers, the widespread distribution of hollow ceramic
igures, and the modest size of public architecture. Seen within the
particular political context of collective governance, in which multiple elite lineages existed side-by-side and were unable to monopolize
power or the production of visual culture, I reinterpret these features
in new ways. My research came to focus on three major components:
(1) composing a history of research in western Mexico, and examining how the discovery of the archaeological Olmec and the deinition
of Mesoamerica led to the region’s marginalization in the 1940s; (2)
identifying the culturally speciic meanings of the symbols of authority and identity depicted in the region’s hollow ceramic igures; and
(3) developing my narrative on how visual culture was used to reproduce and challenge power relationships. I have drated three chapters
in addition to those inished prior to the fellowship.
William Fash, Harvard University
During my fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, I conducted intensive
library research on the various Mesoamerican ballgames and stone
courts, completing my chapters for the monograph that Barbara
Fash and I are editing on the ball courts of Copan, Honduras, for
the Peabody Museum Press. My chapters for two other edited volumes were also completed; a inal, 523-page technical report on
the investigations of Cuauhtinchan Viejo, Puebla, was submitted to Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico; and
three coauthored papers for the annual meeting of the Society for
American Archaeology in April were prepared. During the irst week
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of March, Barbara and I fulilled our iduciary and academic responsibilities to the Santander Program for Research and Conservation
of Mayan Sculpture, administered by Harvard’s David Rockefeller
Center for Latin American Studies, by traveling to Copan to supervise and to provide guidance for our ten staf at the regional Center
for Archaeological Investigations. At the request of 2014–2015
Dumbarton Oaks fellow Jorge Ramos, we visited and shared thoughts
about the new excavation program that Jorge is codirecting at the large
Copan Valley residential compound of Group 8N-11. hat work has
provided compelling new evidence for the conclusions that Alexandre
Tokovinine, Barbara Fash, and I adumbrated in the Dumbarton Oaks
volume he Art of Urbanism, regarding the importance of the House
of New Fire at Teotihuacán, Mexico, for Classic Maya dynasts and
royal courts. Colleagues on the Copan Acropolis Project and I corresponded frequently regarding our upcoming summary volume, and
I supervised the completion of two doctoral dissertations.
Takeshi Inomata, University of Arizona, “Ritual and Politics
at the Preclassic Maya Center of Ceibal, Guatemala”
During my fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, I began working on a
three-volume monograph series with my colleague, Daniela Triadan,
to report the results of our research at the lowland Maya site of Ceibal,
Guatemala. Although this is a large writing project that will require
multiple years of work, the fellowship allowed me to make signiicant
progress and to examine comparative data. he primary theme of our
monographs is the origins of Maya civilization. We trace interplays
between local processes, such as the transition to full sedentism and
political centralization, and interactions with other areas, including
Olmec civilization. Another theme of importance is political decline
at the end of the Classic period. Our work demonstrates that this process involved multiple episodes of political collapse, which happened
more rapidly than previously thought.
In addition, I worked on articles on Preclassic Maya lowlandhighland relations (published in Antiquity) and the Maya concept of
time (to be published in Journal de la Société des Américanistes), as
well as book chapters on Andean plazas and the development of Maya
ceremonial complexes. Along with these writing projects, I continued
my research on Ceibal. At Dumbarton Oaks, I processed the Light
Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data of a 20 x 20 km area around
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Ceibal, which we obtained during the ield season of spring 2015. his
dataset shows the distribution of ceremonial complexes and residential groups over the landscape on an unprecedented scale.
Daniela Triadan, University of Arizona, “he Development
of Social Inequality at the Preclassic Maya Center of Ceibal,
Guatemala”
he project at the Maya site of Ceibal has revealed one of the earliest public ritual constructions, which was built while most of the
population was still leading a mobile lifestyle. During my fellowship
at Dumbarton Oaks, I investigated the beginnings of social diferentiation and considered how these developments articulated changes
in patterns of regional and interregional interactions. I analyzed and
synthesized ceramic sourcing data and carried out an analysis of the
excavated igurines. I examined the production, distribution, and consumption of ceramics as well as their implications for technological
changes and interactions with other communities. My analyses show
that throughout the Preclassic period the majority of the pottery was
locally produced at Ceibal, and that very few pots were imported into
the settlement. I could also trace shits in resource exploitation and
paste recipes. his indicates that utilitarian goods (such as pottery)
were not widely exchanged with other areas. he Preclassic igurines,
on the other hand, show similarities with those of other lowland sites,
the Guatemalan highlands, and the Grijalva River Basin of Chiapas,
suggesting the knowledge of generalized conventions and ideas over
a large area. Together with Olmec-style objects that were most likely
imported into Ceibal, this suggests that long-distance interactions
may have taken place mainly through connections of emergent elites
who were also likely ritual specialists.
Junior Fellows
Erika Brant, University of Virginia, “he Dead Rose from the
Ground: Ancestors and Political Authority in a Post-Collapse
Andean Society (1000–1450 CE)”
During my fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, I examined the role of
ancestor veneration in the political reorganization that occurred
ater the collapse of the Tiwanaku state around AD 1000. Speciically,
my research focused on the Peruvian site of Sillustani, the foremost
necropolis and pilgrimage center of the post-collapse Colla ethnic
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group. he examination of a variety of archaeological materials
(including architectural, ceramic, and faunal data) allowed me to
conclude that Sillustani was the site of commemorative feasts that
both generated and reinforced more equitable forms of sociality in the
years following collapse. Over the course of my eight-month fellowship, I inalized three chapters of my dissertation, drated one additional chapter, presented my research to the Pre-Columbian Society
of Washington, DC, and completed an article that is currently under
review. In addition, conversations with another Dumbarton Oaks
junior fellow, Jennifer Saracino, resulted in an organized session on
indigenous landscapes that will be held at the 2016 meeting of the
American Society for Ethnohistory; the proceedings of this session
will be published by the University Press of Colorado.
Rebecca Mendelsohn, University at Albany, State University
of New York, “he Early Mesoamerican City of Izapa and the
Southern Maya Region”
My fellowship year enabled me to make signiicant strides on several writing projects. I completed six chapters of my dissertation,
and advanced several publication projects by submitting one article
to the Journal of Field Archaeology, preparing another for Ancient
Mesoamerica, and contributing to a third for Latin American
Antiquity (with Robert Rosenswig). hese projects detail the results of
my archaeological excavations and artifact analyses associated with
an important cultural transition (100 BC–AD 400) at the early urban
center of Izapa, located along the southern Paciic coast of Mexico. My
write-up of the ceramics was signiicantly aided by access to diicultto-obtain ceramic reports held in the Dumbarton Oaks Library. My
work was also greatly enhanced by discussions and feedback from this
year’s cohort of fellows. he opportunity to discuss my research with
Takeshi Inomata was an especially beneicial outcome of this year, as
we are both working with similar issues of ceramic chronologies and
interaction between our disparate study areas, the Paciic Coast and
the Maya lowlands. I also shared common interests in the collapse
and reorganization of ancient civilizations with scholars working in
regions as distinct as Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Byzantium. hese
conversations have helped me to understand the ways in which events
at Izapa both share common underlying processes with other areas
and reveal unique human responses to similar phenomena.
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65
Jennifer Saracino, Tulane University, “Shiting Landscape:
Depictions of Environmental and Cultural Disruption in the
Mapa Uppsala”
My fellowship allowed me to continue research on my dissertation
project that investigates the Mapa Uppsala, the earliest known map of
Mexico City painted by indigenous artists ater the conquest. he map
presents the city and its environs and includes depictions of indigenous people engaged in a variety of activities, a detailed rendering of
the valley’s roads and waterways, and almost two hundred indigenous
place glyphs. By combining studies of indigenous mapmaking traditions (both Pre-Columbian and early colonial) with a visual analysis of the map’s composition, my project focuses on how the Mapa
Uppsala is a carefully constructed, visual testament to the lived experience of its indigenous artists.
hroughout my fellowship, I analyzed the library’s collection
of facsimiles of Pre-Columbian and early colonial indigenous-made
manuscripts. I focused particularly on the artists’ employment of
indigenous cartographic conventions and depiction of space in the
Mapa Uppsala, as compared to the diverse corpus of extant indigenous-made materials we have from Central Mexico. As a direct result
of this research, I am able to demonstrate in my dissertation how the
Mapa Uppsala’s indigenous artists creatively combined elements of
Pre-Columbian and European pictorial tradition to innovate cartographic production. his research contributes to our understanding
of the resilience, continuity, and transformation of indigenous pictorial tradition ater the Spanish conquest. his fellowship also enabled
me to complete several articles for publication that illuminate aspects
of sixteenth-century indigenous manuscript production, including
facture, workshop practices, and collaboration among artists.
Summer Fellows
Kirby Farah, University of California, Riverside, “Palace
and Home: Creating and Maintaining an Elite Identity at
Postclassic Xaltocan”
My time at Dumbarton Oaks was focused on enriching the data I
gathered in archaeological excavations at Xaltocan, Mexico, and on
writing my dissertation. My dissertation concentrates on successive
elite residences at Postclassic Xaltocan, and speciically considers
the domestic practices that took place in these residences and how
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these practices and use of space changed over time. Ethnohistorical
records and archaeological reports from comparable sites in the Basin
of Mexico were fruitful resources. Practices of remembering became
one focal point for my research, and I examined how elites at Xaltocan
chose to build and rebuild their residences as political and social
circumstances shited through time. his research developed into
broader questions about place-making and community-wide perceptions of elite residences as both centers of power and houses where
mundane activities took place. Another research avenue focused
on alternative methods for deining class relationships through the
lens of material culture. I searched for models that pushed beyond
the deeply entrenched elite-commoner dichotomy to explore other
methods for understanding the subtle complexities of relationships
between the rulers and the ruled. In the case of my own research, this
is especially important because architectural diferences between elite
residences and commoner residences were vast, but associated artifacts were quite similar. My dissertation will explore this incongruence and its greater meaning.
Anastasia Kalyuta, Russian Museum of Ethnography,
“Discovering the Mysteries of the Oztoticpac Land Map:
Paleography and Translation of Nahua Land Cadastre”
he main objectives of my research project were the paleography and
translation of the Nahuatl and Spanish glosses of the Oztoticpac Lands
Map. his early colonial document related to the inquisitorial process
and execution of don Carlos Ome Tochtli, son of Nezahualpilli, the
last prehispanic ruler of Tetzcoco. he map presents detailed plans of
the Tetzcoco ruling family’s collective properties alongside land plots
owned by don Carlos. he plans are accompanied by brief glosses in
Spanish and more detailed texts written in the Classical Nahuatl, the
main native language spoken in Central Mexico in the early sixteenth
century. hese glosses contain rich and unique data about antecedents
of don Carlos’s execution and Nahua land tenure patterns. However,
their paleography and translation pose serious challenges due to the
damage caused by worms, fading ink, and the speciics of the sixteenth-century orthography. In order to solve these problems and to
provide a careful paleography and adequate translation of the document’s alphabetical texts, the work was divided into three stages. First,
a list of all the alphabetically written texts was made. Each text received
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67
a number, indicating its location on the map and conventional title by
its irst word(s). Second, the paleography of all the glosses was done in
accordance with modern rules of transcription of ancient Spanish and
Nahuatl manuscripts. Finally, the texts were translated into modern
Spanish and compared with Tetzcocan pictorial documents, works of
colonial native historians, and the materials of the inquisitorial process against don Carlos Ome Tochtli.
Matthew Looper, California State University, Chico, “Deer
Imagery in Ancient Maya Art”
During my fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, I conducted research for
a book project on deer imagery in ancient Maya art, particularly as
represented on painted and carved ceramics from the Classic period.
In addition to iconographic and epigraphic approaches, the study
employs comparisons of these images with hunting-related lore from
the colonial and modern eras. Owing to conversations with other fellows, I was initially inspired to work on the chapter concerning the
relationship of deer to status, as relected in imagery and texts, as well
as on the archaeological evidence of trade and the consumption of
venison. Ater completing this chapter, I moved on to two other chapters: deer deities and lore in the codices, and deer spirits (wahy).
Although these investigations are ongoing, I was able to compile a
large and comprehensive catalog of relevant imagery, owing in part to
access I was given by Juan Antonio Murro to the Maya Ceramic Archive,
housed in the Dumbarton Oaks Museum. In this extremely important
archive, I located a number of images of deer deities and related hunting imagery that will be of major signiicance in the inal study. In addition, during my stay at Dumbarton Oaks, I was able to arrange visits to
a number of museum collections, including the Smithsonian storage
facilities in Suitland, Maryland, and several collections in Baltimore, in
order to photograph objects relevant to the project.
David Reed, University of Michigan, “Maya in the Middle”
Who composed the middle tiers of ancient Maya polities? Estimating
the social status of interred individuals assists us in exploring other
dimensions of society, such as diferential access to resources. My
work presents a reconsideration of how to determine status from mortuary data by showing that some aspects of mortuary remains relect
the social organizational context of the burial. Our mortuary analysis
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of Classic-period Copan inds that ancient Maya social organization
was continuous, highly variable, and without clear demarcations. his
raises questions of how the middle strata emerged and functioned,
what economic and power relationships were formed, and how social
organization operated as a whole.
New approaches are unraveling the complex structure and variability between and within Maya polities, and show an increasing
appreciation of the plurality of social positions, from royalty to captives. But we still have a poor understanding of the workings of entire
systems, largely due to incomplete explanatory theoretical models.
My time at Dumbarton Oaks was used to advance the discussion. I
believe that delving further into these issues requires the continued
application of sophisticated analytical methods alongside extensive
work on sociopolitical organization theory. As a result of my summer
fellowship, I have uncovered recent bioarchaeological data that will
enlarge our database and add a new dimension—migration—to our
work. Additionally, I began the study of theoretical approaches that
are recent to archaeological explanation—structuration, collective
action, and pragmatism. hese approaches may aid our understanding of ancient sociopolitical complexity.
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69
Byzantine Studies
he spirit of engagement and collaboration in the humanities that
began at Dumbarton Oaks seventy-ive years ago continued to lourish this year. Byzantine Studies hosted fellows, junior fellows, and visitors from institutions in sixteen countries (Austria, Belgium, France,
Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland,
Russia, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the
United States), making this anniversary year one of international celebration and intellectual cross-fertilization.
Summer Programs
he year began in July 2015, with the summer school in coins and seals
directed by Professor Vasiliki (Vasso) Penna of the University of the
Peloponnese and by Dr. Eric McGeer. Eight participants, from institutions in the United States, Italy, Greece, Hungary, and the United
Kingdom, worked together in the coin room and discussed their
research during long evenings in the gardens and in the Guest House.
An equally eclectic group of summer fellows made great strides in
their work that will result in publications. Anne-Catherine Baudoin
explored how noncanonical Christian texts spread in medieval
Byzantium and neighboring lands. Branislav Cvetković studied the
iteenth-century reliquary of Barbara Frankopan Branković. Reyhan
Durmaz worked on Christian and Islamic hagiographical traditions.
Roberta Franchi examined evidence for female deaconesses in early
Byzantine Constantinople. Przemyslaw Marciniak studied Byzantine
Jonathan Shea gives a presentation on Byzantine seals to the annual
Teaching Fellows’ Day attendees.
71
dialogues of Hermippos, Hermodotos, and Musokles. Mark Masterson
examined same-sex male desire among elites in the Macedonian
period. Brian Matz considered the Filioque controversy in the Middle
Byzantine period. Phillip Mazero worked on Byzantine-Venetian
frontier politics from the seventh to the twelth century.
The Academic Year
A vibrant community in Byzantine Studies coalesced early during
the 2015–2016 fellowship year, setting the foundation for nearly nine
months of intense intellectual exchange and productive research.
Fellows and junior fellows from England, Greece, Italy, Norway,
Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States comprised an
exceptionally friendly and compatible group of scholars who made
the most of their time at Dumbarton Oaks.
Six fellows and four junior fellows were in residence this year,
augmented by Jefrey Hamburger, a visiting professor from Harvard.
Leslie Brubaker and Mary Cunningham gave their primary eforts to
a coauthored book about the cult of the Virgin Mary in Byzantium
between ca. 400–1204, working with both literary and visual materials. Stig Frøyshov considered the use of the Jerusalem Book of
Hours in various ecclesiastical contexts in Constantinople. Jefrey
Hamburger drated a book about medieval diagrams; the book is
based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago that
will be published as From Cross to Cruciix: Berthold of Nuremberg’s
Reconiguration of Hrabanus Maurus’s Treatise on the Cross. As part
of a larger project on the development of Christian society in late
antique Greece, Yuri Marano examined the phenomenon of burials near the body or relics of a saint or martyr. Textual matters concerned Fabio Pagani, who brought together philology, paleography,
and textual criticism in a study of the place of classical philosophy in
Byzantium in the late fourteenth century. Nikolaos Zagklas revised
his dissertation into a book about the twelth-century poet heodore
Prodromos, to be published by Oxford University Press.
he junior fellows were equally productive. hey all inished
their dissertations: Ludovic Bender wrote on monastic landscapes in
eleventh- to iteenth-century Laconia; Siren Celik completed a multifaceted biography of the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos; Bradley
Hostetler wrote about Byzantine reliquaries inscribed with epigrams;
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and Roman Shliakhtin studied the identity of Seljuk Turks as constructed by Byzantine writers. Çelik and Shliakhtin won postdoctoral
fellowships at Koç University for next year, while Hostetler will be
working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Lectures and Discussions
he Byzantine community enjoyed an exceptionally rich panoply of
speakers this year. In October, visiting scholar Claudia Rapp illed the
Music Room with an illustrated public lecture on “Saint Catherine’s
Monastery in the Sinai and Its Hidden Manuscript Treasures.” On
April 6, visiting scholar Jonathan Shepard led a seminar on “Anna
Komnena, Peter the Hermit, and Framing the First Crusade.”
Something new was tried when Nicola Di Cosmo of the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, presented the irst interprogram lecture,
“Climate, Ecology, and Mobility in the History of Eurasian Steppe
Nomads,” on December 9. Her presentation was aimed at a broad
audience in all three programs of study to encourage and facilitate
cross-disciplinary work.
We enjoyed many in-house talks. Jefrey Hamburger shared
his enthusiasm and expertise with “he Diagram Paradigm: he
Diagrammatic Mode in Medieval Art and Beyond” on October 20.
Jonathan Shea gave the fellows an introduction to the seals collection on March 31, while Cécile Morrisson ofered a seminar on the
coin collection on April 27. Betsy Williams and Gudrun Bühl ofered
two seminars on the museum’s textile collection in May. Ludovic
Bender spoke about a number of databases, including “Artifacts and
Raw Materials in Byzantine Archival Documents” on October 21. Stig
Frøyshov and Stephanos Alexopoulos introduced their Catalogue of
Byzantine Manuscripts (CBM) on January 19, while one-month visitor Kristofel Demoen explained his database of Byzantine book epigrams on May 3.
One of the great pleasures of the year was to welcome scholars from other institutions to give presentations on their current
research. András Németh (Vatican Apostolic Library) spoke on “A
Byzantine Appropriation of the Past: he Excerpta Constantiniana
Revisited” on March 29. Dimitri Korobeinikov (State University of
New York, Albany) talked about “Emperors of Byzantium and Sultans
of Rūm: A Dual Sovereignty? Byzantine Aristocratic Families and
Byzantine Studies
73
heir Relations with the Seljuks” on April 12. Maria Lidova (Oxford
University) explained her “Empires of Faith” project on October 7,
and Matt Savage (Louisiana State University) spoke about “Hırami
Ahmet Paşa Camii: A Ninth-Century Cross-in-Square Church
in Constantinople; Architecture, Liturgy, Function, Historical
Signiicance” on April 19. All of these informal talks provoked intense
and productive discussion.
Very practical matters came under discussion as well. Ater the
Byzantine Studies Conference in New York , Michael Sharp, an editor
at Cambridge University Press, came to Dumbarton Oaks to discuss
academic publishing with the Byzantine group and to speak with
them individually about projects underway. A few days later, Michael
Maas held a workshop on writing letters of application for academic
jobs. Many people attended from all three areas of study.
Special Activities
Early in the irst term, Byzantine Studies welcomed local Byzantinists
to a potluck reception in the gardens.
Another highlight of the irst semester was Byzantine Studies’
contribution to the 75th Anniversary celebration. On November 13,
the Byzantine fellows and junior fellows presented “Byzantine Studies,
Dumbarton Oaks, and the Humanities,” sharing their ideas about the
challenges and opportunities faced by our ield in the future. A large
audience from all three programs participated in a lively discussion in
the Oak Room at 1700 Wisconsin Avenue.
Once again, Teaching Fellows’ Day was a great success. On February 20, ninety-four undergraduate students and teachers from seven
universities enjoyed talks by Jonathan Shea, Betsy Williams, and Eric
McGeer on “Discovering Byzantine Lives: Evidence in Texts, Images,
and Material Culture.”
An important new collaboration with the National Gallery of
Art took place in two parts this spring. On February 11, before a large
audience in the National Gallery, Ioli Kalavrezou, Jonathan Shea, and
Dimitri Kastritsis presented papers on the aterlives of Alexander in
the Byzantine world. Michael Maas moderated the panel and discussion; this presentation was followed by an entertaining and informative public lecture by Anthony Kaldellis entitled “From Olympus
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to the Streets of Constantinople: he Byzantine Retirement of the
Ancient Gods” on March 3 at the National Gallery of Art.
April 22–23 saw the annual Byzantine symposium on the
“Worlds of Byzantium,” which was organized by Betsy Bolman, Scott
Fitzgerald Johnson, and Jack Tannous. he speakers argued before
a packed house in the Music Room for a “polycentric and interconnected Byzantium” that played an essential part in the larger medieval world of Europe and the Middle East.
Finally, this was a year of transition. Michael Maas completed a
year as director of Byzantine Studies and, with the assistance of the
indefatigable program coordinator Seh-Hee Koh, organized oice
procedures and publication materials to ensure a smooth passing of
the torch to his successor Elena Boeck, whose term begins in July.
During his year, Maas saw a volume of Dumbarton Oaks Papers
transmitted to production; the volume Knowing Bodies, Passionate
Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium, edited by Margaret Mullett
and Susan Harvey, also was prepared and transmitted for production.
Scholarly Activities
Annual Symposium
Worlds of Byzantium
April 22–23, 2016
Organized by Elizabeth S. Bolman, Temple University,
Scott F. Johnson, University of Oklahoma, and
Jack Tannous, Princeton University
Scott F. Johnson, University of Oklahoma, “A New Byzantine
Commonwealth”
Kostis Kourelis, Franklin and Marshall College, “How Byzantines
became Greeks: Greek Nationalism and Byzantine Studies”
Averil Cameron, University of Oxford, “Byzantium and the Turn to
the East”
Antoine Borrut, University of Maryland, “Islamic Late Antiquity,
Byzantium, and Iran”
Robin Darling Young, Catholic University of America, “King and
God(s) in Early Armenian Sagas”
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75
Speakers at the Byzantine symposium “Worlds of Byzantium.”
Stephen Rapp, Sam Houston State University, “Byzantine Georgia /
Georgian Byzantium”
Alicia Walker, Bryn Mawr College, “Art at the Edges: Shiting
Perceptions of the Middle Byzantine Eastern Periphery”
Elizabeth Bolman, Temple University, “he Dynamics of Place and
Space in Early Byzantine Visual Culture”
Arietta Papaconstantinou, University of Reading, “Babel on the
Bosporus? Languages in the Byzantine World”
Jack Tannous, Princeton University, “Byzantine Syriac and
Byzantine Arabic”
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Daniel Galadza, University of Vienna, “Jerusalem’s Liturgy and Its
Byzantinization”
Cecily Hilsdale, McGill University, “he Social Lives of hings East
of Byzantium”
Columba Stewart, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library / Saint
John’s University, “East of Byzantium Revisited”
Teaching Fellows’ Day
Discovering Byzantine Lives: Evidence in Texts,
Images, and Material Culture
February 20, 2016
Elizabeth Williams, Dumbarton Oaks, “Dress and Identity in Early
Byzantium”
Jonathan Shea, Dumbarton Oaks, “Knowing Me, Knowing You:
Seals and Self-Identity”
Eric McGeer, Dumbarton Oaks, “Better a Lion Command Deer
han a Deer Command Lions”
Public Lectures
October 1, 2015
Claudia Rapp, University of Vienna, “Saint Catherine’s Monastery
in the Sinai and its Hidden Manuscript Treasures”
December 9, 2015
Nicola Di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study, “Climate, Ecology,
and Mobility in the History of Eurasian Steppe Nomads”
March 3, 2016
Anthony Kaldellis, Ohio State University, “From Olympus to the
Streets of Constantinople: he Byzantine Retirement of the
Ancient Gods” at the National Gallery of Art
Talks
September 28, 2015
Ludovic Bender, University of Fribourg, “Hermitages and RockMonasteries of Laconia (Eleventh–Fiteenth Century): he
Landscape of Monasticism in a Byzantine Region”
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77
October 19, 2015
Nathaniel Aschenbrenner, Harvard University, “Rome Contested:
Byzantine, Humanist, and Holy Roman Discourses of Empire in
the Fiteenth Century”
October 20, 2015
Jefrey Hamburger, Harvard University, “he Diagram Paradigm:
he Diagrammatic Mode in Medieval Art and Beyond”
November 9, 2015
Siren Celik, University of Birmingham, “A Historical Biography of
Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425)”
November 23, 2015
Roman Shliakhtin, Central European University, “he Image of the
Seljuk Turks among the Byzantine Literati of the Eleventh and
Twelth Centuries”
November 30, 2015
Stig Frøyshov, University of Oslo, “he Horologion in
Constantinople and Peripheries: Palatine, Secular, and Monastic
Contexts”
February 1, 2016
Leslie Brubaker, University of Birmingham, “he Virgin Mary in
the Byzantine World, 400–1200”
February 22, 2016
David Ungvary, Harvard University, “Anxiety, Artiice, and
Asceticism: Christian Latin Poetic Culture, AD 500–700”
March 7, 2016
Bradley Hostetler, Florida State University, “he Function of Text:
Byzantine Reliquaries with Metrical Inscriptions, 843–1204.”
March 14, 2016
Mary Cunningham, University of Nottingham, “he Virgin Mary
in the Byzantine World, 400–1200: Images, Texts, Relics, and
Ceremony”
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April 4, 2016
Yuri Marano, Collège de France, Monde Byzantin, “he Privileged
Burials of Early Byzantine Greece (Early Fourth to Early
Seventh Century CE)”
April 11, 2016
Fabio Pagani, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and
Humanities, “Studying Plato at Mystra: New Perspectives on
Gemistos Pletho and His School”
April 25, 2016
Nikolaos Zagklas, University of Silesia, “heodore Prodromos:
Writing Poetry and Schedography in Twelth-Century
Constantinople”
Summer Program
Byzantine Coins and Seals Summer Program
July 6–31, 2015
Faculty: Eric McGeer and Vasiliki Penna
Participants: Sergio Basso, Stefanos Dimitriadis, Polina Ivanova,
Rózsa Márton, Nikolaos Mastrochristos, Brian Salas, Panagiotis
heodoropoulos, and Rossana Valente
Byzantine Studies
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Garden and
Landscape Studies
Garden and Landscape Studies saw an unprecedented level of activity in 2015–2016, an expression of both existing and new initiatives.
We continued to host the fellowships, public programs, and academic
events that are the core missions of the program, while generating
several major new publications and launching the irst full year of
our program in Urban Landscape Studies, funded by the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation through their initiative in “Architecture,
Urbanism, and the Humanities.”
New publications included the proceedings of the 2013 symposium Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa, and
two titles in our recently launched translation series, ex horto. SubSaharan Africa is one of the longest occupied and least studied landscapes on earth; the symposium volume is a contribution to a small
but growing efort to address this gap in scholarship. Its essays present
a range of landscapes: pathways and cairns used by nomadic peoples
to navigate and mark signiicant places; anthropogenic or managed
forests consecrated for ritual purposes of various kinds; tombs or palaces with signiicant landscape orientations and components; even
monumental ceremonial and urban spaces, as at Great Zimbabwe or
Djenne. hey explore what we know of precolonial and later indigenous designed landscapes, how these landscapes were understood in
the colonial era, and how they are being recuperated today for nation
building, identity formation, and cultural airmation.
The new titles in ex horto include the first translation into
English of the Kangxi Emperor’s poems and prose descriptions of the
John Beardsley works with a group of landscape and architecture
students from the Phelps Architecture, Construction, and Engineering
High School in Northeast DC.
81
thirty-six views of the Bishu Shanzhuang, his early eighteenth-century mountain estate to escape the summer heat in Chengde, China.
he translations, by Richard Strassberg, with introductions by him
and art historian Stephen Whiteman, have been published together
with the irst side-by-side reproductions of the complete woodblocks and copperplate engravings commissioned by the emperor,
which were instrumental in bringing knowledge of Chinese gardens
to Europe. he other is the irst complete translation into English of
Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s Letters of a Dead Man, composed while on a lengthy tour of England beginning in September
1826. Pückler’s main purpose in making this journey was to ind a
wealthy wife, in order that he might complete his elaborate plans for
transforming two thousand acres near the southwest corner of his
vast realm into an ideal landscape park. His letters are of interest not
only for their many descriptions of landscape, architecture, and gardens but also for the ways in which they situate these places in the
context of the social, political, and cultural life of late Enlightenment
Europe. his publication was launched with a presentation by translator Linda Parshall at the German Embassy on April 13.
he annual spring symposium, held May 6–7 and organized by
Garden and Landscape Studies director John Beardsley and Boston
University architectural history professor Daniel Bluestone, was on
the subject of “Landscape and the Academy.” Universities are custodians of some of the world’s most signiicant designed landscapes.
Historical campuses are the centers of academic life, but universities also manage gardens, botanical gardens, arboreta, farms, forests,
biotic reserves, and even far-lung environmental research stations.
he symposium explored how and why universities have come to
be responsible for so many diferent kinds of landscapes and what
role they play today in academic life, pedagogy, and cultural politics. Organized on the occasion of the seventy-ith anniversary of
Dumbarton Oaks, which certainly counts among the most signiicant cultural landscapes in any university’s care, the symposium
addressed both the history of academic landscapes and their prospects and perils as universities go global and digital.
he fall colloquium, “Frontiers in Urban Landscape Research,”
was held on November 20; an element of the Mellon Initiative in
Urban Landscape Studies, it took the form of a graduate workshop.
Doctoral candidates in advanced stages of writing dissertations on
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Dumbarton Oaks staf and fellows at the book discussion for Letters of a
Dead Man at the German embassy.
topics in the history and design of urban landscapes were invited to
share selected aspects of their work with each other and with senior
designers and scholars in the ield. his colloquium was an opportunity to bring together early-career scholars pursuing cross-disciplinary work and shaping new approaches to the urban environment. It
was intended to generate greater awareness of the urban humanities,
while helping an emerging generation of scholars advance their work
across a range of relevant ields.
his year, Garden and Landscape Studies collaborated with the
Zentrum für Gartenkunst + Landschatsarchitektur (CGL) at the
Leibniz Universität Hannover on a three-day symposium “Reisen und
Gärten (Travels and Gardens),” held on February 24–26 in the newly
restored Schloss Herrenhausen, at the head of a celebrated baroque
garden in Hannover, Germany. A follow-up to the colloquium “Travel
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The Modern Cities class, part of the Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape
Studies, presented in collaboration with Georgetown University.
and Translation,” hosted by Dumbarton Oaks on November 1, 2013,
this event aimed to further our understanding of the role of travel in
the exchange of ideas about landscape design, botanical knowledge,
and horticultural techniques, while strengthening the long-standing
intellectual ties between our two institutions.
In recognition of the seventy-ith anniversary of Dumbarton
Oaks, observed during the 2015–2016 academic year, Garden and
Landscape Studies organized panels on landscape history at the
annual meetings of the College Art Association (CAA) on February
4, and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) on April 7.
he CAA panel, “Landscape into History,” was organized by John
Beardsley with Jennifer Raab, a former fellow now teaching at Yale
University. Characterized by distinct outlooks cultivated in diferent
academic departments, art history and landscape studies nevertheless
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have a common origin. he CAA session looked both forward and
back, exploring the connections between the histories of art and
landscape while investigating the potential for more productive
interchange between the two disciplines in the twenty-irst century.
he SAH panel, “Reframing Landscape History,” organized by John
Beardsley and Anatole Tchikine, relected on the history and the current disciplinary status of garden and landscape studies, addressing
the diferent methodological approaches, institutional frameworks,
and individual visions that have informed the ield’s past and are
shaping its future.
Other academic events during the year included an April 14 lecture, “Olympic Landscapes: Green and Greenest,” by Mary Margaret
Jones, president and senior principal of Hargreaves Associates in
San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hargreaves Jones
Landscape Architecture in New York. Jones has led a number of
the irm’s award-winning projects around the globe, including the
master concept design for the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the parklands for the 2012 London Olympics, which were the subject of her
talk. Another lecture, “he Monster in the Garden: Early Modern
Landscape Design and the Grotesque,” was delivered by Luke Morgan
of Monash University, Australia, on October 15. We also hosted a
March 23 screening in conjunction with the Environmental Film
Festival of the ilm Containment by Harvard historian of science
Peter Galison and ilmmaker Robb Moss about the efort to manage
and warn future generations about repositories of nuclear waste. Jane
Padelford, program coordinator, continued in her role of skillfully
managing all the department’s academic events and public programs,
as well as its many short-term academic visitors, including research
stipend recipients and predoctoral residents.
his was the irst full year of the Mellon Initiative in Urban
Landscape Studies, which aims to bring together landscape architects and historians to explore how urban environments got to be
the way they are and how best to manage them today. his grant
is one of iteen made so far to major institutions of higher education and research by the Mellon Foundation; these grants are aimed
to foster the joint contributions that the humanities and the design
and planning disciplines may make to the understanding of the processes and efects of burgeoning urbanization. To this end, the Mellon
Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks hosts two fellows each semester, one
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85
designer and one scholar, and encourages them to work together
and with other fellows in the Dumbarton Oaks community. It also
invites distinguished practitioners to reside at Dumbarton Oaks for
shorter terms. In 2015–2016, the Mellon senior practitioner resident
was landscape architect Gary Hilderbrand, a founding partner of
Reed Hilderbrand LLC, Cambridge and New Haven. Hilderbrand, a
committed designer, teacher, critic, and writer, is professor in practice
at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since
1990. he Mellon fellows were David Wooden, Christina Milos, Kara
Schlichting, and Alpa Nawre. Jeanne Hafner, a historian with special interests in urban planning history and theory, the history of science and technology, cultural geography, and environmental history,
was engaged to help manage the program as the Mellon postdoctoral
fellow in Urban Landscape Studies.
Developing synergies between Mellon fellows and other fellows at
Dumbarton Oaks is a key focus of the Mellon Initiative. Discussions
among fellows and practitioners are fostered through weekly Midday
Dialogues with invited speakers, landscape-related ield trips, and the
presentation of works-in-progress. During the 2015–2016 academic
year, invited Midday Dialogue speakers touched upon a wide variety
of urban landscape topics, from an urban history of the idea of “informality” in Brazil to contemporary environmental design in Mumbai,
India. Field trips to the Washington Aqueduct and Blue Plains
Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant inspired alliances between
fellows working on water-related topics, including between Wooden,
who is writing a history of water treatment in the district, and Tyler
fellow John Davis, who is researching the Army Corps of Engineers.
In spring 2016, Schlichting, a historian, and Nawre, a designer, joined
forces to augment their shared interests in the history, evolution, and
management of urban water systems. Nawre was inspired through
discussions with Schlichting to “reconsider the values that she
ascribes to the design of any space.” Schlichting, for her part, attested
to the beneits of working with a practitioner such as Nawre, because
it reminded her of the importance of the physical and social attributes
of lived space.
In addition to fellowships, an important dimension of the Mellon
Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies is providing outreach to underserved high school students in the district. his aspect of the program
was launched in April and May 2016, with a series of ield trips to
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Dumbarton Oaks. A group of landscape and architecture students
from the Phelps Architecture, Construction, and Engineering High
School in northeast DC, for example, visited the historic garden at
Dumbarton Oaks to explore principles of landscape art and the
design and construction of plant beds, which led to a discussion of
the importance of biodiversity in cities. In May, the program ofered
workshops on urban vegetation, focusing on tree identiication at
Dumbarton Oaks (“Tree Notebooks”) on May 3 and 9, and ways of
bringing nature into the city (“City of Trees”) on May 11. Two of these
programs involved students from Ward 8, perhaps the most economically disadvantaged area of the district. he Mellon Initiative
also hosted a Teen Council meeting for high school students in the
Design Apprenticeship Program of the National Building Museum
on May 14, introducing them to the diferent design elements and
management strategies of the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens and adjacent Dumbarton Oaks Park, managed as an urban forest by the
National Park Service. We also initiated discussions with the Urban
Studies Curator at the Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian
Institution, about potential future collaborations, such as public programming around a forthcoming exhibit on neighborhood change in
Washington, DC.
Garden and Landscape Studies beneitted this year from an
unusually strong contingent of scholars in residence. he community included two full-year fellows, two one-term fellows, and two
full-year junior fellows, in addition to the four one-term Mellon fellows. We also hosted two William R. Tyler fellows, Harvard graduate students who divided their time between their own dissertation
research and an institutional project. Deirdre Moore helped plan,
design, and implement a pollinator garden as an experiment in bringing additional biodiversity to the gardens, while John Davis created
a digital “water atlas,” revealing where water comes from and goes
to in the city, from the Washington Aqueduct to the Blue Plains
Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. In addition to expanding the
institution’s research in the digital humanities, the project created a
bridge between the activities of our fellows and the Mellon Initiative
in Urban Landscape Studies. We were also fortunate this year to
have an extended stay from visiting scholar Alison Hardie, a specialist in Chinese garden history, who came to complete work on the
long-term project to publish an anthology of translations of Chinese
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garden literature. Instigated nearly two decades ago, the translations
were edited for publication several years ago by Duncan Campbell.
Professor Hardie was able to complete the introductory essay, introductions to the nine chapters of the book, and header notes for each of
the hundreds of translated texts. We hope that her eforts will inally
bring this project to conclusion, signaling our commitment to sustaining the level of activity and achievement we have been aspiring to
in recent years.
Scholarly Activities
Annual Symposium
Landscape and the Academy
May 6–7, 2016
Organized by John Beardsley, Dumbarton Oaks, and
Daniel Bluestone, Boston University
Peter Alagona, University of California, Santa Barbara, “From the
Classroom to the Countryside: he University of California’s
Natural Reserve System and the Role of Field Stations in
American Academic Life”
Hilary Ballon, New York University, “he U.S. Campus Abroad”
Joseph Claghorn, Leibniz Universität Hannover, “Views of the Yard:
he Evolving Image of Harvard’s Core Landscape”
John Davis, Harvard University, “Field School: he Landscape of the
United States Military Academy at West Point”
Hazel Ruth Edwards, he Catholic University of America, “On
Hilltop High: he Enduring and Nurturing Landscapes of the
Howard University Campus”
Burak Erdim, North Carolina State University, “Academy and
Landscapes of Development: Situating Planning Cultures in the
Cold War Middle East”
David Foster, Harvard Forest, “Harvard’s Forest and Farm: A
Consistent Mission to the Academy and Society”
Gary Hilderbrand, Harvard Graduate School of Design,
“Transforming Campus Paradigms: Two Olmsted
Brothers Cases”
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Speakers at the 2016 Garden and Landscape symposium, “Landscape
and the Academy.”
Mark Hough, Duke University, and Linda Jewell, University
of California, Berkeley, “Campus and Garden: Reconciling
Typologies”
John Dixon Hunt, University of Pennsylvania, “‘Landscape’ in New
British Universities”
Karen Van Lengen, University of Virginia, “Pedagogical
Landscapes: he Vassar College Legacy”
Dino J. Martins, Mpala Research Centre, “Field Research Stations in
East Africa: Impacts on Landscape Management, Conservation,
and Sustainable Development”
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Tianjie Zhang, Tianjin University, “Reconiguring Mountain-andWater (Shanshui) Campuses: Landscape Planning in Early
Twentieth-Century Chinese Universities”
Public Lectures
October 15, 2015
Luke Morgan, Monash University, “he Monster in the Garden:
Early Modern Landscape Design and the Grotesque”
April 14, 2016
Mary Margaret Jones, Hargreaves Jones Landscape Architecture,
“Olympic Landscapes: Green and Greenest”
Talks
October 20, 2015
Giorgia Aquilar, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II,
“Imperfect Landscapes for the Evolutive City: New Ecological
Paradigms in the Work of Michael Van Valkenburgh”
December 1, 2015
Alison Hardie, Leeds University, “Having Fun in a Chinese Garden”
December 9, 2015
Catharine Otton-Goulder QC, “Churches in a Shiting Landscape:
he Efects of Coastal Erosion and Silting on the Construction
of Churches in Holderness, East Yorkshire”
January 20, 2016
John Davis, Dumbarton Oaks / Harvard University, “DC Water
Atlas”
February 23, 2016
Margaret Goehring, New Mexico State University, “houghts
about Late Medieval Ornament and the Opening Miniature for
Guillaume de Machaut’s ‘Dit dou Lyon’”
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March 9, 2016
Hugh Livingston, Livingston Sound, “Garden Quartet, Mostly
Intermezzos, Some Preludes, No Cadenzas”
April 12, 2016
Michelle Sauer, University of North Dakota, “Gardens, the Rhetoric
of Desire, and Lesbian Space in Late Medieval Dream Visions”
Contemporary Art Installation Program
2015–2016
Hugh Livingston, Livingston Sound, String Quartet and 22
Intermissions (Please Be Seated)
2016–present
Hugh Livingston, Livingston Sound, Garden Quartet, Mostly
Intermezzos, Some Preludes, No Cadenzas
Panels on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary
Landscape into History
College Art Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC
February 4, 2016
Organized by John M. Beardsley, Dumbarton Oaks, and
Jennifer Raab, Yale University
Danielle B. Joyner, Southern Methodist University, Juliette
Calvarin, Harvard University, and Gavin Wiens, Johns
Hopkins University, “Rocks and Arts in Medieval Le Puy-enVelay: he Virgin’s Volcanoes”
Divya Kumar-Dumas, University of Pennsylvania, “An ‘Art History’
of Landscape? Interpreting Mamallapuram’s Great Penance
Relief”
Elizabeth Kindall, University of St. homas, “Painting the ‘Illusory
Transformings’ of a Chinese Mountainscape”
Julia Lum, Yale University, “Sacred Geographies: Cross-Cultural
Landscapes in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, 1814–1845”
Peter Hewitt Christensen, University of Rochester, “Topographic
Regimes, Visual Persuasion, and the German Construction of
the Ottoman Railway Network”
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The documentary Containment, directed by Peter Galison and Robb
Moss of Harvard University, was screened in collaboration with the
Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital.
Reframing Landscape History
Society of Architectural Historians, Pasadena
April 7, 2016
Organized by John Beardsley, Dumbarton Oaks,
and Anatole Tchikine, Dumbarton Oaks
Jeremy Foster, Cornell University, “Elaborating Time-Consciousness
at the Emscher Park IBA”
Kathleen John-Alder, Rutgers University, “Ecologies of Time and
Scale: Contextualizing Ian McHarg’s Landscape Vision”
Mark Eischeid, University of Oregon, “Translation Analysis: An
Historiographic Technique”
Mira Engler, Iowa State University, “Intersections of Landscape
Design Studies and Consumerist Arts”
Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University, “Reframing Bourbon Landscapes
around the History of Plants”
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University Collaborations
Fall 2015
Modern Cities class, in collaboration with Georgetown University,
taught by Jordan Sand of Georgetown University, with Anatole
Tchikine, Jeanne Hafner, Christina Milos, and David Wooden of
Dumbarton Oaks.
February 24–26, 2016
A three-day symposium “Reisen und Gärten (Travels and Gardens)”
at Zentrum für Gartenkunst + Landschatsarchitektur (CGL), Leibniz
Universität Hannover, Germany
Mellon Initiative in Urban Landscape Studies
Graduate Workshop
Frontiers in Urban Landscape Research
November 20, 2015
Molly Catherine Briggs, PhD Candidate, Landscape Architecture,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, “Beyond the Path:
Assessing the Transporting Capacity of Urban Landscapes with
Dynamic Isovist Imaging”
Dwight Carey, PhD Candidate, Art History, University of
California, Los Angeles, “Planned Authority: he Urban History
of French Imperialism in a Senegal River Town, 1659–1810”
Eyun Jennifer Kim, PhD Candidate, Built Environment, University
of Washington, “History, Narrative, and Recovered Nature in
the Cheonggyecheon Restoration (Seoul, South Korea)”
Margot K. Lystra, PhD Candidate, History of Architecture and
Urban Development, Cornell University, “Drawing the Hybrid
Freeway: Urban Design and Non/Human Relationship’”
Abbey Stockstill, PhD Candidate, History of Art and Architecture,
Harvard University, “he Mountains, the Mosque, and the Red
City: Locality in Twelth-Century Marrakech”
Stephanie M. Strauss, PhD Candidate, Art History, University of
Texas, Austin, “‘Betwixt and Between the Great Yax Ha’: Maya
Kingly Sight across the Usumacinta River”
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Film Screening
March 23, 2016
Containment, directed by Peter Galison and Robb Moss, Harvard
University, in collaboration with the Environmental Film
Festival in the Nation’s Capital
Midday Dialogues
September 29, 2015
Peder Anker, New York University, “A History of Environmental
Designs”
October 14, 2015
Juan-Andres Leon, Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry
/ Museum of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, “he
Topography of Post-Industrial Gentriication: Toxic Identities
and Flooded Realities in Gowanus, Brooklyn”
November 3, 2015
Katrina Jones, Maryland Port Administration, “Restoring Brown
Places into Green Spaces through Community Engagement: he
Masonville Story”
November 10, 2015
Christina Milos, University of Hannover, “Anticipating Future
Urbanization in Nigeria’s Oil Sands Belt”
December 2, 2015
David Wooden, District Department of Energy and Environment,
Meredith Unchurch, District Department of Transportation,
and Rebecca Stack, Design Green, “Critical Work: Innovative
Green Infrastructure Regulations Transforming DC.”
December 8, 2015
Jeanne Hafner, Dumbarton Oaks, “Housing, Landscape,
Environment”
January 5, 2016
Anatole Tchikine, Dumbarton Oaks, “he Flood of Missed
Opportunities: Florence, November 4, 1966”
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January 20, 2016
Clark Wilson, Environmental Protection Agency, “Design Matters!
(Even at the EPA)”
February 2, 2016
Mariana Mogilevich, Pratt Institute, “Beyond the City:
Metropolitan Environments and Urban Identiication”
February 24, 2016
Alpa Nawre, Kansas State University / Alpa Nawre Design, “Talaab,
Ghat, and Canal Waterworks on the Indian Urban Landscape”
February 24, 2016
Kara Schlichting, Queens College, City University of New York,
“he Nature of Urban Coastal Resiliency: Twentieth-Century
Governance, Environmental Management, and Design”
March 16, 2016
Bruno Carvalho, Princeton University, “Informal by Design: From
Amerindian ‘Garden Cities’ to Olympic Urbanism in Brazil”
March 29, 2016
Sheila Crane, University of Virginia, “Inventing Informality in
Algiers and Casablanca”
April 5, 2016
Gary Hilderbrand, Reed Hilderbrand LLC / Harvard Graduate
School of Design, “Vegetal City”
April 19, 2016
Jennifer Vey, Brookings Institution, “he Rise of Innovation
Districts: he Intersection of Innovation and Quality Places”
April 26, 2016
Anne Rademacher, New York University, “Producing Green
Expertise: Place, Pedagogy, and Sustainable Architecture in
Mumbai”
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Outreach Activities
April 27, 2016
Biodiversity from Garden to City, ield trip with Phelps Architecture,
Engineering, and Construction High School
May 3, 2016
Tree Notebooks, ield trip organized through the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative for seventh- and eighth-graders at
Achievement Prep Academy
May 9, 2016
Tree Notebooks, ield trip organized through the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative for fourth-graders at Achievement Prep
Academy
May 11, 2016
City of Trees, ield trip organized through the DC Arts and Humanities
Education Collaborative for sixth-graders at McKinley Middle School
May 14, 2016
Public Park, Private Garden, ield trip with the National Building
Museum Teen Council for ninth- to twelth-graders
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Pre-Columbian Studies
At least some participants confessed to a burning urgency to attend
this year’s Pre-Columbian Studies fall symposium, “Smoke, Flames,
and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice,” held on
October 9–10, 2015, and organized by Vera Tiesler and Andrew
Scherer. From the earliest times, ire has been a fundamental and
transformative element in human culture. he symposium presentations embraced diverse approaches to the multilayered meanings of
ire and the body in ancient, historic, and contemporary Mesoamerica.
he disciplinary interests represented ranged across archaeology, bioarchaeology, epigraphy, iconography, ethnohistory, and ethnography,
and addressed how ire was used in the mundane, daily activities of
cooking and in the important rites of puriication and communication in which smoking censers facilitated interaction with the world
of supernatural beings and deities. he Aztec New Fire Ceremony has
long served as a paradigm for thinking about Mesoamerican ire as
one of the more renowned expressions of rites that are fundamentally
about marking the passage of time and new beginnings. Fire plays
a vital role in festivals of agricultural renewal as well as in funerary
rituals where the pungent smells of burning wood, charred lesh, and
aromatic incense all contribute to a compelling sensory experience.
Fire signatures in archaeologically retrieved mortuary assemblages
demonstrate a wide range of heat treatments and exposures, and body
remnants in the form of bones and ashes served for veneration and
public ritual. Suice to say that the meeting generated “heated” discussion and “fanned the lames” of debate both during and long ater
the formal sessions! A concluding discussion was skillfully led by
An image featured in Stephens & Catherwood Revisited: Maya Ruins and the
Passage of Time.
99
The Pre-Columbian Studies special exhibit, Stephens & Catherwood
Revisited: Maya Ruins and the Passage of Time.
Pre-Columbian Studies senior fellow John Verano, who ofered relections and observations from an Andean perspective, leavened by his
own special brand of humor, to round out the weekend’s scholarly
exchanges. he meeting once again drew a full house, and Bliss fellowships enabled three undergraduates from Harvard to attend.
Timed to coincide with the symposium, the Pre-Columbian
Studies program generated a temporary exhibition, Stephens &
Catherwood Revisited: Maya Ruins and the Passage of Time, featuring Frederick Catherwood’s illustrations of Maya ruins matched
with contemporary photographs of the same sites and perspectives
by Professor Emeritus Jay A. Frogel of the Ohio State University. Our
Harvard summer intern Hannah Yang played a vital role in researching and mounting the exhibition across the Orientation and Rare
Book Galleries and in preparing the accompanying booklet. he
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exhibition was generously supported by donations made to the Flora
Clancy Fund in honor of Flora’s fellowship (1986–1987) and longstanding afection for Dumbarton Oaks.
As part of the Pre-Columbian Studies contribution to the seventyith anniversary celebrations, Tom Cummins presented a public lecture entitled “A Crack in the Mirror: Desires for Pre-Columbian and
American-Made Colonial Art, hen and Now.” He observed that the
notable Byzantine and Pre-Columbian works collected by the Blisses
encompassed creations of compelling aesthetic appeal fashioned by
societies that came to an end within decades of each other. Each culture found its works and artists dispersed, and iconoclastic fervor disavowed what these “classical” traditions had created. Centuries later,
their distinct histories intersected in scholarly discourse through
the formation of Dumbarton Oaks. Cummins made adroit use of a
renowned object in the Pre-Columbian collections—a rare precontact
polished obsidian mirror set in a gilded wooden frame. he leaves and
lowers carved into the frame reveal the repurposing of the object to
serve as a portable altar in the early colonial period, the back bearing
the emblem of the Franciscan order in New Spain. In the course of its
storied history, the obsidian was shattered into several pieces and its
subsequent repair inspired the title for the lecture.
he strikingly designed, revamped style of our Pre-Columbian
publications continues to draw much favorable comment in the ield
thanks to the skilled eye and expertise of Kathy Sparkes, director of
publications, and Sara Taylor, managing editor of art and archaeology. he most recent title in the Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and
Archaeology monograph series is Holes in the Head: he Art and
Archaeology of Trepanation in Ancient Peru by John Verano. Work
is proceeding apace on the catalogue of the Central America and
Colombian collection at Dumbarton Oaks, building on the successful workshop held on-site in January 2014, followed by another
in Panama in January 2015. Productive collaborations have been
forged with materials scientists working in the laboratories of the
Walters Art Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the
American Indian to undertake analytical work on the Dumbarton
Oaks gold objects.
A further initiative promoting Dumbarton Oaks’s name in Latin
America was the workshop held in Santiago, Chile, on May 17–21,
2016, that addressed the Inca conquest of its southern territories in
Pr e-Columbian Studies
101
the fourteenth and iteenth centuries. “Repensando el Tawantinsuyu
desde el Collasuyu” was cosponsored by Dumbarton Oaks, the
project CONICYT USA 2013-0012 (Water Management and Agrohydraulic Systems in Desert Environments), and the Department
of Anthropology, Universidad de Chile. he workshop was held in
Pirque, a quiet town in the foothills of the Andean Cordillera just
south of Santiago, and brought together a group of specialists who
have been actively involved in recent Inca ield research in the province (suyu) known as Collasuyu that encompasses vast expanses
of modern Chile and Argentina. Moving beyond straightforward
description and sharing new data, this meeting brought fresh insights
to bear on our understanding of the Inca incorporation and administration of the region and its developing state-local dynamics. he
invited papers evaluated how we interpret Inca rule by comparing the
archaeological and documentary records, proposing new theoretical perspectives and interpretations of Inca imperial expansion, and
drawing parallels to other ancient empires.
Scholarly Activities
Annual Symposium
Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in
Mesoamerican Ritual Practice
October 9–10, 2015
Organized by Vera Tiesler, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, and
Andrew Scherer, Brown University
Oswaldo Chinchilla, Yale University, “Fire and Sacriice in
Mesoamerican Myths and Ritual”
Markus Eberl, Vanderbilt University, “Divine Fire: Transformation
in Highland Mexican hought and Practices”
Pedro Pitarch, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, “he Chill of
the Jaguar: Absence of Heat and Maya-Tzeltal Disease Concepts”
Jesper Nielsen and Christophe Helmke, University of Copenhagen,
“Where the Sun Came into Being: Rites of Pyrolatry, Transition,
and Transformation in Early Classic Teotihuacan”
Andrew Scherer and Stephen Houston, Brown University, “Blood,
Fire, Death: Covenants and Crises among the Classic Maya”
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Speakers at the annual Pre-Columbian symposium “Smoke, Flames, and
the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice.”
Joel Palka, University of Illinois, Chicago, “Where here’s Fire,
here’s Smoke: Lacandon Maya Burning Rites, Cremation, and
Symbolism”
John F. Chuchiak, Missouri State University, “he Burning and the
Burnt: he Transformative Power of Fire, Smoke, and Flames in
Conquest and Colonial Maya Ritual, Warfare, and Diplomacy”
Vera Tiesler, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, “he Fiery Dead:
Igniting Human Bodies and Body Parts in the Maya Northern
Lowlands”
William Duncan, East Tennessee State University, and Gabrielle
Vail, New College of Florida, “Burning Blood and Bone among
the Postclassic Maya: Gender, Complementary Dualism, and the
Material Record”
Gregory Pereira, French National Center for Scientiic Research,
Paris, “Transforming the Body: Fire in Mortuary Practices in
Ancient Michoacán, Mexico”
Pr e-Columbian Studies
103
Guilhem Olivier, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
“Relics, Divination, and Regeneration: he Symbolism of Ashes
in Mesoamerica”
Ximena Chávez Balderas, Templo Mayor / Instituto Nacional de
Antropología e Historia, “Fire, Transformation, and Bone Relics:
Cremated Remains at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan”
Danièle Dehouve, French National Center for Scientiic Research,
Paris, “he New Fire and the Corporal Penance: Comparative
Perspectives between the Tlapanecs and the Aztecs”
Workshop
Repensando el Tawantinsuyu desde el Collasuyu
May 17–21, 2016
In collaboration with the project CONICYT USA 2013-0012
(Water Management and Agro-hydraulic Systems in Desert
Environments) and the Department of Anthropology,
Universidad de Chile, Pirque
Organized by Frances Hayashida, University of New Mexico,
Andrés Troncoso, Universidad de Chile, and Diego Salazar,
Universidad de Chile
Participants: Félix Acuto, Sonia Alconini, José Berenguer,
Victoria Castro, Ian Farrington, Francisco Garrido, Marco
Giovannetti, Ana María Lorandi, José Luis Martinez, Axel
Nielsen, Tristan Platt, Claudia Rivera, Mauricio Uribe, and
Verónica Williams
Public Lecture
December 4, 2015
homas Cummins, Harvard University, “A Crack in the Mirror:
Desires for Pre-Columbian and American-Made Colonial Art,
hen and Now”
Talks
September 21, 2015
Christopher Beekman, University of Colorado, Denver, “Out of
Many, One: Collective Governance and its Visual Ramiications
in Pre-Columbian Jalisco, Mexico”
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November 2, 2015
Takeshi Inomata, University of Arizona, “Ritual and Politics at the
Preclassic Maya Center of Ceibal, Guatemala”
December 7, 2015
Erika Brant, University of Virginia, “he Dead Rose from the
Ground: Ancestors and Political Authority in a Post-Collapse
Andean Society (1000–1450 CE)”
January 25, 2016
Daniela Triadan, University of Arizona, “he Development of Social
Inequality at the Preclassic Maya Center of Ceibal, Guatemala”
March 28, 2016
Rebecca Mendelsohn, University at Albany, State University of New
York, “he Early Mesoamerican City of Izapa and the Southern
Maya Region”
April 18, 2016
Jennifer Saracino, Tulane University, “Shiting Landscape:
Depictions of Environmental and Cultural Disruption in the
Mapa Uppsala”
Tertulias
July 15, 2015
María Florencia Becerra, Instituto de Arqueología, Universidad
de Buenos Aires, “Mining and Metallurgy during Inka and
Colonial Times in the Extreme Northwest of Argentina”
July 23, 2015
Anastasia Kayluta, Russian Museum of Ethnography, “Discovering
the Mysteries of the Oztoticpac Lands Map: History and
Content of the Earliest Nahua (Aztec) Register of Properties”
July 27, 2015
Christina Torres-Rouf, University of California, Merced, “Dying
Along the Way”
Pr e-Columbian Studies
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July 30, 2015
David Reed, University of Michigan, “Maya in the Middle: Mortuary
Analysis of Late Classic Copán”
Kirby Farah, University of California, Riverside, “Elite Daily Life
and Identity-Making Practices at Postclassic Xaltocan”
September 24, 2015
Jay A. Frogel, World Images, “Stephens & Catherwood Revisited:
Maya Ruins and the Passage of Time”
March 17, 2016
William Fash, Harvard University, “Pre-Columbian Art and
Archaeology at an Ancient Maya City?: he Past, Present, and
Possible Futures of Copán, Honduras” Formal Talk
April 15, 2015
Daniela La Chioma Silvestre Villalva, University of São
Paulo, “Depictions of Musicians on Moche Ritual Ceramic
Iconography: A Study of the Correlation between Instruments
and Power Attributes”
Exhibitions
September 1, 2015–May 9, 2016
Stephens & Catherwood Revisited:
Maya Ruins and the Passage of Time
Orientation and Rare Book Galleries, Dumbarton Oaks
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Library
he research library at Dumbarton Oaks continued to grow in all
respects in 2015–2016:
•
139 new readers (in addition to the vibrant number of fellows, interns, and summer-school students) were granted
access and oriented to the library.
•
54 researchers consulted a variety of collection materials a
total of 777 times in the Rare Book Reading Room.
•
42 researchers made 80 visits to the Image Collections and
Fieldwork Archives (ICFA), consulting 709 boxes of archival
and photographic materials.
•
958 interlibrary loan requests were illed for fellows and
staf; 341 requests from other libraries were illed.
•
767 images of collection items were supplied to scholars for
research and publication.
•
3,305 new books were acquired for the collection, 1,778 journal titles and monographic series continue to be received,
and twenty-nine new subscriptions were initiated.
•
2,020 titles, representing 2,793 volumes, were catalogued in
the past year.
•
4 new indings aids (for the papers of Margaret Alexander,
Edward Eliopoulos, Josephine Harris, and Charles Tauss)
were released by ICFA.
•
4 oral history interviews (with Henry Maguire, Sarah
Underwood, Christoper Donnan, and Herbert Kessler) were
released by ICFA.
An Garden Library exhibition of books and botanical prints
of lowers in the Music Room in May 1959.
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A bookplate from the Blisses’ original prviate book collection
he research library continued to reintegrate ICFA, resulting
in closer collaboration across all units in the library. he staf of the
research library welcomed Alyson Williams as the new reader services
librarian, Konstantina Karterouli as the new postdoctoral fellow in
Byzantine art history, and Bettina Smith as the new manager of ICFA.
Digitization
With the integration of ICFA, the research library adopted as its top
priority the implementation of an online presentation of digitized
images from Dumbarton Oaks and related ieldwork projects in the
AtoM@DO platform (http://atom.doaks.org). Building on the foundation laid by former staf in ICFA, including Shalimar Fojas White,
Anne Marie Viola, Fani Gargova, and Rona Razon, head cataloguer
Sandra Parker Provenzano led a team (including Wendy Johnson
and Jessica Cebra) that migrated and loaded 5,389 photographs of
Byzantine monuments and artwork, as well as indexed an additional
3,888 photographs. In the spring of 2016, staing of this project grew
to include Konstantina Karterouli, and leadership for the project
transferred to Bettina Smith.
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During the summer of 2015, under the direction of Wendy
Johnson, Sita Strother worked as a volunteer on the Garden Archives
Project. To the archive they added 264 images of numerous spaces
in the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens, including the Urn Terrace,
Cherry Hill, Crabapple Hill, Herbaceous Border, Fountain Terrace,
Kitchen Gardens, Plum Walk, and Lilac Circle (www.doaks.org/
library-archives/garden-archives).
he research library digitized and enhanced the cataloguing
for thirty-one additional volumes from the Rare Book Collection,
increasing by over forty percent the total number of books from the
research library collections digitized in the past four years and bringing the total to seventy-four. he digitized rare book materials can be
viewed online at www.doaks.org/resources/digital/rare-books.
Library Exhibits
Rare Book Gallery
Americana from the Collection
May–August 2015
he Rare Book Collection houses a small but signiicant collection of
both manuscript and published Americana. he variety and quality
of items underscore the eclectic interests of Robert and Mildred Bliss.
his exhibit illustrated the early collecting focus of Mildred Bliss before
the transfer of the estate to Harvard University and the formation of
the Rare Book Collection. Materials exhibited ranged in date from
the colonial period through the early twentieth century. Subjects covered included political, literary, social, and garden history. Among the
highlights was a rare pamphlet from 1780 on the trial of Major Andre
published in Philadelphia, a copy of the 1778 London edition of Mawe’s
Universal Gardener from George Washington’s library, and a handwritten sonnet and letter from Emily Dickinson, which was accompanied
by a book of her poems, he Single Hound.
Catalogue House
Garden Perspectives
November 20, 2015–present
he seventy-ith anniversary of the git of Dumbarton Oaks to
Harvard University provided the opportunity to exhibit archival
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photographs of the garden, beginning with its early design and development in the 1920s by Beatrix Farrand and Mildred Bliss and continuing through numerous and varied changes over the course of
its life. An online exhibit complements a physical installation in
the Catalogue House: http://www.doaks.org/75th-anniversary/
garden-perspectives.
Research Library
Quiescit anima libris: On the Occasion of the 75th
Anniversary of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
April 2016–present
he exhibit consists of archival documents and photographs related
to the evolution of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library from its
beginnings as a private collection in a residence to the present modern
research library. In addition to photographs of reading rooms and
library stacks in the Main House through the years, the exhibit features letters and reports detailing the establishment of the library’s
collections and highlighting major transitions in its history.
Loans to Other Exhibitions
Moche y sus vecinos: Reconstruyendo identidades
Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru
February 19–August 14, 2016
he library provided digital images and associated permission for the
exhibition of thirty-two ine line drawings of Moche vessels from the
Christopher B. Donnan and Donna McClelland Moche Archive in
ICFA.
Important Acquisitions
Byzantine Studies
Giustiniani, Bernardo. De origine urbis Venetiarum.
Impressum Venetiis [Venice]: Per Bernardinum Benalium,
[not before 31 January 1492 or 1493].
An expansive consideration of the origins of Venice and its particular institutions, it includes such diverse topics as Constantine’s move
of the imperial capital from Rome to Constantinople, the failure of
the Byzantine empire to retain its western territories against invaders
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such as the Vandals and Lombards, the career of Mohammed, the
Arab conquests, the origins of Greek ire, and the rise of Ottoman
power that culminated in the fall of Constantinople. Known to be in
only six libraries in the United States, this copy is embellished with
hand-painted initials and includes Latin marginalia in a sixteenthcentury hand.
Alexander, of Tralles. Paraphrases in libros omneis Alexandri
Tralliani medici periodeuti: super singularum humani
corporis partium à summo uertice ad imam usq[ue] pla[n]
tam, morborum ac febrium causis, signis, remedijsqá[ue] tum
communibus, tum proprijs. Basileae: Excudebat Henricus
Petrus, mense Martio, anno MDXLI [1541].
Alban horer’s Latin translation based on available Greek manuscripts of the inluential sixth-century medical encyclopedia Biblia
iatrika dyokaideka by the Byzantine physician Alexander of Tralles.
Garden and Landscape Studies
Trew, Christoph Jacob. Hortus
nitidissimis omnem per
annum superbiens loribus,
sive, Amoenissimorum lorum
imagines. Norimbergae
[Nuremberg]: Typis Johannis
Josephi Fleischmanni, 1751–1772.
A rare complete copy of a volume
offering one of the most attractively illustrated records of lower
cultivation of the second half of the
eighteenth century, with depictions of hyacinths, tulips (over twenty
plates), ranunculi, anemones, caryophylli, lilies, auriculas, roses, narcissi, iris, cheiranthi, asters, fritillaries, and crown imperials.
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Campus Martius antiquae urbis.
Rome: Veneunt apud auctorem in aedibus Comitis homati
via Felici prope Templum SS. Trinitatis in Monte Pincio, 1762.
First edition and ine copy of Piranesi’s extraordinary architectural
reconstruction of ancient Rome, combining polemical archaeology
oten embedded in the Rome of his own day with tremendous artistry.
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Barbaro, Daniel. La pratica della perspettiva. Venice:
Borgominieri, 1569.
First edition of an important cinquecento architectural treatise, ofering the irst systematic discourse on the practical applications of perspective, envisioned as a complement to the Vitruvius commentary
that Barbaro wrote with Palladio.
Crescenzi, Pietro de, and Gorgole de Corne. Le bon mesnager:
au présent volume des prouitz champestres et ruraulx est
traicté du labour des champs, vignes, jardins, arbres de tous
espèces. Paris: Jehan André, 1536.
A French edition of Crescenzi’s Ruralia commoda (1307), the most
important agricultural treatise of the Middle Ages, complementing
three Venetian editions of Crescenzi’s work published in the late ifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Rare Book Collection.
Pre-Columbian Studies
Rodríguez, Manuel. El Marañón, y Amazonas: historia de los
descubrimientos, entradas, y reduccion de naciones: trabajos
malogrados de algunos conquistadores, y dichosos de otros,
assi temporales, como espirituales, en las dilatadas montañas,
y mayores rios de la America. Madrid: En la Imprenta de
Antonio Gonçalez de Reyes, año de 1684.
his rare volume ofers the best account of the history of the political
and spiritual conquests in the region of the Amazon and Marañon
during a period of forty-four years, in addition to an interesting compendium of the history of American discoveries since 1491.
Album of aquarelle drawings of Ecuadorian natives and
costumes, ca. 1850.
Fine original aquarelles by an anonymous artist portraying
Ecuadorians (mainly from Quito) in local costumes, performing
trades, and assisting celebrations; a considerable portion is dedicated
to the native population.
Roxo Mexía y Ocón, Juan. Arte de la lingua general de los
indios del Perú. Por el doctor Ivan Roxo Mexia y Ocun. Lima:
Iorge López de Herrera, 1648.
An important Quechua grammar.
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Juan Bautista, fray. Confessionario en lengua mexicana y
castellana: con muchas advertencias muy necessarias para los
Confessores. Sanctiago Tlatilulco: por Melchior Ocharte, año
de 1599.
A Spanish and Nahuatl confessional, representing one of the irst books
printed at the convent in Tlatelolco, on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Villavicencio, Manuel. Carta corográica de la República
del Ecuador: delineada en vista de las cartas de Don Pedro
Maldonado, el Baron de Humboldt, Mr. Wisse, la de las sontas
de las costas por M. M. Filzroy [i.e., Fitzroy] i H. Kellet, i las
particulares del autor. New York: F. Mayer y Co., 1858.
[bound with] Villavicencio, Manuel. Geografía de la
República del Ecuador. New York: Imprenta de Robert
Craighead, 1858.
Large (40 x 29 in.) folded hand-colored map of Ecuador with large
insert of the Galápagos Islands. Lists major cities and towns within
each province; provinces are color coded.
Spilbergen, Joris van. Oost ende West-Indische spieghel:
waer in beschreven werden de twee laetste navigatien
ghedaen inde jaeren 1614, 1615, 1616, 1617, ende 1618/de eene
door den vermaerden zee-heldt loris van Spilbergen.
Tot Zutphen [Netherlands]: By Andries Janssz van Aelst,
Boeckvercooper, 1621.
A fundamental record of Dutch circumnavigation, military activity,
and trade rivalry in the early seventeenth century. he irst part of
this volume contains the account of Joris van Spilbergen’s circumnavigation, while the later part treats the voyage of Jacob Le Maire. Of the
two voyages, that of Le Maire and Schouten is the more signiicant, as
it includes the discovery of a new passage to the Paciic south of the
Straits of Magellan. Many of the locations van Spilbergen visited and
raided are depicted in the woodcuts. he illustrations include views of
the Straits of Magellan, Acapulco, Lima, and Concepción, as well as a
map of Tierra del Fuego and the “Straits of Le Maire.”
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Publications
Although we continued to explore new ways of disseminating scholarly
works online, we maintained our commitment to producing high-quality works in print in 2015–2016. Joel Kalvesmaki, the managing editor
in Byzantine Studies, and Sara Taylor, the managing editor of art and
archaeology, produced a well-rounded roster of books, including two
volumes in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia
series, one in the Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of
Landscape Architecture series, one in the Studies in Pre-Columbian
Art and Archaeology series, two in the ex horto series, and one in
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, our Byzantine Studies journal. he Bliss-Tyler
Correspondence Project was completed and fully published online by
Lain Wilson, the digital humanities fellow, in fall 2015.
Dumbarton Oaks Books and
Dumbarton Oaks Papers
Saints and Sacred Matter: he Cult of Relics in Byzantium and
Beyond, edited by Cynthia Hahn and Holger A. Klein
Enshrined in sumptuous metal, ivory, or stone containers, relics
formed an important physical and spiritual bond between heaven
and earth, linking humankind to their saintly advocates in heaven.
As they were carried in liturgical processions, used in imperial ceremonies, and called upon in legal disputes and crises, relics—and,
Charvolants (carriages drawn by kites), 1827 (ig. 66). Cover image from
Letters of a Dead Man.
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by extension, their precious containers and built
shrines—provided a visible
link between the living and
the venerated dead. Saints
and Sacred Matter explores
the embodied aspects of the
divine—physical remains
of holy men and women
and objects associated with
them. Contributors to the
volume explore how those
remains, or relics, linked
the past and present with an
imagined future.
North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam, edited by
Susan T. Stevens and
Jonathan P. Conant
The profound economic and
strategic significance of the
province of “Africa” made the
Maghreb highly contested
in the Byzantine period—
by the Roman (Byzantine)
Empire, Berber kingdoms,
and eventually also Muslim
Arabs—as each group sought
to gain control and exploit the
region to its own advantage.
Scholars have typically taken
the failure of the Byzantine
endeavor in Africa as a foregone conclusion. North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam
reassesses this pessimistic vision both by examining those elements
of Romano-African identity that provided continuity in a period of
remarkable transition and by seeking to understand the transformations in African society in the context of the larger post-Roman
Mediterranean.
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he Medici: Citizens and
Masters, edited by Robert
Black and John E. Law,
published by I Tatti, the Center
for Renaissance Studies, and
produced by Dumbarton Oaks
he Medici controlled iteenthcentury Florence. Other Italian
rulers treated Lorenzo the
Magnificent (1449–1492) as an
equal. To his close associates, he
was “the boss” (“master of the
workshop”). But Lorenzo liked
to say that he was just another
Florentine citizen. Were the
Medici like the kings, princes,
and despots of contemporary
Italy? Or were they just powerful citizens? he Medici: Citizens and
Masters ofers a novel, comparative approach to answering these questions. It sets Medici rule against princely states such as Milan and
Ferrara and asks how much the Medici changed Florence and contrasts
their supremacy with earlier Florentine regimes.
Holes in the Head: he
Art and Archaeology of
Trepanation in Ancient
Peru, by John Verano
Trepanation is the oldest surgical procedure known from antiquity, extending back more than
ive thousand years in Europe and
to at least the ith century BC in
the New World. Anthropologists
and medical historians have been
investigating ancient trepanation
since the mid-nineteenth century,
but questions remain about its
origins, evolution, and the possible motivations for conducting
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such a dangerous surgical procedure. Peru is particularly important
to these questions, as it boasts more trepanned skulls than the rest of
the world combined. his volume presents the results of a long-term
research project that examined more than eight hundred trepanned
skulls from recent archaeological excavations and from museum collections in Peru, the United States, and Europe. It examines trepanation
in ancient Peru from a broad anthropological and historical perspective, focusing on the archaeological context of osteological collections
and highlighting the history of discoveries. It explores the origins and
spread of the practice throughout the Central Andes, with a focus on
trepanation techniques, success rates, and motivations for trepanning.
It examines the apparent disappearance of trepanation in the Andes
following Spanish conquest, while noting that there are reports of trepanations being performed by healers in highland Peru and Bolivia into
the twentieth century.
hirty-Six Views: he Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in
Poetry and Prints, translated by Richard E. Strassberg, with
essays by Richard E. Strassberg and Stephen H. Whiteman
In 1712, the Kangxi emperor published Imperial Poems on the Mountain
Estate for Escaping the Heat (Yuzhi Bishu Shanzhuang Shi) to commemorate his recently completed summer palace. hrough his perceptions
of thirty-six of its most scenic views, his poems and descriptions present an unusually intimate self-portrait of the emperor at the age of sixty
that relected the pleasures of his life there, as well as his ideals as the
ruler of the Qing Empire. Kangxi
was closely involved in the production of the book and ordered several
of his outstanding court artists—
the painter Shen Yu and the engravers Zhu Gui and Mei Yufeng—to
produce woodblock prints of the
thirty-six views, which set a new
standard for topographical illustration. He also ordered Matteo
Ripa, an Italian missionary serving
as a court artist, to translate these
images into the medium of copperplate engraving, which introduced
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this technique to China. Ripa’s hybridized interpretations soon began
to circulate in Europe and inluenced contemporary aesthetic debates
about the nature and virtues of the Chinese garden. his artistic collaboration between a Chinese emperor and a western missionary-artist
marked a signiicant moment in intercultural imagination, production,
and transmission during an earlier phase of globalization.
Letters of a Dead Man, edited and
translated by Linda B. Parshall
In 1826, the prince of Pückler-Muskau
embarked on a tour of England,
Wales, and Ireland. Although captivated by all things British, his initial objective was to ind a wealthy
bride. He and his wife Lucie, having
expended every resource on a plan
to transform their estate into a vast
landscape park, agreed to an amicable divorce, freeing him to forge
an advantageous alliance that could
rescue their project. For over two
years, Pückler’s letters home conveyed
a vivid, oten quirky, and highly entertaining account of his travels.
From the metropolis of London, he toured the mines and factories of
the Industrial Revolution and visited the grand estates and spectacular art collections maintained by its beneiciaries. He encountered the
scourge of rural and urban poverty and found common cause with
the oppressed Irish. With his git for description, Pückler evokes the
spectacular landscapes of Wales, the perils of transportation, and the
gentle respite of manor houses and country inns. Part memoir, part
travelogue and political commentary, part epistolary novel, Pückler’s
rhetorical lair and acute observations provoked the German poet
Heinrich Heine to characterize him as the “most fashionable of eccentric men—Diogenes on horseback.”
Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by
John Beardsley
Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the longest-occupied and least-studied
landscapes on earth. While scholarship has been attentive to images of
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nature made by the region’s explorers and settlers and to landscapes of
the colonial era—public parks and
game preserves, botanical gardens,
and urban plans—surprisingly little
attention has been paid to spaces
created by and for Africans themselves, from the precolonial era to
the present. his book is a contribution to a small but growing efort to
address this oversight. Contributors
explore what we know of precolonial and later indigenous-designed
landscapes, how these landscapes
were understood in the colonial era,
and how they are being recuperated
today for nation building, identity formation, and cultural airmation.
Contributors engage with the most critical issues in preservation today,
from the conlicts between cultural heritage and biodiversity protection
to the competition between local and international heritage agendas.
The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
he Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML), published by Harvard University Press, was launched in 2010 and already includes
over forty bilingual volumes. Each volume presents original texts in
Byzantine Greek, Medieval Latin, and Old English alongside facingpage translations and limited commentary. he books are designed
to make the written achievements of medieval and Byzantine culture available to both scholars and general readers in the Englishspeaking world.
A total of four volumes appeared in print in the 2015–2016 publication seasons, one in Medieval Latin in the fall, and one in Byzantine
Greek, Medieval Latin, and Old English in the spring. he Old
English Editorial Board met at Dumbarton Oaks in the fall, and the
Medieval Latin Editorial Board met in the spring. A third meeting
was held with scholars of Medieval Iberian languages to discuss plans
for launching a Medieval Romance branch of DOML. Tyler Fellows
David Ungvary and Nathanael Aschenbrenner worked part-time
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throughout the academic year on Latin and Greek projects, respectively. In February, a three-person team of Old English translators was
able to spend a week collaborating in the library. General editor Jan
M. Ziolkowski and assistant managing editor Raquel Begleiter represented DOML at the July International Medieval Congress in Leeds,
as well as at the May International Congress on Medieval Studies at
Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library Titles 2015–2016
Lives and Miracles: Gregory of Tours, edited and
translated by Giselle de Nie
Holy Men of Mount Athos, edited and translated
by Richard P. H. Greenield and Alice-Mary Talbot
On Plato’s Timaeus: Calcidius, edited and
translated by John Magee
Old English Psalms, edited and translated
by Patrick P. O’Neill
Conferences and meetings
International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 6–9, 2015
Old English Editorial Board Meeting, November 6, 2015
Medieval Latin Editorial Board Meeting, March 11, 2016
51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan
University, May 12–15, 2016
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Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library Residencies
Invited for short stays, or residencies, a small number of translator
teams are ofered the opportunity to take advantage of on-campus
resources (both physical and digital). Preference is given to projects nearing completion, when concentrated, intensive work is most
needed, and to translators who would not otherwise be able to meet
in person. Johanna Kramer, Robin Norris, and Hugh Magennis held
residencies to work on Anonymous Old English Saints’ Lives from
February 15–19, 2016.
Editorial Boards 2015–2016
Byzantine Greek series
Alice Mary Talbot, editor
Editorial board: Alexander Alexakis, Charles Barber, John Dufy,
Niels Gaul, Richard Greenield, Anthony Kaldellis, Derek
Krueger, Eustratios Papaioannou, and Claudia Rapp
Advisory board: Albrecht Berger, Wolfram Brandes, Elizabeth
Fisher, Clive Foss, John Haldon, Robert Jordan, Antony
Littlewood, Margaret Mullett, Jan Olof Rosenqvist, Jonathan
Shepard, Denis Sullivan, and John Wortley
Medieval Latin series
Danuta Shanzer, editor
Editorial board: Robert G. Babcock, Julia Barrow, B. Gregory Hays,
David Townsend, Winthrop Wetherbee, Michael Winterbottom,
and Roger Wright
Advisory board: Walter Berschin, Peter Dronke, Ralph Hexter,
Mayke de Jong, José Martínez Gázquez, Kurt Smolak, Francesco
Stella, and Jean-Yves Tilliette
Old English series
Daniel Donoghue, editor
Editorial board: Peter Baker, Robert D. Fulk, Malcolm Godden,
Antonette diPaolo Healey, Susan Irvine, Christopher A. Jones,
Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe, Andy Orchard, and Elizabeth Tyler
Advisory board: Rolf Bremmer, Roberta Frank, Simon Keynes,
Patrizia Lendinara, and Donald Scragg
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Digital Publishing
The Bliss-Tyler Correspondence
Mildred Barnes and Robert Woods Bliss, the founders of Dumbarton
Oaks, maintained an active correspondence between 1902 and 1953
with their close friend and art adviser Royall Tyler and his wife
Elisina. he Bliss-Tyler Correspondence, our irst born-digital publication, presents approximately one thousand transcribed letters,
postcards, and telegrams. Extensive notes and annotations identify
key individuals, dealers, places, publications, and artworks. Seven
introductions by Robert Nelson and James Carder provide historical
context, and an additional essay by Noah Delwiche, a former intern
from Harvard University, presents original research, undertaken at
the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, into Tyler’s service
in military intelligence during the First World War.
Many of the transcribed letters document the formation of the
Blisses’ collection of Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, Asian, Islamic, and
European art. hey also discuss contemporary history, literature
and poetry, music, politics, and expatriate life. Various friends and
acquaintances, including Bernard Berenson and Edith Wharton, are
referenced throughout the correspondence, as are important world
events, such as the First and Second World Wars.
Special Content for the Anniversary Year
To celebrate the seventy-ith anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, we
coordinated with other departments to develop and present special
online content. James Carder and his summer interns composed
seventy-ive blog posts to illuminate the early history of Dumbarton
Oaks. Major sections include the origins of the studies programs,
music, the growth of the museum collections, and biographies of igures who guided the early development of the research institution.
he posts also incorporate quotations from interviews conducted
as part of the Oral History Project, as well as hundreds of archival
images of people, events, and spaces. he three directors of study,
with the input of former fellows and staf members, compiled lists of
inluential books and articles produced with institutional support.
hese lists were consolidated and presented online along with information about the authors and a brief narrative of Dumbarton Oaks’s
evolving support for scholarship. Finally, to accompany an exhibit
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The Garden Perspectives online exhibit, part of the 75th Anniversary
online content.
in the Catalogue House, Gail Griin and Linda Lott selected before
and ater images from seven garden rooms for an online feature. Gigi
Kisela, a 2015 summer intern from Harvard University, took new photographs of the spaces. he interactive exhibit reveals striking continuities and changes in the gardens since Mildred Barnes Bliss began
working with Beatrix Farrand in the 1920s.
Ongoing Projects
In addition to ongoing work with the online catalogues of Byzantine
coins and seals, there are two major digital humanities projects in
development. he irst is an online catalogue raisonné of Byzantine
and early Islamic furnishing textiles. he catalogue will include
entries alongside essays from the spring 2015 conference on “liminal
fabric,” and will be the second of our major born-digital publications.
he second is an annotated bibliography of resources related to the
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Byzantine liturgy. his resource, developed in collaboration with
Daniel Galadza at the University of Vienna and the “Daily Life and
Religion: Byzantine Prayer Books as Sources for Social History” project directed by Claudia Rapp, aims to present and explain the main
terms, themes, and subjects of the Byzantine liturgy to an audience of
both specialists and nonspecialists.
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Museum
2015–2016 was a busy and memorable year for the museum. he majority of activities and events focused on the seventy-ith anniversary
of our institution. hrough a series of nine short special exhibitions,
the museum aimed to celebrate, commemorate, and open up future
directions for exploring and renewing interest in the collections
bequeathed by Mildred and Roberts Woods Bliss in 1940. Realizing
these ambitious projects required all hands on deck and a great spirit
of teamwork. he collections’ staf at the heart of the museum’s operation gave generously of their intelligence, energy, and dedication.
Exhibitions and Events
Drink and Prosper
Special Exhibition Gallery, April–August 2015
“Drink and Prosper” reads the Greek inscription on the irst vessel in
this exhibition. he experience of drinking can involve pleasure or
pain and relect tradition or innovation, but it always fosters creativity in the decorative arts. he exhibited objects relect social standing,
wealth, and rank, as well as local customs, belief systems, and traditions. By placing the vessels in a single row in the Special Exhibition
Gallery, the exhibition juxtaposed similar and strikingly diferent
shapes and highlighted commonalities and variations in drinking
traditions across the many centuries and cultures represented in the
three collections of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum.
A visitor to the exhibition 75 Years/75 Objects
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Byzantine micro-mosaic of John Chrysostom on display in the
exhibition 75 Years/75 Objects.
75 Years/75 Objects
Special Exhibition Gallery, September 2015–May 2016
he exhibitions on display between September 2015 and May 2016
centered on modes of viewing and understanding artifacts with
the aim of engaging visitors with the most fundamental questions
pursued by scholars and the general public and activating diferent
methods of studying and appreciating the works in our collections.
Arranged in sequences of nine themed consecutive rotations over the
course of nine months, the works on display relected the signiicance
of the historical anniversary year, as well as the ongoing assessment of
Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss’s passion and appreciation for collecting. he objects selected exempliied the interrelated methods of
seeing, examining, and thinking about objects, from the most major,
familiar works to lesser known art in the collection. All objects were
integral to the museum’s core mission of collecting, researching, and
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interpreting. Concerned with the production, use, and aesthetics
of material culture, the displays invited thoughts about the roles of
museums, curators, and scholars, who are constantly challenged to
reread and reinterpret the collections. he museum commissioned
an impactful series of stop-motion videos of ive selected objects to
reveal the various “inner core” or mechanical operations. he videos
were displayed alongside the objects in the inal installment of the
anniversary exhibition, “Revealing.”
September 2015 | Researching
October 2015 | Reconstructing
November 2015 | Collecting
December 2015 | Reinterpreting
January 2016 | Conserving
February 2016 | Reuniting
March 201 | Pondering
April 2016 | Questioning
May 2016 |Revealing
Clothing for the Aterlife
Textile Gallery, October 2015–May 2016
Textiles, more than gold and precious stones, marked a person’s
social status in the ancient Andes. Elegant clothing assumed further
signiicance at the time of burial, when family and followers dressed
the deceased for the aterlife. he sumptuous attire of the ancient
Andeans and other selected pieces in this exhibit ofered a glimpse
into the elite’s lifestyles and their perceptions of the aterlife.
Porphyry: he Imperial Stone
Bliss Gallery, January–May 2016
Roman and Byzantine emperors employed purple as royal color,
and the stone porphyry became highly valued and extensively used
for imperial monuments. Later, in the twelth and thirteenth centuries, the rulers of the Norman kingdom in Sicily appropriated this
Byzantine tradition of using porphyry sculptures and employed it
to airm the Normans’ imperial and dynastic aspirations. As collectors, Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss were interested not only in
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Coin display in the exhibit From Consul to Emperor.
Byzantine art but also in cultures inspired by the Byzantines. his
exhibition of porphyry sculpture, ranging from the late Roman
period to the Norman Kingdom, attests to this interest.
From Consul to Emperor: he Origins of the Loros
Byzantine Gallery, January–May 2016
One of the most distinctive elements of imperial regalia was the loros,
a jeweled, ornamented scarf-like cloth that was wrapped over the
tunic around the emperor’s body. his exhibit traced the development
of the loros in a selection of coins and seals from the fourth through
the fourteenth century.
Research and Other Projects
Between September and May 2016, the Dumbarton Oaks Archives
published seventy-ive anniversary blog posts about people, places,
programs, events, acquisitions, publications, and music associated
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with Dumbarton Oaks between 1940 and 2015. he archives also contributed nine pieces for the electronic newsletter 75 Years Ago this
Month (http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaksarchives/from-the-archives/dumbarton-oaks-celebrates-its-75thanniversary) and continued to conduct, transcribe, and publish
interviews for the Dumbarton Oaks Oral History Project (http://
www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives/oralhistory-project). Nineteen interviews were added, bringing the total
number of published interviews to 122. Finally, the the Bliss Album of
Garden Photographs, a collection of nearly two hundred black-andwhite photographs taken in the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens between
1929 and 1932, was added to the online resources.
Our eforts to digitize and disseminate have grown exponentially
with the online publication of the Byzantine lead seals. A new project,
the digitization and online cataloguing of the Byzantine coins also
began this year, with the goal of providing free access to high-resolution images of our comprehensive holdings through our website in
the years to come (the launch of the coins online catalogue is planned
for fall 2016).
Scholarly Activities
Museum Conference
Private Collecting and Public Display: Art Museums in the Nation’s
Capital in the Early Twentieth Century
April 8–9, 2016
Organized by the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Franklin College of
Arts and Sciences, University of Georgia, and Dumbarton Oaks
Museum; cofunded by the Wilson Center for the Humanities
and Arts, University of Georgia, and the Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection
he conference explored the aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological
sources that shaped art collecting in early twentieth-century America,
focusing on the Phillips Collection (1921), Freer Gallery (1923), Textile
Museum (1925), Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
(1940), National Gallery of Art (1941), and Hillwood Estate, Museum,
and Gardens (1973) in Washington, DC. The founders of these
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Attendees at the conference “Private Collecting and Public Display.”
collections advanced distinct notions of cultural identity by collecting
and displaying American and European art that lay outside the general
canon of early twentieth-century art collecting. he papers presented
contextualized the individual foundations and positioned them within
the broader history of related American institutions. Above all, the
intention was to focus on the modernist notion of art collecting as a
form of self-expression, a visual rendition of a collector’s worldviews,
and a speciic understanding of the course of history.
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“What’s Mine is Yours: Private Collectors and Public
Patronage in the United States, 1870 – 1950”
public lecture
April 8, 2016
Inge Reist, Frick Collection
Conference Papers
Asen Kirin, University of Georgia, “he Transiguration of Everyday
Life: Marjorie Merriweather Post and Her Collection of Art”
Julian Raby, he Freer and Sackler Galleries, “Mr. Freer’s ‘Points of
Contact’: Past, Present, and Future
Sumru Belger Krody, he Textile Museum, “he Catalyst: Myers
and His Legacy in Textile Studies”
Susan Behrends Frank, he Phillips Collection, “Duncan Phillips
and the Phillips Collection: An Intimate Museum as an
Experiment Station for Modernism”
Magene Daniels, he National Gallery of Art, “For All the People
of the United States: Andrew Mellon and the National
Gallery of Art”
James Carder, Dumbarton Oaks, “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss
and the Dumbarton Oaks Collection”
Gudrun Buehl, Dumbarton Oaks, “he Art Donor’s Intent:
Concluding Remarks”
Loans
HC.D.1936.45.(SP), Virgin and Child, to the exhibition Drawing in
Silver and Gold, Leonardo to Jasper Johns, National Gallery
of Art, Washington, DC, May 3–July 26, 2015, and he British
Museum, London, September 10–December 6, 2015.
PC.B.518, All T’oqapu Tunic, to the exhibition he Great Inka Road:
Engineering an Empire, National Museum of the American
Indian, Washington, DC, June 26–December 4, 2015.
PC.B.594, Polychrome Vase, to the exhibition he Art of Music, he
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, September 26, 2015–
February 8, 2016.
BZ.1973.2 and BZ.1973.7, Fragments from a Garment or Furnishing
with Horseman and Dionysian Figures; BZ.1973.35, Fragment of
a Decorative Neckband; BZ.1953.2.66, Fragment from a Garment
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or Furnishing with Cross in Square; BZ.2010.070, Fragment of
a Panel with Amphorae, Baskets, Floral Motifs and Ankh; and
BZ.1970.43, Fragment of a Hanging Representing Two Figures in
an Arcade, to the exhibition Designing Identity: he Power of
Textiles in Late Antiquity, Institute for the Study of the Ancient
World, New York University, New York, February 25–May 22,
2016.
BZ.1946.2, Portrait of Menander; and BZ.1947.22, Emaciated Man,
to the exhibition Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the
Ancient World, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April
11–July 10, 2016.
BZ 1929.101, BZ 1934.6, and BZ 1930.1 (one object in three separately
accessioned fragments), Hero Being Born Alot by a Two-Headed
Eagle, to the exhibition Court and Cosmos: he Great Age of the
Seljuqs, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 25–July
14, 2016.
Acquisitions and Gifts
Acquired on May 22, 2015
Follis of Justinian I; Kyzikos (BZC.2015.004)
Two-nummi bronze coin; Revolt of the Heraclii (BZC.2015.005)
hird Siliqua of Heraclius with Heraclius Constantine. Carthage
(BZC.2015.006)
Tetarteron of Cyprus. Richard (Crusaders) (BZC.2015.007)
Islamic. Gigliato of Aydin. Baha’ al-Din Ghazi Umur I Beg
(BZC.2015.008)
Acquired on June 29, 2015
Solidus of Justinian I. Rome (BZC.2015.009)
Silver coin of Justin II. Carthage (BZC.2015.010)
Solidus of Maurice. Carthage (BZC.2015.011)
heodosius, son of Maurice (BZC.2015.011)
heodosius, son of Maurice (BZC.2015.013)
Solidus of Heraclius. Constantinople (BZC.2015.014)
Hexagram of Heraclius. Constantinople (BZC.2015.014)
Solidus of Heraclius. Carthage (BZC.2015.016)
Solidus of Constans II. Carthage (BZC.2015.017)
Constantine II and Constantine IV? (BZC.2015.018)
Constantine II and Constantine IV? (BZC.2015.019)
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Gold necklace with gold square phylactery with repoussé cross
(BZ.2015.028)
Hyperpyron of Michael VIII (BZC.2015.020)
Hyperpyron of Andronicus II (BZC.2015.021)
Leo I, AR tram (BZC.2015.022)
Purchased from Susanne K. Bennet,
Washington, DC, on July 1, 2015
Gold necklace with round pendant with eight-pointed star in globules (BZ.2015.023)
Necklace with alternating gold and lapis cylindrical beads
(BZ.2015.024)
Gold necklace with round pendant with grid of globules and
spiralled-wire illigree (BZ.2015.025)
Gold necklace with cross pendant and two capsae (BZ.2015.026)
Gold chain with composite pendant (BZ.2015.027)
Gold necklace with gold square phylactery with repoussé cross
(BZ.2015.028)
Gold chain mesh necklace with circular clasp with small cabochon
and pendant emeralds and sapphires (BZ.2015.029)
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Necklace (bracelet?) with chain of globule-encrusted links and
round clasp with six-pointed igure (BZ.2015.030)
Gold chain with small diamond-shaped clasp with dark inset stone
(BZ.2015.031)
Gold chain with simple hook clasp (BZ.2015.032)
Gold chain with simple hook clasp (BZ.2015.033)
Gold chain with simple hook clasp (ring closure) (BZ.2015.034)
Gold chain with simple hook clasp (s-hook) (BZ.2015.035)
Gold champleve enamel pendant with christ and two emperors
(BZ.2015.036)
Small pendant with three “inverted vases” attached to small gold ball
(BZ.2015.037)
Pair of earrings in the form of discs surrounded by gold beads
(BZ.2015.038)
Pair of hoop earrings, hoops decorated with small gold balls
(BZ.2015.039)
Pair of hoop earrings, hoops decorated with small gold balls
(BZ.2015.040)
Pair of gold hoop earrings decorated with three chains terminated by
a pearl (BZ.2015.041)
Small bracelet (large earring?) With hinged closure with four beads
(BZ.2015.042)
Acquired July 24, 2015
Justinian II (1st), fractional siliqua, uncertain western mint
(BZC.2015.043)
Justinian II (1st), fractional siliqua, uncertain western mint
(BZC.2015.044)
Purchased February 3, 2016
Andronicus II + Michael IX, Hyperpyron, hessalonica
(BZC.2015.045)
Square commercial weight, 3 oz. (80.16 gr), 6th century (BZ.2015.046)
Acquired March 3, 2016
Valentinian II, Gratian & heodosius, bronze solidus weight, Va,
379-382, 4.12 gr., Constantinople? Mint (BZ.2015.047)
Lead semissis weight, Leo I, 457-474, 2.18 gr., Constantinople mint
(BZ.2015.048)
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Byzantine gold solidus, Heraclius, 626-627, 4.47 gr., Carthage mint
(BZC.2015.049)
Byzantine gold solidus, Constantine IV, with Heraclius and Tiberius,
679-680, 4.29 gr., Carthage mint (BZC.2015.050)
Byzantine bronze trachy, Manuel Comnenus Ducas, 1230-1237, 1.82
gr., hessalonica mint (BZC.2015.051)
Byzantine bronze trachy, John Comnenus Ducas, 1237-1242, 1.10 gr.,
hessalonica mint (BZC.2015.052)
Acquired March 4, 2016
Bronze half-follis, Anastasius I, 498-507, 2.32 gr., Constantinople
mint (BZC.2015.053)
Bronze half-follis, Anastasius I, 498-507, 7.67 gr., Antioch mint
(BZC.2015.054)
Bronze penta, Justin I, 522-527, 2.14 gr., Nicomedia mint
(BZC.2015.055)
Bronze follis, Justin I, 522-527, 17.08 gr., Antioch mint (BZC.2015.056)
Bronze follis, Justin I, 522-527, 13.97 gr., Antioch mint (BZC.2015.057)
Bronze deka, Justin I, 522-527, 5.02 gr., Antioch mint (BZC.2015.058)
Docents Program
he vibrant and dedicated corps of museum volunteers are an integral and vital part of our mission to serve the larger public. As in past
years, the docents donated their time and talent for three hours each
week. he visitor service assistants welcomed visitors to the museum,
answered general questions, and provided information about the special exhibitions, museum facilities, and gardens. Docents continued
to provide tours of the museum’s collections, the garden, and the historic buildings on the Dumbarton Oaks campus. Four new volunteers
were recruited and trained, thereby doubling the number of visitor
service assistants in 2015–2016.
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Gardens
Over the years, the Arbor Terrace above the Kitchen Garden has
undergone many changes, from Beatrix Farrand’s 1920s design as an
herb garden to Ruth Havey’s 1950s design for a stone terrace, central
pool, and pot garden to Andy Cao’s 2012–2013 wire and crystal Cloud
Terrace. Each of these gardens had its constraints: the herb garden
was diicult to maintain, the Havey garden was never fully realized,
and the Cao garden was a temporary installation. Taking elements
from each design, the garden staf has reintroduced the herbs of
Farrand’s design in pots placed within the Havey stone terrace that
Cao chose as the focal point of his installation. his spring, to accompany the Garden and Landscape Studies symposium, Landscape and
the Academy, we displayed under the arbor drawings of medicinal
plants from Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, also grown within pots
on the terrace. On the arbor’s northern wall, we included Farrand’s
1924 drawing for the Marsh Botanic Garden at Yale University, which
is based on the geometric pattern of the medicinal garden at Padua.
For our celebration of the seventy-ith anniversary, we collaborated with Linda Lott and the Rare Book Collection to create an
exhibit in the Catalogue House of historic images paired with contemporary images taken from approximately the same perspective. As we
chose the views, we realized how much and yet how little the gardens
have changed over the years, and we gained insight into changes that
we could make to bring them closer to their earlier intent. For example, comparing images of the Herbaceous Border, we were able to see
and restore the original placement of river stones along the front of
the borders. Additional insights into the garden are gained through
the Dumbarton Oaks website’s photographic blog, updated daily by
The Materia Medica exhibit on the Arbor Terrace.
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The Arbor Terrace, with one of the new reproduction Soderholtz pots in
the foreground.
garden staf member Luis Marmol, and visited by over one-quarter
of a million people since its inception in spring 2010. Not only does
the blog allow virtual access to the gardens it also serves as a record of
bloom times and garden changes for our archives.
hroughout the gardens are concrete pots and birdbaths acquired
in the 1930s from Maine photographer and potter Eric Soderholtz.
(Farrand also commissioned him to produce similar pieces for her
garden at Reef Point in Bar Harbor, Maine.) For the new design of
Arbor Terrace, docent Joan Benziger donated the funds for and collaborated with us to choose six reproduction Soderholtz pots, including four planters reproduced from the pots that lanked the main
pathway of Reef Point, made by Lunaform Pottery of Maine.
Tyler fellow Deirdre designed and planted, under the direction
of garden staf, a new pollinator garden in the Dumbarton Oaks bioretention swale adjacent to the staf parking lot. Most of the species
chosen are trees, plants, and shrubs native to the Washington, DC,
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Leon Lopez of Flaherty Ironworks mounts the recreated goose weather
vane on the shed in the cutting garden, where the original once stood.
area and were selected for their attractiveness to pollinator species
and their ability to survive the conditions and soil of the swale. he
swale also contains a small grove of Chamaecyparis that complements
the aesthetics of the larger grove of cedars to the south. Another
area of the garden to be enriched with a mixture of conifers and
native perennials is the upper and lower terraces of the library. For
the formal geometry of the terraces’ planters, the garden staf chose
native species to soten the spaces and to provide transitions to the
native woodland beyond.
In the fall of 2015, Lee and Juliet Folger, through the Lee and
Juliet Folger Fund, suggested and supported the addition of railings
to increase accessibility and safety in the gardens. Francis Flaherty of
Flaherty Ironworks constructed twelve railings in the hilliest parts
of the gardens. Numerous visitors have written and called to express
their appreciation for this beautiful addition to the garden.
his year, Francis Flaherty also restored a long-missing garden
element. Retired garden foreman Larry Johnson told us years ago of
a goose weather vane made of copper that had been mounted on the
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shed in the Cutting Garden when he began in the 1960s. Although
we were able to ind a drawing of the goose in Farrand’s iles, we
were unsure of its scale until last year, when we found a metal letter S
attached to a rod in the greenhouse basement. Realizing that we had
found the vane’s south, we could thus determine the scale of the goose
weather vane.
Our garden iles—ranging from plant lists, nursery orders, and
project plans to pesticide records, equipment purchases, and utility
drawings—are as varied as the garden’s past. To preserve this working
history, we began the process of consolidating and archiving the iles
of previous garden staf and advisors. Now easily accessible are notes
from Mildred Bliss regarding plant purchases, the history of bulb and
chrysanthemum orders, and yearly plans for the Herbaceous Border
and Rose Garden. Once we have organized the paper iles, we hope to
scan them for incorporation into institutional archives and a digital
organizational system.
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Friends of Music
With the 2015–2016 concert series, the Friends of Music, which was
established in 1946, entered its seventieth anniversary year. he
season opened with he Knights, the brilliant orchestral collective that made its impressive Washington, DC, debut at Dumbarton
Oaks in 2014. Reconigured as an eleven-piece chamber group, the
ensemble returned with a carefully crated, marvelously satisfying
program from the tumultuous but highly creative times surrounding World War I. Music from the Great War Era included works by
Maurice Ravel, Ernest Bloch, Anton Webern, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Sergei Prokoiev, and Igor Stravinsky. he Washington Post praised
the entire evening’s music-making, characterizing the performance
of Ravel’s Piano Trio as “a delicate, beautifully drawn account of
the work, full of shiting light and elusive colors and with a sense of
improvisatory freedom.”
Exploring the close connections between traditional classical and
contemporary music, the professional vocal ensemble hird Practice
made its Dumbarton Oaks debut with works from the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and twenty-irst centuries: the exquisite Musikalische
Exequien by Heinrich Schütz; the motet Komm, Jesu, Komm by
Johann Sebastian Bach; and the little match girl passion, the heartrending composition by David Lang. According to he Washington
Post, “the entire evening proved a winner, the singers sustaining vocal
energy, unfailing technique and expressive nuances throughout three
vastly diferent works.”
he period instrument ensemble Musica Paciica, with guest violinist and acclaimed Cape Breton iddler David Greenberg, displayed
dazzling virtuosity and warm expressiveness in the season’s holiday
ofering, Frost and Fire: A Scottish Christmas Celebration. Greenberg
skillfully curated the program, juxtaposing traditional Scottish
Gaelic tunes with pieces by Henry Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli, James
Pianist Christopher Taylor
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The ensemble Third Practice in the Music Room before their November
16 concert.
Oswald, and William McGibbon. His uncanny ability to shit from
baroque performance style to Cape Breton-style iddling without
compromising the authenticity of either illustrated the historical connection between the two forms and infused the ensemble’s playing
with energy and freshness.
Over the past quarter century, the American pianist Christopher
Taylor has become a distinguished, if sometimes controversial, artist
on the concert stage, but it was not until this season that he made his
Dumbarton Oaks recital debut. he multiple award-winning Taylor
chose to display his prodigious musical and technical gits by interpreting a French Suite by Johann Sebastian Bach, an early sonata by
Johannes Brahms, and the rarely performed Twelve Études, op. 8, by
Alexander Scriabin.
he powerful artistic chemistry that informs the Horszowski Trio’s
music was palpable in virtually every note. he ensemble’s program
opened with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Trio in E-lat major, op. 70, no. 2,
and concluded with Robert Schumann’s Trio no. 1 in D minor, op. 63.
Linking those two works, the trio of violin, cello, and piano ofered the
deeply afecting For Daniel, by the American composer Joan Tower and
dedicated to her nephew who died in 2003.
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he New Yorker has dubbed the Dover Quartet “the young American string quartet of the moment,” and the Strad lauded the ensemble’s
“exceptional interpretive maturity, tonal reinement and taut ensemble.” Unsurprisingly, the quartet’s spring concert had been eagerly
anticipated, and the Dover did not disappoint. he ensemble’s deep
musicality and concentration, together with a lawless technique, were
consistently evident in its performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s
“Hunt” Quartet, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Quartet no. 3, and Caroline
Shaw’s Plan & Elevation (he Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks). he audience responded with a heartfelt and deserved standing ovation.
he grand inale of the season was the appearance by the Venice
Baroque Orchestra. he period instrument ensemble, conducted from
the harpsichord by Andrea Marcon, focused predominantly on works
by Antonio Vivaldi, but lavored the program with a taste of music
by Arcangelo Corelli, George Frideric Handel, and Johann Sebastian
Bach. he Washington Post enthused, “ . . . from the opening notes of
[Vivaldi’s] Concerto in G minor, RV 577, the 18-member ensemble . . .
found almost limitless worlds of drama and color to explore . . . he
most spectacular playing of the evening came in the arrangement of
two works by one of the group’s recorder players. Playing a sopranino
recorder . . . Fusek turned in a virtuosic tour de force, soulful in its central Largo movement and almost impossibly agile in the closing Giga,
which seemed to approach the velocity and weightlessness of light.”
Again this season, the Friends of Music series continued to increase
its visibility in the community through broadcasts of selected concerts by the classical music radio station WETA. In 2015–2016, WETA
recorded performances by he Knights, Christopher Taylor, and the
Dover Quartet for the weekly program, “Front Row Washington.”
Performances
he Knights | October 4–5, 2015
hird Practice | November 15–16, 2015
Musica Paciica with David Greenberg | December 6–7, 2015
Christopher Taylor | January 10–11, 2016
Horszowski Trio | January 31–February 1, 2016
Dover Quartet | March 6–7, 2016
Venice Baroque Orchestra | April 10–11, 2016
Fr iends of Music
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Facilities, Finance,
Human Resources, and
Information Technology
Facilities
he facilities department is responsible for plant operations and
maintenance of building systems, utilities, housekeeping, accommodations, special events, refectory operations, internal mail service,
capital planning, and project management functions in a campus
with fourteen buildings, 210,000 gross square feet (GSF), and 16¼
acres. Department team members consist of engineers, building assistants, and refectory staf, coupled with trusted service contractors for
major building systems and highly skilled construction staf for capital projects.
he engineering team continued to operate, routinely maintain,
repair, and replace all building systems, totaling over twelve hundred
pieces of equipment assets and building envelope systems. In 2015–
2016, we continued to consolidate service contracts and revised the
existing contracts to better serve our needs.
he building assistance team members provided housekeeping
and custodial duties for all buildings, special event setup and breakdown for the special events, and internal and external mail services
for the Dumbarton Oaks community.
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he refectory staf continued to provide lunches ive days a week,
ity weeks a year for the staf, fellows, readers, and other members
of the community at Dumbarton Oaks. hey have also been instrumental in preparing the food for small, high-end special events in the
refectory, director’s residence, and orangery.
he 2015–2016 year has been very busy, with completion of several projects and the design and planning of upcoming ones:
•
We completed the design of the Pool Loggia and Terrace
project and started its construction phase.
•
he Main House Phase Two project, which includes several
gallery relighting and inishes upgrades, has been completed. Construction is slated to start in early summer.
•
he Dumbarton Oaks Condo has been renovated and now
is a two-bedroom unit with new inishes.
•
he storm water master plan for the gardens has been completed, and we are getting ready to start the design phase.
•
A feasibility study for the La Quercia building has been
completed.
We have made signiicant improvements in our green initiative
programs, which have yielded signiicant savings. We have replaced
our cleaning products with green-seal-approved products; replaced
bottled water service with high-eiciency iltered water dispensers;
and replaced disposable, single-use cofee pod machines with greener
technology that uses touch screens and grinds cofee in bulk. We have
been purchasing electricity produced with 100 percent wind power
the last three years. his translated to about 12,783,783 kilowatt hours
produced at 100 percent green energy, eliminating 8,815 metric tons
of carbon dioxide that would have been otherwise emitted, an environmental beneit equivalent to taking 1,856 cars of the road for one
year or not consuming 991,906 gallons of gasoline. We have recently
extended our contract to continue to use 100 percent wind power for
the next three years. We also revised our natural gas contract purchase to include 100 percent carbon ofset. Based on our average
consumption, this change will eliminate 1,439 metric tons of carbon
dioxide emissions, an environmental beneit equivalent to taking
almost 303 cars of the road for one year or not consuming 161,942 gallons of gasoline. hese changes will not only make Dumbarton Oaks
100 percent carbon-footprint-free in utility consumption but will
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also bring an estimated savings of $43,000 per year for electricity and
$36,000 per year for natural gas.
he facilities department is continually looking for ways and
means to increase the quality of service while reducing or containing
costs in the areas of special events, accommodations, housekeeping,
and maintenance of the Dumbarton Oaks campus.
Finance
he inance department forms a small team of individuals who are
dedicated to serving the Dumbarton Oaks community. We value
providing timely and accurate information to various departments
within Dumbarton Oaks, as well as to Harvard University. Our
responsibilities range from managing cash inlow and outlow to
ensuring the assets of Dumbarton Oaks are safeguarded at all times.
he inance department works with the department heads in budget
and forecast preparation; we monitor various budgets and make sure
they align with expenses. We report numbers to Dumbarton Oaks
managers and Harvard University. We prepare inancial statements
and review lux analysis, reaching out to departments when needed.
We oversee the garden gates during the summer months, ensuring
that the reliable and customer-friendly gate attendants are using the
cash collection system and providing assistance to visitors coming
to enjoy our gardens. We are working to tag our inventory, with the
assistance of the information technology department. One of our
key responsibilities is adhering to Generally Accepted Accounting
Principles and documenting internal controls to ensure proper checks
and balances are in place in all aspects of accounting, including cash
handling. We continue to strive to make day-to-day operations more
eicient and efective while keeping strong internal controls in place
for compliance with our inancial and tax regulations.
Human Resources
he human resources department continues to operate on the principle of “success through people” and is committed to continuous
improvement. Key initiatives of the past year include the creation of
a Human Resources intranet portal to make readily available a wide
variety of tools and information that can help staf members in their
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Dumbarton Oaks management attend a workshop on Title IX
best practices.
day-to-day activities and ofer greater transparency about various
policies and procedures; a streamlined onboarding and oboarding process; a new lactation room in accordance with the Protecting
Pregnant Workers Fairness Act; and more training opportunities. In
addition to continuing to issue the biannual human resources newsletter introduced in 2014, the department has also established open
oice hours every week to further promote an open-door policy and
ongoing communication with staf.
Dumbarton Oaks welcomed several new staf members in the
2016 iscal year. At two employee orientations—one on April 17, 2015,
and another on February 2, 2016—human resources manager Pallavi
Jain and information technology manager Charlotte Johnson introduced new arrivals to institutional policies, procedures, beneits,
digital platforms, and other resources. At two staf cofees—one on
January 5, 2016, and another on April 4, 2016—the Dumbarton Oaks
community welcomed Michael Maas (director of Byzantine Studies),
Bryan Anderson (building assistant), Emily Jacobs (manager of academic programs), Joni Joseph (museum collections manager and
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assistant registrar), Alyson Williams (reader services librarian), Dina
Hammadi (staf accountant), Konstantina Karterouli (postdoctoral
fellow in Byzantine art history), and Bettina Smith (ICFA manager).
Two staf members transitioned into new roles: Raquel Begleiter as
assistant managing editor of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library,
and Anatole Tchikine as assistant director of Garden and Landscape
Studies. Furthermore, the January date marked the retirement of
Christopher Franklin, who served as director of security from 2009
to the beginning of this year.
A number of professional training and development sessions have
taken place, oten in collaboration with other departments, to support
staf in enhancing their job knowledge and skills. Training sessions
included management, safety, IT training, and Title IX training.
Information Technology
Dumbarton Oaks Information Technology (DOIT) is responsible for
strategic planning and overseeing the direction of IT infrastructure,
resources, and services. We serve the Dumbarton Oaks community through collaboration and innovative and advanced technology
solutions.
DOIT’s mission is to advance the institution’s strategic goals,
foster innovation, enable scholarly endeavors, and deliver the highest quality service. he department concluded a notable second year
illed with many behind-the-scenes changes, projects, and initiatives. Our key accomplishments centered around data security, server
infrastructure upgrade, and data storage. hese major achievements
and milestones allowed DOIT to focus more on aligning IT to support
and improve business processes. In addition, two key new members
joined DOIT: database/CMS developer Prathmesh Mengane and web
designer Michael Sohn. he relocation of these two positions was part
of an efort to centralize IT services and to provide relief to a department currently managing IT application and vendors on their own.
he goal of this initiative was to consolidate functional expertise to
increase eiciency and to provide consistent quality of support across
the institution.
he major focus of this year was to strengthen the core information technology infrastructure. As part of our strategy, we consolidated and virtualized our data center servers, upgraded our network
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gateway, and enhanced our backup solution. We transitioned from
our 2010 Microsot Exchange server to a cloud-based e-mail and
calendar system in Oice 365. We also successfully implemented
information security risk management, incident management, and
monitoring.
Key Accomplishments
Enhanced and Upgraded IT Core Infrastructure
DOIT strives for eiciency in technology, and our server virtualization accomplished that goal this iscal year. All of our existing hardware had been at the end of its life and maintenance contracts and
some of the equipment was failing completely. herefore, it was more
economical for DOIT to deploy a server virtualization infrastructure.
he virtual infrastructure consolidated the physical servers, signiicantly reducing costs, increasing lexibility and services, and maximizing the use of server resources. Virtualization is now our default
platform for server infrastructure; DOIT has a three-year license
agreement with VMWare. Moreover, the team has removed and
replaced an end-of-life analogue with digital voice gateway in order
to reduce potential loss of availability to our analogue phone systems.
Disaster Recovery and Backup Planning
DOIT completed an initial provisioning of a secondary data center
at our 1700 Wisconsin Avenue building. his completed phase one of
Dumbarton Oaks’s disaster recovery and business continuance plan.
he new data center allows for the relocation of storage and servers
and will be a suitable location for expanded or redundant services as
the institution moves forward.
Oice 365 Exchange Migration
In an efort to provide and improve service, enhance eiciency, and
reduce hardware and maintenance costs, our e-mail accounts were
migrated from a locally-hosted Exchange system to the cloud-based
Oice 365 Exchange online environment. Approximately 300 e-mail
and resource accounts were transitioned, which provided ity gigabytes of e-mail storage for each user and one terabyte of storage space
on OneDrive and Skype for business accounts. Users may also connect to this system using the Exchange connector for smartphones
and Apple iOS devices.
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Microsoft Oice 365 log-in screen for Dumbarton Oaks staf.
Emergency Communications
As Dumbarton Oaks continues to expand in size and locations, the
need for multiple communication pathways for emergency responders
is paramount. DOIT implemented a Cisco 911 Emergency Responder
system that sends alert notiications to community members’ e-mails
and cell phones, allowing our security team to quickly respond to an
emergency by building location and loor. he system also alerts 911
emergency responders to the address and speciic Dumbarton Oaks
building in the event of an emergency.
IT Security Risk Management Intuitive
he following risk and mitigation plans have been put in place:
Acquired, designed, and implemented Mozy, a mobile backup
solution that reduces the risk of losing end users’ data. he application provides worry-free cloud-based automatic backup protection. If
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disaster ever strikes, end users have the power to restore iles with a
single click.
Acquired, designed, and implemented Deep Freeze Enterprise.
To eliminate the risk to our readily available public computers
throughout the institution, DOIT has implemented this solution to
protect these computers by freezing a snapshot of the standard coniguration and settings which, when compromised by any unwelcome
or unwanted changes, can be restored by simply rebooting the system.
Implemented an intrusion detection system to proactively detect
and mitigate IT security incidents. Any outgoing traic is checked
against known bad reputation URLs (i.e., URLs or IP addresses
deemed to lure users to malicious websites).
To protect against hackers and data leaks, DOIT has acquired,
designed, and implemented an e-mail encryption solution. his protects the transmission of sensitive information over e-mail by efectively rendering the information unreadable while in transit. It also
aligns with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA),
the security and privacy rules of the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI)
regulation.
Removed the public wireless network from the 1700 Wisconsin
Avenue building to prevent its access to unsolicited users who were
competing with our legitimate Dumbarton Oaks end users. his has
signiicantly reduced the load and increased bandwidth availability.
Automated remote management and patching of all desktop
computers to ensure they were updated with patches for Windows
and Mac operating systems and third-party applications; and remedied vulnerabilities and enforced security policies for endpoint security protection.
Optimize University Operations-IT Support Services
It is not all about technology, it is about people. his year, DOIT looked
to leverage technology to help people at the institution be more productive and efective. To do this, DOIT sought to enhance the institution’s
technology-based operations and systems, which in turn increased
institutional efectiveness. In our approach to automate and enhance
business processes to improve eiciency, service, and usability, we
partnered with our academic manager, events manager, and human
resources department to:
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•
Develop an access management system to support eicient
and efective ways to provision and deprovision resources
and access to staf and various constituents.
•
Launch a new self-serve portal that provides information
and options for fellows and staf.
•
Review fellowship application processes and evaluation
management system to support processes.
•
Complete a customer relationship management (CRM)
database system evaluation, begin review, and plan for
implementation.
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Trustees for Harvard
University, Executive
Committee, Honorary
Ailiates, Senior Fellows,
and Staf
Trustees for Harvard University
Drew Gilpin Faust, President
Lawrence S. Bacow
James W. Breyer
Paul J. Finnegan
Karen Gordon Mills
Susan L. Graham
Nannerl O. Keohane
William F. Lee
Jessica Tuchman Mathews
Joseph J. O’Donnell
heodore V. Wells Jr.
Executive Committee
homas B. F. Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of
Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art
Ioli Kalavrezou, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Art
Michael Puett, Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History; Chair of
the Committee on the Study of Religion
Diana Sorensen, James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance
Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature; Dean
of Arts and Humanities, Ex Oicio
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Mathilda van Es, Associate Dean for Administration for Arts and
Humanities, Ex Oicio
Jan M. Ziolkowski, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval
Latin; Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Collection, Ex Oicio
Honorary Ailiates
Susan Boyd, Curator of the Byzantine Collection, 1979–2004
Giles Constable, Director, 1977–1984
Irfan Shahîd, Ailiate Fellow of Byzantine Studies
Robert W. homson, Director, 1984–1989
Director’s Oice
Jan Ziolkowski, Director
Yota Batsaki, Executive Director
Raquel Begleiter, Assistant Managing Editor of Dumbarton Oaks
Medieval Library
Brijette Chenet, Executive Assistant
Nevena Djurdjevic, Human Resources Coordinator
Susannah Italiano, Events Manager
Emily Jacobs, Manager of Academic Programs
Pallavi Jain, Human Resources Manager
Research Appointments
Bryan Cockrell, Postdoctoral Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies
Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in
Byzantine Art History, Dumbarton Oaks / George Washington
University
Rebecca Frankel, Post-Graduate Fellow in Medieval Latin
Jeanne Hafner, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Landscape
Studies
Konstantina Karterouli, Postdoctoral Fellow in Byzantine Art
History, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives
Spencer Lenield, Post-Baccalaureate Media Fellow
Eric McGeer, Consultant for Byzantine Sigillography
Jessica Salley, Post-Baccalaureate Communications and Outreach
Research Fellow
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Jonathan Shea, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Byzantine History
/ Sigillography and Numismatics, Dumbarton Oaks / George
Washington University
Lain Wilson, Post-Baccalaureate Digital Humanities Fellow
Byzantine Studies
Michael Maas, Director in Byzantine Studies
Seh-Hee Koh, Program Coordinator in Byzantine Studies
Senior Fellows
John Dufy, Chair
Dimiter Angelov
Ioli Kalavrezou
Derek Krueger
Ruth Macrides
Robert Ousterhout
Garden and Landscape Studies
John Beardsley, Director of Garden and Landscape Studies
Anatole Tchikine, Assistant Director of Garden and Landscape Studies
Jane Padelford, Program Coordinator in Garden and Landscape Studies
Senior Fellows
D. Fairchild Ruggles, Chair
Sonja Dümpelmann
Georges Farhat
Gert Gröning
Alison Hardie
haisa Way
Pre-Columbian Studies
Colin McEwan, Director of Pre-Columbian Studies
Kelly McKenna, Program Coordinator in Pre-Columbian Studies
Senior Fellows
homas Cummins, Chair
Kenneth Hirth
Patricia MacAnany
Diana Magaloni
Gary Urton
John Verano
Trustees, Executive Committee, Senior Fellows, and Staff
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Facilities
Alan Dirican, Director of Facilities
Manuel Delgado, Assistant Director of Facilities
Buildings
Mario García, Facilities and Services Coordinator
Carlos Mendez, Events and Services Coordinator
Bryan Anderson, Building Assistant
J. David Cruz-Delgado, Building Assistant
Noel Gabitan, Building Assistant
Jose Luis Guerrero, Building Assistant
Larry Marzan, Cleaning Assistant
José Pineda, Building Assistant
Adebayo homas, Building Assistant
Engineering
Kenneth Johnson, Senior Building Systems Engineer
Michael Neal, Mechanical Maintenance Technician
Albert Williams, Mechanical Maintenance Assistant
Refectory
Hector Paz, Executive Chef Manager
Deysi M. Escobar-Ventura, Refectory Assistant
Dominador Salao, Kitchen Assistant
Finance
Gayatri Saxena, Director of Finance
DeWahn Coburn, Manager, Financial Operations
Neressa Darroux, Financial Analyst
Dina Hammadi, Staf Accountant
Jonathan Lee, Payroll and Beneits Coordinator
Friends of Music
Valerie Stains, Artistic Director, Friends of Music
Gardens
Gail Griin, Director of Gardens and Grounds
Ricardo Aguilar, Gardener
Miguel Bonilla, Crew Leader
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Melissa Brizer, Greenhouse Specialist
Rigoberto Castellon, Crew Leader
Walter Howell, Gardener
Luis Marmól, Gardener
Donald Mehlman, Gardener
Nathan Neufer, Gardener
Pedro Paulino, Gardener
Manuel Pineda, Crew Leader
Marc Vedder, Integrated Pest Management Specialist
Information Technology
Charlotte Johnson, Information Technology Manager
Gregory Blakey, Support Technician
Prathmesh Mengane, Database and CMS Developer
Komlan Segbedji, Network Engineer
Michael Sohn, Web and Graphic Designer
Library
Daniel Boomhower, Director of Library
Deborah Brown, Librarian, Byzantine Studies
Kimball Clark, Cataloguer
Bridget Gazzo, Librarian, Pre-Columbian Studies
Ingrid Gibson, Interlibrary Loan Librarian
Wendy Johnson, Cataloguer
Linda Lott, Librarian, Rare Book Collection
Sarah Mackowski, Acquisitions and Interlibrary Loan Assistant
Barbara Mersereau, Acquisitions Assistant
Sandra Parker-Provenzano, Head Cataloguer
Sarah B. Pomerantz, Serials and Acquisitions Librarian
Bettina Smith, Manager, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives
Toni Stephens, Library Assistant
Alyson Williams, Reader Services Librarian
Museum
Gudrun Bühl, Curator and Museum Director
Renée Alfonso, Museum Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator
James N. Carder, Archivist and House Collection Manager
John Hanson, Assistant Curator, Byzantine Collection
Joni Joseph, Museum Collections Manager and Assistant Registrar
Trustees, Executive Committee, Senior Fellows, and Staff
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Colin Kelly, Museum Exhibit Technician
Joseph Mills, Photographer
Cécile Morrisson, Advisor for Byzantine Numismatics
Juan Antonio Murro, Assistant Curator, Pre-Columbian Collection
Patti L. Sheer, Museum Shop Manager
Laura Symcak, Docent Coordinator
Publications
Kathy Sparkes, Director of Publications
Meredith Baber, Editorial Assistant
Joel Kalvesmaki, Editor in Byzantine Studies
Sara Taylor, Managing Editor, Art and Archaeology
Security
Patrick Williams, Director of Security
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