From the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, 2011 - 2012

dumbarton oaks research library and collection Annual Report 2011–2012 From the Director Renewing an Ivory Tower In 2011, the expression “ivory tower” celebrated its centenary: the phrase first entered English one hundred years ago, to translate the French tour d’ivoire. The nineteenth-century French man of letters Charles Sainte-Beuve had used the words in reference to his fellow poet Alfred de Vigny. Although the phrase has always implied— usually with more than a hint of criticism—a detachment from the outside world, it looks ever less applicable to the existences of those who spend much time around real-life universities. If the privileged isolation from everyday concerns that the image conjures up was ever to be found readily in academic settings, it has now disappeared beyond repair. In the job realities of many professors—at least in the humanities—times and places for uninterrupted research and writing are exceedingly rare. Life has become an ever-turning kaleidoscope of teaching, mentoring, committees, face-to-face meetings, and e-mails. Where does Dumbarton Oaks belong on the spectrum that leads from reality through the image—and where should it fit? From one perspective, probably even the dominant one, the disappearance of “ivory towers” that never even really existed is not to be lamented. The term has often carried pejorative connotations, since the world in general tends to emphasize the real and practical at the expense of the ideal (and idealistic). But from another vantage point, beautiful havens are needed even more than was the case once upon a time. Dumbarton Oaks has no The director’s office in the Main House. 7 turrets, but since its foundation one of its major obligations has been to provide a release from mundane demands and obligations for individual scholars so that they may complete books or dissertations, while another has been to enable teams of researchers to come together in peace and to collaborate upon the conception and completion of complex projects. To fulfill these charges, we have boosted the numbers of scholars we serve, and we have broadened the definition of scholar to include younger people— even, during the summers, undergraduate students—who were formerly excluded. We are not ones to launch a full-scale defense of the ivory tower, but we have made a greater effort to communicate to a larger public why what we do (and what we enable to be done) matters. Nations need the energy and entrepreneurialism of business and corporations—but they also require the dynamism and creativity of groups and individuals who are not focused first and foremost upon profit in the next quarter, but who instead serve society over the long term by eliciting and strengthening skills in the young, adding to the common stock of cultural knowledge, and enriching culture through the joys and beauties of discoveries and recoveries. Within the vast spectrum of education as a whole a unique niche has been occupied by the ongoing experiment called the university, which since the Middle Ages has contributed both stably and ever-changingly to the progress of many nations, the achievement of countless inventions and insights, and the benefit of still more individuals. Universities may not be industries in the customary sense of the word, and the model of shareholders may be misapplied in regard to them, but they do answer to as many groups as do publicly held corporations. The instructors who bonded together as a guild to found universities in the Middle Ages form one of the constituencies. Another is the students, whose conception of learning has never been restricted narrowly to classrooms and examination booklets. A third is the parents of the students, who often steer their children toward the universities and who even more often foot much or all of the bill. A fourth is the alumni, who have graduated from the universities and who give generously to enable them to maintain or expand their missions. A subset 8 dumbarton oaks among the loyal alums are donors, even if they have been dead for decades or centuries: the preservation of their gifts is essential, not merely because it is right and not merely because it is required by law (although either of these causes should be sufficient in itself), but also because it demonstrates to future givers that the spirit of their gifts will be honored. Can we expect future generosity if we have not shown respect for its past manifestations? Last but not least, universities of the not-for-profit kind are beholden to society as a whole. They are accorded the tax advantages of being charitable organizations because the citizenry and government expect them to fulfill special roles and to conduct themselves according to certain principles. How do those of us in universities and research institutes such as Dumbarton Oaks demonstrate to all these groups that we are doing the best jobs possible? Part of the answer lies in self-knowledge, which springs from an awareness of what we have been in the past, a sensitivity to what we are presently, and a vision of what we wish to become in the future. If research institutes devoted to the past lose this diachronic perspective, all else is lost for the humanities. Universities and research institutes will not fulfill their distinctive functions if they become no more than the pale imitation within a non-profit setting of what corporations accomplish. Their graduates must be able to become skilled, productive, responsible, and creative workers (and of course, thoughtful citizens)—but universities and the other institutions that revolve in their orbit are not vocational schools with the sole task of teaching specific skills. Nor will universities live up to their potential by carrying out research and development that could just as easily take place in for-profit laboratories. In all realms of learning, whether sciences, social sciences, or humanities, universities must handle what private businesses have seldom ever taken upon themselves and what government agencies may have done in the past but alas no longer do. Often that means basic research. At the same time, the resources of universities are far too straitened for them to regard everything that is useless as being their mission: canny choices must be made. Within Dumbarton Oaks, careful stewardship of resources has always been the norm rather than the exception. Because we from the dir ector 9 flourish mainly thanks to the largess of donors who have expected us to employ their generosity wisely and effectively, the institute has developed and maintained a culture in which every expense has been examined closely and in which leanness has prevailed, so that administration does not come at the cost of execution. I am grateful to our Finance team for helping us, over the years, construct and abide by a sound budget. Hard work comes easily when people are passionate about what they do, and such passion radiates from every staff member and fellow of Dumbarton Oaks. When hard work, passion, and creativity coincide, the results can be spectacular. With such colleagues, a director is in the happy position of having to exert only the slightest direction in order to achieve very good results. Rehearsing the accomplishments and innovations of the past year would require much more space than the scope of an annual report would allow, and the retrospection would diminish the time available for looking forward. Still, it would be sad not to take pleasure in a few of the major achievements of 2011–2012, and rude not to express appreciation for them, since they required great teamwork from many individuals. Like hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of past visitors, I marvel at the beauty of the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens, where the historic fabric of the various distinctive “rooms,” so carefully conceived and laid out more than a half century ago, is punctiliously maintained, but where new initiatives in ironwork, masonry, and other media are constantly bringing discreet renewal and improvement. Our gardeners have responsibility for the largest, most visible, and most visited stretches of our property. This past year witnessed, on the heels of our first-ever art installation by Charles Symonds (in the gardens, library, and museum) and our inaugural garden installation by Patrick Dougherty in the Ellipse, our second garden installation on the Arbor Terrace. The artists Andy Cao and Xavier Perrot, helped by a team of volunteers, used wire mesh studded with thousands of dangling Swarovski crystals to create a scintillating cloud hovering over the dark mirror of a pool. The beauty of this construction, particularly as the midmorning and midafternoon light is refracted by the crystals swaying in the breeze, has attracted 10 dumbarton oaks considerable attention from the media and has delighted visitors of all ages. For imagining and arranging the installation, thanks go to John Beardsley, our director of Garden and Landscape Studies. For supporting the experiment, Gail Griffin and our gardening staff also deserve appreciation. Such cooperation between our areas of scholarly study and the other departments within our institution is essential to our achieving our potential. Interdepartmental collaboration has become one of our distinguishing features. I derive equal satisfaction from the capital projects, such as the waterproofing of the Main House. This undertaking followed the renovation of the townhouse known as The Oaks, which since its acquisition has been remarkably useful for its meeting space and housing, but which has become an even more coveted asset with the adjustments to its architecture, such as the enclosing of its seminar room. Many other improvements take subtler forms. In the last two years, the campus has had, for the first time in its history, comprehensive wayfaring and signage. In one sense the many unobtrusive signs, already taken for granted, are a tiny step, almost unworthy of attention; in another sense, they mark great and long-overdue progress in rendering our sixteen and a quarter acres more easily navigable by those new to them and in signaling that we are one campus, even though we may be scattered across different edifices. On the inside, the buildings of Dumbarton Oaks have been hives of activity. As I sit at the keyboard, I realize with a start that our museum has nearly entered into double digits in the number of temporary exhibitions it has mounted since it reopened in the spring of 2008. Alongside the exhibitions, the museum has initiated and participated in all sorts of events, ranging from symposia through workshops, study days, and colloquia to lectures, which have promoted both our own holdings and our fields of studies. Perhaps less ostentatiously, the museum has embraced an ever greater number of class visits from both Harvard University and DC-area universities. The official name of this institution is Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Besides the museum, the other major part of the equation that makes us a research institute is obviously our library. Over the past year, it has served ever more from the dir ector 11 readers, thanks to thriving programs for residential fellows, nonresidential stipend-holders, visiting students, and other appropriate users. Pausing for a moment to think of our key constituency, the fellows who rely on the library to conduct their research, is a reminder that the fellowship program has been moving from strength to strength. (We owe special thanks to Kathleen Lane, now at the American Institute of Architects, for many enhancements of the programs and policies.) While serving an ever growing number of readers, our librarians find time for creative research and knowledge-sharing: many short-term exhibitions have graced the display cases in the library and outside the Rare Book Room, and are recorded in blogs and online exhibits. Located physically within the library but administratively autonomous, the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA) has made ever stronger progress in inventorying its vast holdings, an undertaking that is the indispensable prerequisite to the digitization that we hope soon to push forward on a major scale. In all quarters of our institution, we take very seriously our fiduciary responsibilities in preserving the objects that have been entrusted to us. In keeping with this awareness of our duties, the ICFA has devoted considerable efforts to assessing the hundreds of thousands of photographs, film, and negatives in its possession that require special efforts in preservation. The publications department at Dumbarton Oaks plays a central role in making available to a greater world the results of scholarly investigation in our three chief areas of scholarship, namely, Byzantine Studies, Pre-Columbian Studies, and Garden and Landscape Studies. It has also set the stage for two volumes that appeared in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Humanities. This new series complements our books in Byzantine Studies, strictly defined. It fosters scholarship that connects the Byzantine and medieval humanities, by focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean during the Byzantine era through the prism of non-Greek texts. Not produced by our own publications department but bearing our institutional name is the new series of bilingual volumes, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, published by Harvard University Press. It amazes me to realize that nearly twenty volumes have come into print in this series. Our first Greek volumes 12 dumbarton oaks flank those that have appeared with Medieval Latin and Old English texts, all in the en face format so that readers with no command or only limited knowledge of the original medieval languages will be enticed to read. These books spread awareness of our institutional name while simultaneously supporting a broad appreciation of Byzantine and medieval cultures: this is part of our mission, even as inscribed in stone outside our main entrance. For all my pleasure in cradling copies of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library in my hands, for all my appreciation for the visual and tactile beauty of the bronzed gold dust jackets and the thick paper, I am equally delighted by the digitization initiatives we have underway. These projects involve almost every department at Dumbarton Oaks. The Oral History project (whose aim is to collect, transcribe, and digitize interviews relating to the past of Dumbarton Oaks and of the institutes and societies with which it was closely allied in its early decades) has begun to shed unexpected light on all aspects of our institutional life. The project to edit and annotate the correspondence between Mildred Barnes Bliss and Royall Tyler, which has emanated from the Archives, will illuminate the acquisition of many objects in our collections. But the project has other rewards: it serendipitously casts light, for instance, on life in the 1920s and beyond, captivating historians and non-historians alike in ways we cannot begin to predict. The endeavor to digitize and index the garden correspondence of Mildred Bliss has been proceeding apace in the library and Rare Books Collection. The library has also pressed onward in the construction of a database for our large collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts on microfilm. While making materials available online, we have executed our work with a care and have framed its scope with a judiciousness that should stand us in good stead for many years to come. Indeed, we received powerful votes of confidence for our ability and willingness to host valuable resources of information, both digital and material, when we were entrusted with the Maya Vase Database and the Moche Archive. Joanne Pillsbury (now associate director of scholarly programs at the Getty Research Institute) is no longer director of Pre-Columbian Studies, but these archives and other initiatives remain among the testimonials to her endeavors. from the dir ector 13 To this point I have been talking mainly about management, but the time has come to turn to leadership. In seeking to guide us, I have attempted to formulate an overarching vision and goals of my own, but to elicit them from what Dumbarton Oaks has been traditionally. I have also had to exercise judgment, since even if each of us performs at the highest possible level, we cannot do everything. An institution of our size must shape its vision carefully. Where do I hope to take us? One of my consistent goals has been to strengthen our three areas of studies, namely, Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape Studies, by supplementing them with interdisciplinary collaborations in adjacent fields. Dumbarton Oaks has the resources to accomplish much on its own, but we will not realize our full potential alone. For instance, we are blessed in being affiliated with Harvard University, largely because of the people—the human resources—upon whose experience and talents we may draw. I have as an objective to ally us as closely as I can to faculty, students, and staff at Harvard whose skills and work would benefit from contact with us and vice versa. This means thinking first and foremost about our fields of study, but it also requires creative programming to draw fresh talent in areas related to our own traditional strengths. Over the past few years we have had ever more frequent class visits, both from Cambridge and from the Washington area, and we look forward to even more. Likewise, we have had growing numbers of interns who have helped in Byzantine Studies, the gardens, the Image Collection and Fieldwork Archive, the museum, oral history, and Pre-Columbian Studies. We established the Tyler Fellowships, to help support students in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Studies (as well as in their penumbras); the second year of these non-residential fellowships, just now underway, permits the fellows to contribute to the work of Dumbarton Oaks in various projects. Here is not the place to list all the faculty, librarians, curators, and administrators we have hosted from Cambridge—but those connections have been strengthened whenever they have seemed appropriate to the humanistic missions of Dumbarton Oaks. The relatively new and expanding internship program has also strengthened our ties to the university, while bringing to 14 dumbarton oaks Dumbarton Oaks the energy and enthusiasm of a group that has traditionally been absent from our community: undergraduates and graduate students in the earlier stages of their academic career. As one of our founders emphasized already in the middle of the last century, education extends far beyond courses, examinations, and extended writing of theses or dissertations. An argument could be framed that extracurricular activities have been overemphasized at the collegiate level for more than twenty years, with unsurprisingly adverse consequences for the purely academic side of things. To redress this shortcoming in a small but deeply meaningful way, Dumbarton Oaks offers options for what could be considered research-related extracurriculars. By devising internships imaginatively, we benefit from the energies of best and the brightest while also showing off and sharing our own strengths. For young people the opportunity to engage with specialists in museums, libraries, archives, publications, and gardens can be eye-opening and invigorating. By experiencing from within the highest-level workings of a research institute, these students are helped to reaffirm and, yes, to transform themselves. They are allowed the space in which to be eager: that is, after all, what the word student means. Beyond Harvard, we aim to collaborate with other institutes in the United States and abroad. In 2010–2011 we cosponsored events with the Italian cultural institute as well as with the Mexican and Honduran embassies. The culmination came in a full day devoted to Cyprus, the result of a happy conjunction with the Cypriot Embassy. Such jointly sponsored lectures and study days help us to attract audiences we would not have reached otherwise, and they build relationships that I hope will serve not only Dumbarton Oaks but scholarship in general. In however modest a way, the results can even contribute to better international relations. Laying the groundwork for shared activities is time-consuming, but well worth the effort. What lies ahead for Dumbarton Oaks? Thanks to the rapid clip of technological change, no humanities research institute can afford to behave in the manner that pseudo-science ascribes to the ostrich. With our heads held high and our eyes wide open—looking straight ahead at the present but with both the past and the from the dir ector 15 future in our peripheral vision—we must demonstrate the very special things we can accomplish by amalgamating the traditions of high-level scholarship with our ongoing commitment to digital initiatives. We take enormous satisfaction in the conversion of our website to the content management system Plone, which facilitates the ever freer incorporation of digital content. Our facilities department is committed to making available more and more of our Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), which includes an events manager to help us to coordinate and communicate better about the many services we provide in connection with events. Our museum, library, and ICFA have been ambitious and creative in hosting online exhibitions. Like a very vigorous plant species (not an invasive weed, I hope!) Dumbarton Oaks has pervaded the blogosphere, thanks to the ICFA, library, oral history project, gardens, and areas of studies. Our many events, scholarly initiatives, exhibits, and publications are disseminated to a growing and diverse audience through our new, monthly electronic newsletter (The Oaks News). The talent and passion of our staff and interns are remarkable, in bringing knowledge of history and appreciation of beauty to the world at large. By reaching out to a broader audience for both our traditional media and the new ones, we can present the best face of higher education in North America. Yet our vision is global: owing to the variety and nature of our fields, we can bring together the brightest people from around the world as both fellows and staff, and motivate them to work together to achieve the best new results—ones that will serve as models for researchers, librarians, and archivists elsewhere. For such strides to be taken at the staff level, we must maintain clarity about the reporting structures in our ten departments while simultaneously fostering (in both managers and the staff members they oversee) a ready embrace of a sensible interdepartmentalism, which is in this case really just the organizational expression of interdisciplinarity. To descend to a more grittily practical level, we have also been attending to the basic business of ensuring proper maintenance of our facilities and proper planning for our future, over the next ten years and beyond. In keeping with this timeframe, in the fall of 2010 Dumbarton Oaks received approval from the District of 16 dumbarton oaks Columbia for its ten-year campus plan. The plan foresees no major changes in the number of staff members and fellows: we remain well below the thresholds we have been permitted under previous campus plans, and we still have more than a half acre per fellow, which as campus plans go in Washington (or almost anywhere else) is extraordinary. But we are changing. Dumbarton Oaks has almost completed the approvals process necessary to renovate and expand a building only a short distance away, at 1700 Wisconsin Avenue. This project, to be completed in time for occupancy in the academic year 2014–2015, will allow us to replace La Quercia, our existing apartment building on 30th Street. At present we must house fellows in quarters that stand a half mile away, are increasingly difficult to maintain, and lack flexibility: sometimes they are too small, sometimes too large, and only fortuitously just right. The new building will enable us to accommodate our fellows in better space and to cope better with the fluctuations in family size that occur from year to year in our cohorts of fellows. Although being situated at the corner of Wisconsin and R Street will bring the disadvantage of noise, it will have many more advantages. Families will enjoy proximity to the Georgetown Public Library, to the supermarket, to convenient bus service, and to our gardens. In terms of the socializing that can enhance the intellectual benefits of a year here, fellows will have the boon of closeness to Dumbarton Oaks, with a traffic pattern that will increase the likelihood of interaction among fellows, senior fellows, other short-term visitors, and staff. Our migration will be of benefit the fellowship programs not only in terms of greater proximity but also in terms of spirit, since we will bring our gardens to 1700 Wisconsin while integrating the building into the Dumbarton Oaks aesthetic. With trees, plantings, a green roof, and sustainable design, what emerges will be a credit to the neighborhood in which we are rooted as well as to our architecture and gardens. Equally important, 1700 Wisconsin will serve the cause of both advanced research and general culture. The present three areas of studies, as they have been strictly and conventionally defined, will not be expanded. But it will be possible, within a genuine residential community, to create synergies and catalyze intersections as never before. from the dir ector 17 Using the word community of course brings to mind particular faces. At the risk of concluding on a melancholic note, this is a moment when the name of our recently deceased director of finances calls out to be acknowledged. In the last annual report her loss was too recent and raw for me to mention. After three decades of service to Dumbarton Oaks, Marlene Chazan is not with us today physically, but she is in spirit. In heart and mind she stood fully behind most of what I have delineated in this report, most particularly the transformation of 1700 Wisconsin. At one crucial juncture she urged us, in her economical but highly effective fashion, not to be constrained but to think big—not to shoehorn too many people into too small a space, but to pursue options for judicious expansion of the building. She would be happy to see where we are headed. Dumbarton Oaks has become what it is—and here I mean not funds or buildings but spirit—thanks to the efforts of the dozens in our community to support the best in our ambitions and to help us work together to our collective advantage. We will not forget Marlene, just as we will not shed our appreciation for all the others who have moved on from us in recent years, since we task ourselves in special and quiet ways with being a shrine to memory. The humanities are supposed to be humane, and they rest on the bedrock of respect for the past. We must not lose these features. At the same time, we are a vigorous organism that not only tolerates but even embraces change, as not only fellows and scholars but also staff members come and go. Saying goodbye to friends is hard, but the loss is offset by the joys of new colleagues, with new talents, new perspectives, and new energies. The Director’s Office has an entirely different staff from two years ago. To give only a token list of those who have come, we have a new Director of Finances (Mary Beth Tsikalas), a new Human Resources representative (Pallavi Jain), a new Executive Director (Yota Batsaki), a new Executive Assistant (Francisco López), and a new Director of Pre-Columbian Studies (Colin McEwan). But in fact the term new is absurdly inapplicable to most of the individuals I just identified, since many of them have been working so hard and so long that they may be thinking already of retirement—but the work is what justifies the adjective, since they have been renewing Dumbarton 18 dumbarton oaks Oaks exactly as is needed for a legacy institution. And so we look back with love and appreciation even as we peer forward with hope, while progressing as swiftly as we can into a future that we shape to the best of our abilities. from the dir ector 19