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AMT: Good afternoon, Jeanne-Nicole.
JNSL: Today is August 5, 2009. My name is Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent and I have the honor today of interviewing Dr. Alice-Mary Talbot. Thank you for coming.
AMT: It's a pleasure to be with you today.
JNSL: I would like to begin with the beginning and if you will think back to the first time you heard about Dumbarton Oaks, how you came to come here in the beginning, and the circumstances of your first involvements as a young scholar.
AMT: That's a very easy question for me to answer because I first heard about Dumbarton Oaks through my professor, Ihor Ševčenko. I was taking my very first course in Byzantine studies with him at Columbia University, which was a seminar on Byzantine epigraphy, a very strange way to begin the study of Byzantium, but that's the course he was teaching that spring, and it was a very small seminar of four students, and in the springtime he invited three of the students to accompany him to Dumbarton Oaks for the annual spring symposium. And I still remember it was on Byzantium and the Arabs, a topic I knew nothing about. In those days you couldn't just sign up for the Byzantine symposium, you had to receive an official invitation, and basically students were not encouraged to come, they had to be essentially invited and escorted by their professor. So, this was necessary in order for me to attend it, and it was a truly remarkable weekend. The weather was superb, I still remember the white azaleas in flower, the amazing buffet lunch that was served – a whole salmon with scales of cucumber slices – and meeting so many people whose names I just knew from the bibliography. And the symposium itself was the first time I had ever attended any kind of scholarly symposium, so I think I would have been impressed by almost any such event. But obviously the Dumbarton Oaks symposium was of unusual quality and it was a truly thrilling experience and I think it did have a major impact on making me decide to become a Byzantinist.
JNSL: And so at that point you hadn't even chosen your thesis topic yet.
AMT: At that point I was a first year graduate student and I was actually planning to concentrate in Ottoman history, so I was still very much searching for my field. But, as a result of beginning to study with Ševčenko, I decided to change my priorities and to make Ottoman history into my minor field and Byzantine studies into my major field.
JNSL: Was he a demanding supervisor?
AMT: Oh, extraordinary. He is certainly one of the most brilliant scholars I've ever met. His knowledge of foreign languages is unparalleled, and I remember at this first symposium sitting at a table with him and hearing him switch into at least six different languages during lunch. I was just astonished at his facility with modern European languages, and his knowledge of Greek was amazing. He had very high expectations of his students, and he had a rather unusual way of teaching, in that he was not very good at presenting introductory materials but he liked to plunge right into the middle of things with an actual text and then he would pretty much leave it to the students to develop their own bibliography and to figure out how to deal with it. When he taught paleography, for example, he just handed us a – in those days there weren't even photocopies – it was something called a thermofax, of a text and essentially said start reading it, with absolutely no introduction to things like abbreviations or ligatures or whatever. But we supported each other, and he obviously would answer questions if you asked him. But he, I think – he was a much better teacher of very advanced students and would not have been successful with undergraduates. I don't think he ever taught undergraduates as a matter of fact.
JNSL: And then you later came back as a Junior Fellow?
AMT: Yes, once I decided on my dissertation topic, which was to edit the letters of the patriarch Athanasios I, by that time Ševčenko had already sort of begun the process of leaving Columbia and taking a position as a permanent faculty member at Dumbarton Oaks. And so, it made a great deal of sense for me to be a Junior Fellow there because he had been away from Columbia for already one full year at that point, and so it gave me an opportunity to take advantage of Dumbarton Oaks and to be close to my mentor. So, it was a rather unusual situation in that my mentor was here, and I ended up staying two years, which was very common in the '60s. Most Junior Fellows, in fact, did have a renewal of their fellowships, and so I was here from 1966 to 1968.
JNSL: And that was – who was the director at that time?
AMT: Well, it was a time of transition. Ernst Kitzinger had stepped down as the Director of Byzantine Studies at the end of the spring of '66. And there, I think – I'm not sure there actually was a Director of Byzantine Studies when I first came. And then Ševčenko held the position, but only for three months and then they appointed Romilly Jenkins. I'm not quite sure of the chronology but, well, certainly when I was a Junior Fellow Romilly Jenkins became director, but he only lived for three more years, so that was a very short tenure. He died very suddenly of a heart attack.
JNSL: And Mr. Tyler was –
AMT: No, Jack Thacher was still the director, the original Director of Dumbarton Oaks. He was nearing the end of his tenure, he stepped down in 1969, I believe. I did get to know him a little bit because he was an art historian and since my husband was an art historian he was interested in getting to know us perhaps a little bit more than some of the other Fellows. And Mr. Thacher was very helpful to us. We were planning a trip to Europe and he helped us to gain entree to some private collections, which was wonderful, and just in general gave us advice on our travels in Europe, so we were grateful to him.
JNSL: And then – so Mrs. Bliss died in 1969, so you would have seen her.
AMT: Yes, I pretty much literally just saw her. She was very elderly by the time I came, not in good health. She would come to the symposia and sit in a huge sofa which was put at the front of the rows of chairs and would sit there during the symposium and listen to the papers, and then she came every Friday afternoon for tea, a rather formal tea which was served to the Fellows and she would pour for us. But she had very little interest in the Junior Fellows as far as I could tell, and she was more interested in chatting with the faculty members. So, I may have told her that I wanted a slice of lemon in my tea, but that was about the extent of my interaction with her. Still, I did have a chance to see her and to gain the impression of her as a true grand dame. We were, of course – we all were very aware of the role she played in the establishment of Dumbarton Oaks, and so we were – we felt that she was responsible, in a way, for our being there. So, we were very excited to have the opportunity at least to lay eyes on her as we were, but she never, by that time – she never entertained at her home. So, earlier Fellows did have a chance to go to her home in Georgetown and meet her more informally, but by the time I came it was sort of too late for that.
JNSL: Did you have further responsibilities as a Junior Fellow in addition to working on your project? Were there other things you were expected to do?
AMT: No, in the mid-'60s our only responsibility was to work on our dissertations, it was in the earlier period that you had assigned work projects.
JNSL: And did you interact closely as a group? Was there a lot of sort of social interaction or was –?
AMT: Well, I would say that the group of Junior Fellows was very close, there were seven of us, so it was a substantial number, in fact, we outnumbered the regular Fellows. And we all lived in the same apartment building up on Wisconsin Avenue at 2702, and we all sat in the reading room on the second floor, and we did develop very, very close friendships. I would say of the – during the two years I was there I developed really lasting friendships with three of my colleagues, George Majeska and Jaroslav Folda, who are – I still count among my very close friends today. And then Margaret English Frazer, who tragically died a number of years ago, and she developed early onset Alzheimer's and it was a great tragedy, but she was a wonderful friend for a while at least. And we had, I would say, less contact with the older Fellows. And then there was the permanent faculty of whom there were about six – it was a very hierarchical arrangement then. You were very conscious of this strong difference between the faculty and then the regular Fellows and the Junior Fellows, and it was also a very small, relatively small group, because only Byzantinists, for example, went to lunch, and we all had lunch at the same time every weekday at – seated at a table, served by a waitress. So, it was very different from the quite informal come-when-you-want, serve-yourself, buffet style, sit-with-whomever-you-want that you have now. And then after lunch there would be coffee – was served in this room here with – usually one of the faculty members would pour, and we would try to have more general conversation. And Francis Dvornik never came to lunch because he had a weight problem and had to always watch very carefully what he ate, but he would always come for coffee because he enjoyed the company. And so, we always enjoyed when he would come and he would – he was very friendly with the Junior Fellows. And he actually made a point of inviting us to his home for a meal at some point during the year. In some ways, he was the most outgoing of all the faculty members, so – but I did certainly have a chance to get to know obviously Ševčenko, my own professor. Cyril Mango was there the entire time and had incredible respect for him; Paul Underwood who was working on Kariye Djami, and then Robert Van Nice, who technically was not a faculty member – he was more of a staff person – but he did come to lunch every day and he was working on the drawings of Hagia Sofia, and I did get to know him quite well and enjoyed him very much because he lived in Istanbul for many years and he was a great raconteur of stories of life in Istanbul and what it's like to work in a great church like Hagia Sofia for many years. So, I did feel privileged to get to know these people, but it was a very, very different atmosphere from what it is today, and there were no Garden and Landscape or Pre-Columbian Fellows.
JNSL: None at all?
AMT: None at all, yeah.
JNSL: And you came back, then, in – did you continue to come to the symposia after you finished your Ph.D. and before you came back in –?
AMT: I came to some of them. We moved to Cleveland in 1968, and I finished my dissertation there and started teaching as an adjunct at various colleges. And I was not able to teach Byzantine studies – I was teaching mainly modern Middle Eastern history, and I began to feel that I was quite isolated from the field and I was not at all sure I could continue because there was no library in Cleveland and it was a very difficult time. But I did come back occasionally and I guess a very important event was the symposium of 1972 because this was a major departure in the tradition of symposia at Dumbarton Oaks. Because, up to that date and after that date, symposia, Byzantine symposia, were always on a theme and all the speakers were invited and it was usually only senior scholars in the field, and so there was no opportunity for junior scholars to participate in any way except as in the audience. And in 1972, I think through the wisdom of the Senior Fellows, they decided as a one-time innovation to invite mostly some recent Junior Fellows and recent post docs and also a few scholars who had not been at Dumbarton Oaks and were also recent post docs. And they invited about ten, eleven of us to give papers on our research at Dumbarton Oaks, and so that was a really very exciting opportunity, a bit terrifying, to be, to give – this was my first conference paper ever, and to give it in the Music Room at Dumbarton Oaks before a Dumbarton Oaks symposium audience was really quite intimidating, I can tell you. But it was a wonderful opportunity to meet sort of all my – a cohort of all of the young scholars, most of whom I knew but not all. I'd never met Tom Matthews, for example, or Angeliki Laiou before, and they were participating in that, and it also, I think, gave me encouragement to stay in the field – the fact that I was invited, and then was invited to publish my paper in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers. And that was my second publication, I guess, in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers, so that was really, it really gave me a boost when I really needed it.
JNSL: Then it wasn't too long after that that you were part of the founding of the Byzantine Studies Conference.
AMT: Yes, and there's a definite connection, I think. What happened was that this 1972 symposium was an absolute – like a lightning bolt for young Byzantinists, because I think up to that point we hadn't – we just sort of accepted the fact that there was no possibility for Byzantinists to get together and give papers and talk to each other and meet each other, and when we had this symposium in 1972 with the young people giving papers, a lot of the younger people who were at that symposium said, we should do this every year. But we realized that Dumbarton Oaks was not going to do it every year, this was a one-time event, and the next year they went back to their normal routine. And so, that, I know, is what gave the impetus to a group of people to get together and decide we should start an annual conference. And I honestly don't remember how I got so involved in it, I just don't remember – it's possible that Walter Kaegi would remember – all I know is that he and I ended up being the co-organizers of the first Byzantine Studies Conference and that, for reasons which I also don't remember, I agreed to host it in Cleveland, which turned out to have been a foolhardy move because I had no real institutional affiliation as an adjunct. I had no university I could hold it at, so I had to go to the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, where my husband was a curator, and I essentially asked the director of the museum if he would be willing to host it, because the Cleveland Museum has one of the great collections of Byzantine art. And I obviously pointed that out, and he very graciously agreed to host it. I, looking back on it, I'm amazed that he agreed to do it, and I'm very grateful to him, and it was very difficult because I had absolutely no support in Cleveland to do it. So, I had to do virtually everything myself except that some women from the local Greek church did help me. But I had no students to – the place I was an adjunct was an hour from Cleveland – so, I had no students who could help, and fortunately these ladies from the Greek church agreed to do things like help set up the registration table. And they very kindly hosted a dinner for the participants. Anyway, we had said that if seventy-five people came we would think it was a great success, and to our amazement one hundred twenty people came, and that was the beginning. We then drew up a constitution, and it's been going ever since. But I think it was founded in reaction to the symposia at Dumbarton Oaks as a place where it would be for – primarily for younger people, although obviously anyone was able to offer a paper – where you volunteered to give papers, there were no invitations, it was always a shoestring operation. Everyone paid his or her expenses for everything, and it was always intended to be as sort of informal and un-intimidating, in contrast to the Dumbarton Oaks symposium.
JNSL: And were there any, at that first conference, were there any Fellows or faculty members from D.O. who came over as a gesture of support for what you were doing or were they –?
AMT: I don't think so, no. There might have been some Fellows, but certainly none of the faculty came. There were very few senior scholars, it was definitely a project of the younger generation, which it has continued to be, which I think is the way it should be.
JNSL: And looking at your work, how did you become interested in the history of women, how did you develop that focus of Byzantine women?
AMT: Well, it's an interesting story, I think, actually. When I was working at Lake Erie College, which is another of the schools where I was an adjunct teacher. I started teaching there in 1970, if I remember correctly, and that was the era when women's studies were just beginning, maybe more around '72-'73, and it was a women's college. And so, I remember the dean calling me into his office and saying that we're a women's college and I think it really important that we start offering women's studies here, which we never have, he said how would you like to teach a course in women's studies. And I told him that I really didn't feel comfortable with doing a course on the entire history of women in the world, and I'd never done any modern history, but that I would be happy to do a course on women in classical antiquity and the middle ages, and said that maybe someone else could do the Renaissance to the present. So, he was happy with that, and so I put together a course, I believe in the fall of 1973 for the first time. It was all completely new to me. I mean, obviously I'd never – this topic was not discussed when I was an undergraduate and in graduate school. And I was quite fascinated by the topic, and I only devoted one week to Byzantine studies, most of it was classical Greece and Rome and the western middle ages, because that's where more secondary materials were available for the students. But when I was doing the preparation for the course I read a wonderful book by, dear me, now I'm going to go blank on the woman's name, a very famous Oxford historian, on medieval nunneries in England, and I was absolutely fascinated by this book. It was maybe – very fat book – five hundred pages long, based on – I think it was mainly on sort of very late middle ages, based on episcopal visitation documents to women's convents, and I just thought the material was fascinating. And I began thinking, I don't know anything about nunneries in Byzantium, and this might be an interesting topic to research. So, I began to do research and to find the surviving typika – which survive, the six surviving typika – and at that point I really didn't have any time to pursue the subject, but that's what triggered my interest. And it was only in the early '80s with the typikon translation project, which I became involved in, that I then had the opportunity to follow through on that interest and to translate the six, and to really develop more detailed knowledge of the phenomenon. But it was definitely that course at Lake Erie that sparked my interest.
JNSL: And did you return often in the '70s to Dumbarton Oaks or were you more really out in Cleveland at that time?
AMT: I was very much based in Cleveland. I had two small children so it was difficult for me to travel very much, and I didn't have very much connection with Dumbarton Oaks. I did publish my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks, and so I did come back a few times in connection with preparing the final manuscript and checking proofs and that sort of thing. That book was published in '75, so I would come very occasionally, but I had pretty minimal contacts until 1978 until I came back as a staff member for two years.
JNSL: So, let's move to that period.
AMT: Okay. What happened was that when Giles Constable became the Director of Dumbarton Oaks in 1976, he decided to abolish the position of Director of Byzantine Studies. It's something I've never understood completely. It was – whether it was a cost cutting move, whether it was because of supposed difficulty in identifying an appropriate candidate – I've never really understood why that decision was made; I think it was a very bad decision. In any case, Giles assumed the duties of the Director of Byzantine Studies, but he very quickly realized that it was very difficult for him to do both jobs, and so he and his successors, as Director at Dumbarton Oaks, had to make a series of accommodations over the years to try to get help in carrying out all the duties of the Director of Byzantine Studies. And so, the first such effort was hiring me on a half-time basis to help with organization of academic events. So I, for example, organized public lectures, and I organized the symposia, and I also helped with the publications program with reviewing manuscripts.
JNSL: What was your title?
AMT: I was called Associate for Academic Affairs, and then in later years – I only did it for two years because I had to commute and with my small children that turned out to be very difficult. In later years, at one point, there was a troika of very junior professors here including Henry Maguire, I think, and John Duffy and Irina Andreescu. And they divided up the duties of the Director of Studies among the three of them, but none of them held that title. They also hired a man called Peter Topping who was here for maybe ten years and he was responsible, completely responsible for publications and also was very involved in advising the library on acquisitions. So, there were a number of these what I would consider makeshift efforts to carry out the responsibilities of the position, but there was no single person who was really responsible, and I think that was very unfortunate. But I did myself have two wonderful years back here and they were absolutely key in enabling me to continue in the field because at that point, as you can see, I was teaching as an adjunct – I was teaching Middle Eastern history – I had had no library, and it was very difficult for me to continue as a Byzantinist – and being here in Washington on a regular basis meant that I could return to serious research. I began to work very seriously on my second book which was on the posthumous miracles of the patriarch Athanasios, and what I did was I would work during the day on the Byzantine studies job and then at night I would work on my book, and I was able to publish that in the early '80s. So, that was extremely important and it also meant that I began to get back into the field and to be able to network again and sort of catch up with what was going on. But having access to the library was just extraordinarily important.
JNSL: Who were some other Byzantinists who were there at that time?
AMT: Well, the most important figure was definitely Alexander Kazhdan, who arrived in February of 1979. So, that was the first year that I was in that position, and I, because of my position, Giles essentially asked me to help him with his, shall we say, his acclimation and adjustment, which was a very difficult one, to Dumbarton Oaks. His English was very poor, he had no familiarity with the American academic system. And he did need a lot of support, I think, in those early days, but for me it was an extraordinary privilege to get to know him. And it was the beginning of a very long and fruitful both friendship and collaboration. I, in that early period – my main collaboration with him was that we did teach a course together. He was very anxious to start teaching, even though his English was really not adequate to the task, and this was very unusual since Dumbarton Oaks is not a teaching institution and it's not accredited, but we did work out an arrangement with local universities that they would send their students to Dumbarton Oaks and the universities would give the credit. But what happened was that Kazhdan organized this course, and then he informed me that he couldn't be there for the first four weeks because he was going to be in Europe. So, he asked me if I could teach the first four weeks of it, which I think was a good thing, because I, being more familiar with the needs of American undergraduates was able to give a rather general introduction before he came and began giving much more sort of detailed presentations. Then he had some serious health problems at the end of the semester and – very serious health problems – and I had, in fact, to read all the students' papers and do the grading, which I also think was a good idea because I think he actually wouldn't have had any idea what the normal standards of American undergraduates are and it would have been difficult for him. And then the third thing I did was I took notes as he lectured and afterward we would go over all the mistakes he'd made in English and I tried to help him improve his English. So, I learned a lot from his lectures, and that was the genesis of the book he wrote with Giles Constable on, again I'm going blank, on the Homo Byzantinus, and I was fairly involved in editing the early drafts of that book. So, that was the beginning of our association. We, obviously – we were very complementary figures to each other and could help each other in various ways. And so, that I think led him to call upon me when he began to work on the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium.
JNSL: And before you began that project, you began your work on the typikon? Is that right – that was first?
AMT: Yes, I actually did all that work in Cleveland. Since it was a translation project, I was able to do it completely at home, which was wonderful, because all I needed was essentially the photocopies of the text and a dictionary. And then Angela Hero, who served as the editor, was in New York, and I would just mail my text to her and she would correct them. We did have, I believe, two meetings of all the translators in Washington where we all, at the early stages – where we got together and discussed guidelines for the project. And those were wonderful, wonderful meetings, too, to launch the project, but after that we all worked very much in isolation essentially, but in close contact with the two editors, John Thomas and Angela Hero.
JNSL: And then, am I correct, you started work on – as the director of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium in 1984, is that right?
AMT: Correct, yes. What happened was that I went back to Cleveland essentially full time for four years and went back to the adjunct teaching, and worked on the typikon project and also finishing this book on the miracles of Athanasios. And I was increasingly unhappy with the adjunct teaching being underpaid and not being able to teach anything in Byzantine studies. And so, when Kazhdan approached me in the fall of 1983 – what had happened was he had always – for a long time – had a dream of doing what he called a dictionary of Byzantine studies, even in the Soviet Union. And when he came to Dumbarton Oaks he hoped that he could realize this dream. He had – he was not a very practical man – and he had very little concept of the amount of money it would take to do it, or the amount of organization it would take. And he also didn't understand the ways in which funding agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities operate. And he assumed that all that needed to happen was for Giles Constable to phone the head of NEH and Dumbarton Oaks would be given the money. And so, before I got involved Kazhdan had actually submitted an application to NEH which was rejected because it was inadequate, and I think that was sort of the wake-up call for him. He realized that he just didn't have sufficient familiarity with the American system of doing things and getting funding for projects. And so, he invited me to work with him, and I had almost no experience myself except that the typikon translation project had received NEH funding. I hadn't been involved in that application, but I knew how it had happened, but I was very tempted because of my dissatisfaction with my teaching arrangements in Cleveland. But I did insist that I couldn't commute on a weekly basis, and so we worked out an arrangement whereby I was hired on a half-time basis and I came one week a month to Dumbarton Oaks, funded by NEH, when we got the grant, and then I, in theory, worked one week a month at home on editing and doing my own research and writing. Of course it turned out to be much more than that, but at least it meant that I was only away from home one week a month and that proved to be a very manageable schedule which I continued for seven years. And so, we formed an editorial board of five, and with Kazhdan as editor-in-chief and I was the executive editor, and then Tony Cutler was the chief editor for art and Tim Gregory for archaeology, and originally Gary Vikan was sort of the assistant art editor. But at that year, in 1984, he was hired away from Dumbarton Oaks by the Walters, and they would not give him leave to work on the Dictionary, so he had to resign. And at that point, we decided to replace him with Nancy Ševčenko who was my former elementary and high school classmate and life-long friend. And so that proved to be a very good choice. She, like me, was working a lot sort of as an independent scholar, so she welcomed the opportunity to become involved in this project and did a superb job.
JNSL: You were aware when that began – or how long did it take for you to realize what would be required to complete a project like that? I just think it must have seemed like a tremendous undertaking.
AMT: It did. We actually did manage to complete it within the projected time, which I guess in hindsight is pretty extraordinary. I think we had projected seven years, and we actually submitted the manuscript after five years and it took two years to go through the press, but it was a tremendous job of coordination because of the very large number of contributors – I think it was one hundred seventeen contributors – and it would have been so much easier to do it today with email. But in those days we did everything by snail mail, and we had several contributors in Australia and it took three weeks for the mail in each direction. So I just – I often fantasize about what it would have been like to do that same project now. I bet we could have done it in maybe three or four years, certainly much, much less time.
JNSL: And at that time, then, was Angeliki Laiou, or was Thomson –
AMT: There were actually three directors at D.O. during the course of preparation of the ODB. Giles Constable was there at the beginning and was very, very helpful in getting, helping to arrange for the publication with Oxford University Press. He was very involved in those negotiations and actually signed the contract. He also did help a bit with the original planning process and initial contact with NEH although he didn't have anything to do with the actual application. Then in the middle years Robert Thomson was there from, so let's see, Constable left just as it started, but was very involved in getting it launched, then Thomson was there for the heart of the project, '84-'89, and he was a key author himself, he wrote all the entries on Georgia and Armenia, and was a model contributor. It was my great privilege to work very closely with him on editing his entries and it was so easy to work with him because he – everything was in such good shape the first time around. And he was very conscientious about meeting deadlines and very reasonable about doing revisions and it was just a great pleasure to work with him. And then Angeliki Laiou – by the time she came it was really at the very end, when we were sending it to press and reading the proofs. So she – she herself was on the advisory board, and did contribute some entries, but by the time she became Director, it was winding down, essentially, so she was not so involved with it.
JNSL: I'd like to ask you a question about the beginnings of your Greek reading group with the Fellows? Did that start under Kazhdan or were you the beginner of that?
AMT: I would say that it did begin under Kazhdan, although it was called a seminar then. He called it his weekly seminar, and he – since he was a full time researcher – he very much enjoyed having ways of interacting with the Fellows on a more sort of formalized basis, and very often volunteered to give courses of various sorts or to meet somewhat less formally with the Fellows. To tell the truth, during the '80s, I was so busy working on the Dictionary of Byzantium that I was not able to attend most of these sessions. I just felt I had – my time was so limited here that I couldn't take the time off to do what would have been a great pleasure for me. But it wasn't part of my job, so I actually did not attend any of his seminars in the '80s. I did attend in the '90s when he presented essentially his history of Byzantine literature as a series of, really, lectures over the course of a year. But in the '80s I just would hear about them from colleagues. I know he did, for example, a Psellos reading course, and he would pick texts and they would read with a group, but unfortunately I can't tell you very much about it since I didn't personally participate in that.
JNSL: In what year did you become a Senior Fellow?
AMT: I was appointed a Senior Fellow the year I became Associate for Academic Affairs, which was perhaps a little bit strange because I was a staff member and I was quite junior, but the director Giles Constable was for some reason very anxious that I be on the Board of Senior Fellows, and so he did appoint me and I stayed on for five years.
JNSL: And were the duties at that time similar to what they are today, I mean in terms of selecting people? What were your responsibilities?
AMT: Yes, it was primarily the selection of the Fellows and very much advising on academic policy and various types of problems which emerged. In those days, when Dumbarton Oaks was very involved – I'm talking now about the late '70s and very early '80s – Dumbarton Oaks was still involved, to a certain extent, in field work. It had actually – it wasn't as much still actively engaged in field work but with the aftermath of these projects and ways of publishing them or dealing with the materials, and there were a lot of problems with various projects. Kalenderhane Djami, for example – there were grave difficulties in its publication – dissension and disagreement between the two chief editors, and great delays, and so the Senior Fellows spent a great deal of time trying to remedy that situation. There were also many difficulties with the San Marco project, which was more a project to photograph mosaics and publish them. That's what I have, you know, very distinct memories of, spending a great deal of time on that kind of issue.
JNSL: And were there many women involved in the field when you first began? Or how has that changed through the year? You mentioned Angela Hero was also a student of Ševčenko.
AMT: For the M.A., she was a Meyendorff student, she went to Columbia for her M.A. and to Fordham for her Ph.D., but I first met her when we were in the same seminar at Columbia with Ševčenko. There were almost no senior women in the field when I was a graduate student and in my early years as a post doc researcher. Certainly Serarpie Der Nersessian, who had been the great exception, had retired by the time I came to Dumbarton Oaks, so I don't think I ever actually met her. She was somewhat of a legend, but I never got to know her personally. She moved to Paris so she didn't come back to Dumbarton Oaks after she retired. At the symposia, there were, at first, no women speakers, as is very readily apparent if you look at the photographs of the symposia of the '60s and '70s. And I know that we always were very conscious when a single woman would be invited to speak, and that was another way in which the 1972 symposium was so earthshaking, because when the young people were invited to speak, many women were included in that, so that was another sort of consciousness raising event. Now there were many junior women and we were very supportive of each other and I think most of us have done fairly well in the field, but we did not have many role models to follow. At Harvard as an undergraduate, I only had one female professor in four years and that was in astronomy. At Columbia, I had no female professors. I had one female instructor in Turkish. At Dumbarton Oaks, there were no female members of the faculty, so it was a very, very different situation.
JNSL: Did your work in the '70s and '80s – did you ever have opportunities to travel to Greece and Turkey through your connections with Dumbarton Oaks?
AMT: No, I had absolutely no opportunity to travel, except any just personal trips I arranged on my own. I, in fact, didn't go to Greece I think for a period of, well, there were long gaps in my visits to Greece, unfortunately, and to Turkey.
JNSL: But Dumbarton Oaks always had a very international –
AMT: I certainly met people from all these countries, definitely, yes.
JNSL: And let's move on to the beginnings of the Hagiography Database project, if you could remember. Was that an idea of Kazhdan's originally?
AMT: It was, yes. Maybe I should backtrack to talk a little bit about my own emerging interest in hagiography, because this is a topic which I knew really almost nothing about as a graduate student. When I worked on my dissertation I did use two saints' lives of the patriarch Athanasios as a major source, but I didn't think of them as saints' lives really, I thought of them more as historical sources, and I'd never read any other saints' lives, believe it or not. So, I was not aware of how they were typical or atypical of the genre or anything like that. I had nothing to compare them with, and really a sort of a series of coincidences, I think, led me into the study of hagiography. The first and absolutely key event was while I was here at Dumbarton Oaks working on the letters of Athanasios. Ševčenko mentioned to me that in the microfilm collection was a manuscript from the Halki Library in Istanbul which included not the letters of Athanasios but it was devoted to the cult of the patriarch Athanasios, and he was aware that there was an unpublished text of the posthumous miracles of Athanasios, and he suggested that I look at this to help me with the biography of the saint which I would need to write for the dissertation. So I did find it and, you know, read enough to realize that it very important and interesting text. But I had little time to do anything with it because I had to focus on the letters for my dissertation. But after I finished the dissertation, I decided that I really wanted to work on this unpublished manuscript, again, not that, at that point, I was particularly interested in saints' cults or thinking of it as hagiography, but because it was connected with Athanasios, and I was really interested in the afterlife of this historical figure whom I'd worked on so much. But as I worked on the text, which included the account of the translation of his relics and thirty-nine of his posthumous miracles, I became absolutely fascinated by the text itself, and this was the beginning of my very strong interest in healing shrines and the development of saints' cults. But I still, I would say, was not reading more broadly in hagiography at that point. Then when Kazhdan came to Dumbarton Oaks I discovered that he had a very strong interest in hagiography and he had been extremely frustrated in the Soviet Union because this was a verboten topic, and he was unable to pursue research on it and he was only able to publish one article on the life of the patriarch Euthymius of Constantinople and he was able to get away with it because that particular text closely resembles a historical chronicle. And he called it the "Chronicle of Psamathia" instead of the "Life of the Patriarch Euthymius," and titled his article something like "Two Tenth Century Chronicles." And he got away with it because there was this woman who had to read everything he wrote and give the imprimatur before it could be published. But that was the only thing he could do, so when he came to the United States he felt this extraordinary sense of liberation that he could now read whatever he wanted and write on whatever he wanted and he set himself a regiment of reading the life of every saint before the tenth century and taking copious notes on these vitae on these little tiny cards about this big. And he was primarily interested in the information these texts revealed on realia and every day life, although he did read the texts extremely carefully and he noted down all kinds of information. And he was interested in the date of composition, and he was interested in the authors, and he had all kinds of interests. But his primary focus was on the information on everyday life, and he put together a work which is unpublished but available in the Dumbarton Oaks library which he called a bio-bibliography in which he assembled an account, an entry for each vita in which he wrote a brief – a paragraph on the saint, the author of the work, the date of composition, and then a complete bibliography. And it's an extraordinarily piece of work. Someone someday should revise it, update it, and publish it, or do it on the website or something, because it's still a very valuable piece of research. So, that's one thing he did, but while he was doing this and writing many articles on the lives he read, he began to think about ways in which he could make what he called his little cards more widely available to Byzantinists. And he himself was not very comfortable with computers. He started using a computer as a word processor around maybe 1990, I would say, but he used it only as a word processor. And so he had to rely completely on others to understand how a relational database could be developed and disseminated.
JNSL: And I have one last followup question. Who else was involved in, who else worked on that project?
AMT: The two primary staff members were Alexander Alexakis and Lee Sherry. Lee worked for it for I believe five years, Alexander maybe for three years. And then we had three other sort of shorter term employees, Stephanos Efthymiadis, and Stamatina McGrath, and Beate Zielke, so there were six altogether who worked on it, and the project lasted, I believe, from 1991 to 1997.
JNSL: And so that was during Angeliki Laiou's time as Director?
AMT: Yes, that's right, and also while Henry Maguire was the new Director of Byzantine Studies.
JNSL: When was that position restored?
AMT: In 1991, yes.
JNSL: That must have been an exciting time.
AMT: It was indeed. What I am told had happened is that Robert Thomson, when he stepped down as Director of Dumbarton Oaks after only one five year term, and I am told that he strongly recommended that the position of Director of Byzantine Studies be reinstated, but then they hired Angeliki Laiou as the new Director. And since she was the most specifically byzantinist director that Dumbarton Oaks ever had, I think that perhaps some people thought well maybe it's not necessary since she's the director. But she herself came to realize fairly soon that she felt that the position should be reinstated, and so she hired – she came in 1989, and Henry Maguire started in 1991, and was here for one five year term. He was on leave from the University of Illinois and that's all, that's the maximum leave he could get.
JNSL: And you became Director of Byzantine Studies in 1997.
AMT: Correct.
JNSL: Can you maybe speak a little bit about that era?
AMT: Well, first of all, there was a transitional year that Henry left Dumbarton Oaks in 1996 and for again reasons that I do not understand, although it was well known that he would be leaving that year, no search was mounted for his replacement. And so Angeliki became the de facto Director of Byzantine Studies once again in '96-'97. But at that point I was working two thirds time, I think, for Dumbarton Oaks, at that point and she – or six tenths time, I can't remember, something like that – and she asked me to take on all the responsibilities for publications and work full time at Dumbarton Oaks and move to Washington, and so my husband took early retirement from the Cleveland Museum of Art and we moved here in 1996, and so during that transitional year I did do all of the work that the Director of Byzantine Studies does in terms of publications, and Angeliki was involved with the primarily the organization of academic events – she retained those duties for herself. And then in the spring of that transitional year, there was a search and I was hired.
JNSL: Wonderful, and it must have been very, in a way, very relieving for you to finally be here permanently and not having to – commuting must have been very tiring.
AMT: Yes, over my career I did commute for fourteen years, so it was a very, very long time. But I was very fortunate that Dumbarton Oaks always permitted me to stay here in the Fellows Building and so that meant I didn't have to get a separate apartment. And so, it was relatively easy to go back and forth, and although Ohio, for people in Washington – Ohio sounds like it's very far away, but the plane trip is actually only one hour, so it's no further than going to New York and there's no time change. So, that meant it was doable, definitely, but yes, it was very nice not to have to commute any more, and to be here on a full time basis.
JNSL: How were your responsibilities articulated when you took up the position, or what were your main responsibilities at that time? That's changed through the years.
AMT: Well, there was a major change in the organization of Dumbarton Oaks which occurred under Ned Keenan. I became Director of Studies in 1997, and Angeliki left one year later, and then Ned Keenan was director from 1998 to 2007. At the time that I became Director of Studies in 1997, there were the three programs of studies organized much the same way. The Director of Studies had very broad responsibilities, and each of us supervised the library collection in our field and we supervised any types of collections in our field. So, when I began I had the Byzantine librarian reporting to me, and she in turn supervised eight staff people, and then the Byzantine curator, who in turn supervised two staff people, and then the curator of the, what was called the Byzantine visual resources, what's now the Image Collection and Fieldwork Archive, and she in turn supervised about three people, so I had, as did the other directors of studies, very broad supervisory responsibilities. And we were much more involved with the collections and the library at Dumbarton Oaks, and this was the system that had been in place for Byzantine studies since the beginning. But Ned Keenan decided that it was silly, for example, for there to be three separate libraries, each having a cataloger, and that it would make more sense to integrate the libraries and have a single either cataloger or cataloging staff who would do everything, and that acquisitions should be concentrated in one or two individuals, and not have such duplication of effort in the three programs. He felt there would be efficiency of scale and that it might be handled in a more professional manner, so he began with the library and the first thing that happened was that the three libraries were integrated in name. In those days all the library, all the books were still in the Main House and there was no way of physically integrating them, so they remained physically separate. But a head librarian was hired and slowly the process began of reorganizing the library staff, and so that there was a cataloging department and an acquisitions department and then there were specialist librarians in each field who were responsible for working with the Fellows and visitors and for recommending acquisitions of books. And that system was fully instituted by the early 2000s, and so that was one major major change. Then when Susan Boyd retired in 2004, Ned Keenan made a similar decision to integrate all the museum collections and to have a museum director – such a title had never existed before here – and to no longer have the Directors of Studies supervising the collections, and so in 2004, actually we were searching simultaneously for a new museum director and for a new Byzantine curator, and Gudrun Buehl was hired as Byzantine curator and we hired another woman as the museum director, but unfortunately she, in the end, was unable to come and had to withdraw. She was living in Germany and there were complications about her pension, I believe, from the German government, and Gudrun Buehl had made such a positive impression that she was rapidly promoted to be museum director and she effectively has been serving as Byzantine curator ever since. And so, then she took over supervision of, for example, the Pre-Columbian curator and also of the photographer and the head of the docents and the museum shop, and so that was another major shift. And then the – I can't remember the date of this, but also sometime in the early 2000s – the, what used to be called the photo collection and fieldwork archive was transferred to be under the head librarian, and so I no longer had responsibility for that. So, there was a major loss I would say of responsibilities. The Director of Studies definitely has a weaker position than in the earlier days. On the other hand, I do think that most of these decisions were good ones to make, that with the increase in the size of staff at Dumbarton Oaks and with the increasing complications of the digital age and all that, it has made a great deal of sense to do this, this reorganization, and that things are going well with the new system, and as it turns out, I've still had more than enough to do because of, I would say, increasing responsibilities in other areas, primarily publications and academic – organization of academic events. But that I'd say has been a very major change here in the past twelve years.
JNSL: Which parts of your job as Director did you cherish the most, did you enjoy the most?
AMT: Oh –
JNSL: – apart from – I'm sure there were a lot of difficult administrative responsibilities.
AMT: Well, I think I probably enjoy interaction with the Fellows the most, but that actually is a rather small part of the job. I have gotten a lot of pleasure out of the organization of academic events, which have been hard work but I think have had good results and it's been a wonderful way of bringing so many tremendous scholars to Dumbarton Oaks and they've resulted in good publications; so, I've enjoyed having a role in that. I've spent most of my time on publications – that definitely is the lion's share of the position now. I think it may always have been fairly important, although in the early days I think fieldwork, the supervision of fieldwork was an extremely important component and that stopped completely in the 1970s, and also I think when Kitzinger was Director of Studies, for example, I'm sure he was more involved in the museum because of his interest in art, but the publications are just a constant – constantly demanding because of the need to produce an annual journal and then the fact that every year we have events such as colloquia and symposia that, in turn, lead to new publications. So, you're just sort of finishing up publishing one symposium and then another symposium takes place and you have to immediately turn around and start soliciting papers for that and going through the review process, revision, editing process all over again. And it also has been true that we have tackled some unusually large editorial projects in the '90s and early 2000s. Henry Maguire realized that one of the problems about not having a director of studies for so long was that there was total neglect of the publication of Dumbarton Oaks field work, so that the projects in Cyprus, for example, which had mostly taken place in the '60s and very early '70s, were never published. And Henry started to try to pressure the responsible parties to prepare publications of the fieldwork or of the monuments on which they worked. And so, he launched that project and he should take almost full responsibility for Lagoudhera which was done by the Winfields, David and June Winfield, and he made a good start on the publication of the Episcopal Basilica at Kourion, which was the project of Megaw. But that project turned out to be particularly difficult because of Megaw's extremely advanced age, and he was unable to serve properly as an editor-in-chief of the volume. And so, the materials were received in very unsatisfactory condition and it took literally many, many years to pull that publication together, and it was only published about two years ago. I mean, that took maybe twelve years to publish, and then Asinou has also been a very, very difficult project because two successive scholars renounced its publication, one after fifteen years and one after sixteen years, so thirty-one years later we finally started with a new team to publish it. And that is finally out in copy editing, but I have spent a huge amount of time on Asinou and Kourion, for example, just trying to pull together all the contributors and to get the manuscripts and the photos here. Then we had other huge projects like the Typikon Translation Project, which, although the translations were pretty much finished by 1990, there were great delays in doing the final editing, pulling the work together. And those five volumes were not published until 2000, and there were five volumes, so that was another very large project. And then Angeliki Laiou's Economic History of Byzantium in three volumes was published in 2002, and these were all multi-contributor books, which just compounds the difficulties when you're dealing with many, many, many authors. So, I think that's one reason why the publications have been so totally absorbing and time consuming, because they have been very major publications and have had various degrees of complexity. We've also published – we've finished publishing the coin catalogs, for example. That was a project which went on for – it took almost fifty years to publish those, and the final two volumes, each in two parts, were published in 1999. So, I do feel that we made major, major strides forward in completing a lot of projects which had been underway for, in some cases, decades, and I'm very very happy that they are available now. I also was involved in the project to, for the first time, make our publications or at least some of them available in digital form on the web. And this was an idea broached, under Ned Keenan, by Glenn Ruby, who was director of publications at the time, and his idea was to make these works available at no cost to users, which was a quite revolutionary idea in 1998, 1999. And so, I was involved in the discussions of which books we would make available and getting author permissions and sort of dealing with the ramifications of that project. We didn't put everything online that we publish but a very substantial proportion of the books we published between '99 and 2005 were put online, and the DOPs that were published for about five years in that time period. But then with Glenn's death in 2005 that came to an end, and I hope it may be revived at a later time.
JNSL: At what point did the summer programs in Byzantine Greek begin, was that also during your time here?
AMT: Yeah, they started in 2000, and I had – this is something I had wanted to do since I became Director of Byzantine Studies. I found recently the letter I wrote to Angeliki Laiou in the first month I was Director of Byzantine Studies. She'd asked me to outline my goals, and I wrote down there that I felt keenly that there were very few opportunities, especially for American graduate students, to receive training in auxiliary disciplines except at a handful, well, less than a handful of universities, and that Dumbarton Oaks could provide a real service by offering a training in medieval Greek and paleography and sigillography, numismatics, epigraphy, et al. And she stepped down the next year, but I brought up the idea with Ned Keenan and the Senior Fellows and received strong support to start the summer school in medieval Greek. And so, we began that in 2000, and it ran for two summers in a row and then we decided to also institute one in coins and seals, and so that one was held in 2002, and then we began to alternate the programs. Then what happened, the coins and seals program was held in 2004 and then we began the major construction project at Dumbarton Oaks, and so for four years we had to not hold the summer schools, because either the Main House was inaccessible or the Guest House – the Fellows Building – Guest House was unavailable, so that was very frustrating, because we'd just gotten the project rolling and then we had to stop for four years. But I was approached by Maria Georgopoulou who is the director of the Gennadius Library at the American School in Athens, and she had heard about the summer school and was anxious to launch something similar in Athens. And so, when she heard, first of all, that we couldn't do it here because we were closed down, she asked if we would have any objection if they sort of imitated us and did something similar, and we said no of course not. And then I met with her and we agreed essentially to alternate years, so the year in which we had the coins and seals summer school here they do the medieval Greek program in Athens, and so every summer there is one available. I mean, there is also a program in Belfast, but it's – I think ours is at a higher level. The one in Belfast starts, in some cases, with beginners, and our program also lasts a full four weeks, whereas the one in Belfast is for two weeks, each program. So, we were able to resume that program of having the summer schools in 2008 and I trust they will continue in the future. We've had wonderful faculty for them. The first two years I co-taught with Alexander Alexakis and George Dennis and then George Dennis had health problems and moved. And Alexander Alexakis moved back to Greece, and so I've most recently began partnering with Stratis Papaioannou, and we'll be doing it again next June in 2010. And then Alexander and Stratis are the two teachers in Athens which ensures that there is a great deal of similarity between the two programs because the faculty is the same. There are some differences between the schools, in Greece that they can take them on wonderful field trips which – we can't unfortunately go to Byzantine churches here in Washington. But we have been making a real effort to expose the students to the resources at Dumbarton Oaks, and they get to visit the museum and to look at manuscripts in our collection and look at the facsimiles in the Rare Books Room, and I think they have a very, very full experience here.
JNSL: That's wonderful. And in starting to close this interview – some broader questions. Do you have one particularly funny anecdote that stands out in your memory of all of these years that you think should be part of our institutional memory as well?
AMT: Well, there is one story I tell, it's just about myself, but it is a – it was a very amusing event. It was in the early era of the compact stacks. Giles Constable introduced compact stacks to Dumbarton Oaks. It must have been around 1978, when I was working here, and I have to – they were, at that time, in the room which is now D.O.'s archives room. And I have to tell you that in those early days of compact stacks people were extremely nervous about the fact that they closed automatically and people were really scared of getting caught in them. We just weren't used to them, and there were lots and lots of jokes about people getting caught in them and tales of murder mysteries and things like that. And these particular compact stacks were extremely long, the ranges were very long, which made them, especially in those early days, very vulnerable to breakdown. So, there were problems with the compact stacks which, I think, made us even more nervous about them. So, one day I went down to get a book out of the stacks and I had to move a range of them to get my book, and after I'd gotten my book and I was walking out, I heard a voice say, "When you have finished getting your book, could you please put the stacks back the way they were so I can get out?" And this was a perfectly calm voice but I absolutely panicked because I was sure I had trapped someone in the compact stacks, and the person didn't sound injured but I was really, first of all, startled at this voice because I hadn't seen – I had checked, and there wasn't anyone in the aisle, so I couldn't understand, so I said, "Where are you?" And he said, "I'm in the wall." I said, "You're in the wall?" He said, "Yes," he says, "I'm a workman. I'm working on some plumbing in the wall." And it turned out that he had opened the stacks so that, to expose the hole in the wall where he could access some pipes, and then he'd gone into the wall to fix his project – to do his project, and I had locked him in by moving the compact stacks, and so he obviously was concerned that I move them so he could get out again. Well, I can tell you, I was extremely startled and very relieved that I found out that he was in the wall and not squished between two stacks, but I can assure you, it was one of those incidents I will never, never forget.
JNSL: In which of the symposia of the many that you have attended – which one stands out for any particular reason?
AMT: That is very hard. I guess one that does stand out is the 1998 symposium on Constantinople which was organized by Henry Maguire and Robert Outsterhout, and that stands out for a number of reasons. First of all, because it was certainly the most popular symposium we ever had. In those days we could accommodate 200 people in the Music Room, as opposed to 120 now, but this symposium, because it was on Constantinople, was so popular that we were incredibly oversubscribed, over 250 people wanted to sign up for it. And it was a very, very difficult experience to deal with the unhappy people who wanted to come. So, I remember that one because of my poor assistant who had to keep fending people off on the phone and telling them they couldn't come and the difficulties of that. But for a happier reason, I mean, it was happy that so many people came in the end, but I also remember it because we did organize a wonderful exhibit in connection with the symposium, which was based heavily on material from the Fieldwork Archive, and Natalia Teteriatnikov organized it. And it was just spectacular and it was the first time that the great reproductions of the Hagia Sofia mosaics were mounted and made available to be on display, so there was enormous excitement. We were only able to show three of them, but still they made an amazing impact, and then Natalia had extraordinary photographs of the, of Whittemore's work on the restoration in Hagia Sofia. There were fieldwork notebooks on display. It was a truly, truly memorable exhibit which everyone who came enjoyed enormously, and it also was the beginning of making available those reproductions from both Hagia Sofia and Kariye Djami, which had been rolled up for decades and forgotten. And it was Henry Maguire who first really rediscovered them and began to set the wheels in motion for their restoration and mounting which has happened gradually over the past decade. So, that really, for me, was a quite memorable symposium, yes. In terms of colloquia, I think one of the most memorable was the one in 1999 which I organized with Cécile Morrisson because that marked the retirement of Philip Grierson after serving as Adviser for Numismatics for forty-five years. And I had become very close to Philip Grierson because he always stayed in the Fellows Building when he was at Dumbarton Oaks, so we had many breakfasts and dinners together. And it was an extraordinary privilege to get to know him and it was a bittersweet event, I mean, it marked the completion of the cataloging of the coins and the final publication, so we were very happy about that. It was a celebration of Philip's amazing contributions to Dumbarton Oaks over forty-five years, but it was also very sad as it marked the end of an era, that he would no longer be coming to Dumbarton Oaks on a regular basis. But it was a truly marvelous colloquium full of emotion, really.
JNSL: I am just so grateful for your time today, thank you very much. Are there any other final thoughts that you would like to share before we end? There so much more we could speak about.
AMT: Well, maybe I should just maybe say a few words about the changes I've seen over the decades –
JNSL: Oh yes, I'd meant to address that.
AMT: – since I am one of the relatively few people who has had some connection with Dumbarton Oaks for over forty years, and I have see enormous changes in the place. When I first was here as a Junior Fellow it was a very, very small institution – very small staff. There was one person in the finance office, as opposed to six now, there were only Byzantinists here, it only operated in the academic year because there was no central air conditioning, and so the place was pretty much closed down during the summer and only had a skeleton staff during the summer. There were air conditioners in a few offices, so people could work, a few staff people could stay on during the summer, but there were no Fellows here. It was impossible to work in the library as a reader, and so it was a very small, very hierarchical institution, extremely formal. Giles Constable made an enormous difference in the history of Dumbarton Oaks in doing two things. First of all, in installing air conditioning which had incredible implications for the institution because it meant we could operate year round and so, as of 1980, we were able to offer summer fellowships, to put summer fellows in the Fellows Building, for example, to have people work in the library all summer long, and it meant he was able to just expand all the programs substantially. He also greatly democratized, if that's the right word, Dumbarton Oaks by making great efforts to have all three programs on a more even basis. The Byzantine Studies program has always been the biggest, has always had the largest budget, has always had the most Fellows, it's always had the biggest library, it's always been the biggest, but Giles did a great deal to make sure that the other two programs were much more comparable in their facilities and in their programming. And he also made changes such as altering the system at lunch so that it was no longer sit-down all at the same time, but it was a buffet that you could come at any point which meant that more people could use the dining room – because we had lunch in the dining room in this building – that more people could eat lunch. And therefore he was able to – essentially to open up lunch to a larger number of people, although it was still very crowded and basically it remained used by Fellows and what I would call sort of professional staff, such as museum curators, librarians, publications manager. It's not the way it is now, that absolutely everybody can come to lunch, but still, it was a very important change that Giles made. Then I saw the time in which there was no Director of Byzantine Studies, which, as I say, I think was a mistake. I've been very pleased to see the reinstatement of that position in the early '90s and really the, I would say, the steady growth in activities since that time. Angeliki Laiou was – one of her important changes was to encourage what she called "innovative activities," because up to 1991, the main academic events we had at Dumbarton Oaks were the annual symposium, and we did have public lectures, and we did have these seminars by in-house staff, but we never had colloquia, roundtables, the type of event which we now sort of take for granted. So, she provided more money in the budget to open up the programs of academic events to be more flexible, to accommodate a range of activities which my predecessor Henry Maguire launched – those early programs – and that I've continued since then. And that trend has, I would say, dramatically increased under Jan Ziolkowski, who has encouraged even more activities here and has been extremely anxious to involve more people in activities at Dumbarton Oaks, to bring more people here. So, I would say another major change I've seen is a much greater interest in opening up Dumbarton Oaks in recent years, more interest in making the museum collections more visible and encouraging people to come, for many years I don't think the directors cared if the public came to the museum or not, now I think there's much more emphasis in active public programming and having a series of special exhibits and encouraging great visitation. Jan Ziolkowski has greatly increased the interaction between Dumbarton Oaks and Harvard, which I think is a very important development. Dumbarton Oaks has had surprisingly little contact with Harvard over the years, and I think Jan is doing a great deal to change that pattern, and I think Jan also is being very supportive of having more of the type of lecture that will be of interest to a wider public and bringing more people into Dumbarton Oaks. So, I am very happy about these developments, I have to say, that again, when I looked at some of the goals that I had when I first became Director of Studies, they included exactly some of those initiatives and with the support of recent directors of the institution we've been able to move in that direction and I'm very happy at the direction we're going in now.
JNSL: Well, I am tremendously grateful for this opportunity to speak with you today. Thank you so much.]]>
BG: Well, I was hired in 1987. I started work here August 3, 1987. I had just come back from Ecuador when the position was advertised. I had been with the United States Information Agency for two years as a library fellow. I was called a library fellow, but not a research fellow like the Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks. It was actually a contract position. Maybe later I'll go into more detail about that, but I had the wonderful opportunity to work in our bi-national center libraries – three bi-national center libraries in Ecuador. And of course Ecuador is an Andean country, and I had greatly improved my Spanish. The position was a one-year contract, and we were able to renew it for a second year. And after that, I tried to renew it again, and they said, "No, no. You have to give someone else a chance." So I came back to the Washington area, where I had lived before, and Dumbarton Oaks was advertising the position of Librarian for Pre-Columbian Studies. It required fluency in Spanish and a familiarity with Andean – or the cultures of Latin America. I saw the ad and three other people saw it and either called me about it – this was before the internet. Somebody mailed it to me. It was in the Washington Post, you know – we used to clip, and everybody would read the newspaper, and so people thought it was right for me. Then, I got an interview. That was interesting because Elizabeth Boone was on sabbatical that year. She was at the Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton. She was the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies. The acting director was Janet Berlo. So, I came in for an interview with Janet Berlo, and then they had the short list come back and interview with Elizabeth a few weeks later. They brought Elizabeth down. I still remember a lot about those interviews because this place was just so amazing to me. And Elizabeth was great because she was real down to earth in the interview, so it was this contrast of – I remember I walked into the lobby and I didn't know – and this is funny in retrospect – because I didn't know if I was allowed to step on the mosaic on the floor. And you know, it turns out we probably shouldn't have been allowed to step on the mosaic, but I stood at the entrance and asked the guard, "How do I get in?" And he said, "Just walk across."
JW: So you mention that Dumbarton Oaks was an amazing place when you first got here. What were some of the things that contributed to that initial impression?
BG: The collections, because – well, the collections and then the people that I met. The library at that time did not – the Pre-Columbian Studies library was managed by the assistant curator of the collection. So, my first interview, I interviewed with Janet Berlo and I also interviewed with Gordon McEwan, who was the assistant curator of the collection. He is an archeologist. So, he took me through the museum and showed me the Pre-Columbian Collection and explained about the Blisses. I did not know anything about the Blisses. So, what was amazing – the house itself, the gardens. And to tell you the truth, even the experiences – the fieldwork of the people that I met, and they talked to me about their work. And also it was great – I had just come back from Quito and Gordon had done extensive work in the highlands of Peru, so meeting people here who knew so much about the Andes – it was funny too because at one time I felt comfortable with the people who knew all about the Andes and who spoke Spanish, but also it was all very exotic. Of course, the lifestyle of the Blisses was not something I had experienced before, and there was still evidence of the lifestyle of the Blisses. I remember when I met Irene Vaslef. I thought, "Oh, wow!" [To James Carder] I don't know, did you ever meet Irene Vaslef, James?
JNC: I did.
BG: She was a character. She was the Director of the Byzantine Library. She was very welcoming. On the one hand, she was talking about OCLC and Library of Congress classification, but she seemed very exotic to me too – this older woman from Central Europe. So, that was it. It was a mix of feeling somewhat intimidated, and on the other hand very comfortable.
JW: So we're going to shift gears a little bit and talk more about your professional role here at Dumbarton Oaks. Would you tell us what you know about the relationship between Dumbarton Oaks and the Harvard University Libraries and how this relationship has changed since you've been here at Dumbarton Oaks?
BG: It's changed greatly. When I first came, we operated very independently. We didn't even use HOLLIS. We didn't even use the system that was HOLLIS – it was called HOLLIS, but it was a different operating system. It was NOTIS, the NOTIS software. We didn't even use that. When I came here, we didn't even have an integrated library system. The other thing is – I don't know if anyone else has said this in their interviews – but the three library collections operated independently. The library for Pre-Columbian Studies was physically separate and it was managed separately from the other two library collections. I reported – my position reported to the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies. That's why Elizabeth Boone and Janet Berlo were interviewing me. There was not a central library administration. Each library staff – well for the most part – reported to the director of studies. The Byzantine library was a department, it was a part of Byzantine Studies, but Irene Vaslef was a department head, whereas I wasn't, and my counterpart for Landscape Architecture was not. To tell you the truth, each of the three programs – in each of the three programs, the library collection and the library staff was handled a little differently in the organizational structure chart. So I worked – I have to go back and explain that when I was hired, the position for Librarian of Pre-Columbian Studies had just been created. Before me, the assistant curator was managing the library. I should probably talk a little about – this isn't answering your question, but I'll get to that later. I should probably talk a little bit about the library of Pre-Columbian Studies. It started out as Mr. Bliss's personal library at about a little over two thousand books. And he donated it to Dumbarton Oaks. They had it organized by culture in what was then our rare book room, which – I don't even know what is in that room now. But, in the Main House it's a wood paneled room. It was open and it was next to what is now Jonathan Shea's office and across from the men's room. And that was our library. But that was before my time. All of the books fit in that one room, and they were not catalogued and they did not have Library of Congress classification or any other classification. They were organized by subject and within each subject, the subject being culture, and within each culture by author's last name. And that worked fine for a couple years. They actually had Fellows – this was in the early 1980s – and even the Fellows were in that room. And then in 1981, Dumbarton Oaks received the bequest of Thelma Sullivan, who was an Aztec specialist. She was American, but she lived and worked in Mexico. She donated her books, her notes, her drafts of her publications – everything – to Dumbarton Oaks. At that time, the books were too many to fit in that room and to be organized – it was time to catalogue them properly and get them into something. But again, there wasn't a librarian yet. So Elizabeth Boone wrote and got a NEH grant, and they hired a cataloger with that grant, and that was Michael Hamerly, and Michael Hamerly had a PhD in Latin American history. He came and worked – it was a grant for a two-year project. He worked for about eighteen months, and then he got a job on the West Coast. And I met him recently, about a year ago. It was nice to meet him at my Latin American Studies librarians' conference. He did a great job. He catalogued the library, he used contract cataloguers for any – well, I think actually he didn't even use – he found copy records. What librarians do is they look into a shared database, and if there's copy that matches – if someone else has catalogued the book already, they can find that record and bring it in. He found – but we didn't have a system – so he'd find a record, and at that time we had cards. He'd get the card, print it out, attach our holding to that record. And then if he didn't find copy cataloguing, he'd do original cataloguing, which is a ton of work. This man did a really good job organizing the library. But then he left. I think he felt a little frustrated that he was working with scholars, but he didn't have time to do his own scholarship. So after that – that was when the assistant curator had to manage the cataloguing. They were still buying books – I should say, they had started to buy books, because until that time, it was the Bliss's library and Thelma Sullivan's library. But they had started to buy books, and so Gordon McEwan was charged with overseeing copy cataloguing. So, they'd hire people from Telesec temporaries who had been trained as cataloguers, but Gordon wasn't trained as a cataloguer. He was very concerned about this. He told me when I was hired, "I did the best I could, but I didn't have the training, so I don't know." And it showed, because at the beginning there were a lot of records that had been brought in – I keep saying brought in, but we had claimed as our own. They were sitting in this great database called WorldCAT OCLC with our holdings attached, but they weren't for the right manifestation of the work. We had bought – in the old days, we used to by every university microfilm dissertation that fit our profile. Now we don't do that anymore because they're available online. But we used to buy every hard copy. But instead of the copy cataloguing the hard copy being claimed, it was for the microfilm or microfiche, so it took us years to go find all of those and fix those. And also, they'd accept whatever call number was on the record, and sometimes it wasn't what would work best for our users. But anyway, when I started, it was a three-year campaign of Elizabeth Boone to get a position funded for Librarian of Pre-Columbian Studies. She had to say, "Look, we're going to be growing. We're going to keep buying books, our field is growing, there's a lot being published. We need to professionalize this and get a librarian." And so after three years, the position was funded and I was hired. So, meantime, like I said, we were printing cards and – that was happening in Pre-Columbian Studies. Byzantine Studies had a whole library staff. They had Irene Vaslef as Director. They had two cataloguers at least, they had an acquisitions department. Landscape Architecture had a – I don't know when their position got funded. But they had a librarian. I think they called her the librarian of the reference collection. And then they had the curator of rare books. And shortly after I was hired – when I was hired, it was someone named Laura. I forget her last name.
JNC: Byers.
BG: Byers. And she retired, and she had been there for a long time. It was Laura working with Betty MacDougall, who was the director of the program. And then it might have been at that point that they split it and created the position when they hired Linda Lott as rare books librarian and curator of rare books, and then the reference position, and it was Annie Thacher. So, the three programs all had the library organization structure in the way that worked best for their program. But it was a lot of work. It was actually impossible to keep up, because I was supposed to be finding – figuring out which books to buy, and in that day it was all paper. So, catalogues would be sent to me, booklists, phone calls would come through, faxes. And I was supposed to be selecting the books, creating new orders – which was mostly typing in, because we didn't have a system to upload – so, creating the orders, sending the orders, receiving the books, paying the invoices, and then cataloguing the books. I had part time help to create the labels and stamp the books, and that was it. And I had help to shelve. What would happen, the cataloguing would wait. I would do the easiest cataloguing, and everything else was piling up. And this was happening in all three programs. So, it was good when the decision was made to get an integrated library system. That was under Angeliki. She selected a committee from the library staff here, and we researched it. That was when we started working closely with Harvard. We had Dale Flecker and his staff. They were our advisors. We decided – and he carefully cautioned us about going with Harvard. The choice was – the first choice was whether we were going to go onto Harvard's HOLLIS system. And this was called a CHUI rather than a GUI. Remember "chewies" and "gooeys"? It was a character based interface, rather than a graphical user interface. It was a DOS-based system by this company called NOTIS. And he said, "We're undergoing a several-year study to figure out what we're moving to. If you come on now, you're going to have to migrate with us." And also, they had over years – they had bought an off-the-shelf system, but then they modified it so much so that it was not recognizable anymore. They had a whole department called OIS – Office of Information Systems – to maintain it. So their system was now called their own. It was Harvard's system. And he said, "This has all these issues." So, he said, "Honestly too, you're going to be everyone's last thought down here. We're not used to thinking about you. Given that, you're welcome to go onto HOLLIS." But we decided not to. We selected SIRSI – is the company – the Unicorn system. And it's an integrated library system. So what we did, we loaded our records from OCLC, that WorldCAT OCLC. We had been attaching our symbol to them all those years, so we were able to load them into a system, and SIRSI called their software Unicorn. And we had Unicorn, and it was at that point we started working together – the three departments here, but we still had very little to do with Harvard. They helped us with the data load, and then after that for years, we were on our own. We had a library information – I forget what we called her – but she managed our software. It was Donna Bible. And Ingrid Gibson, who is now interlibrary loan, but she had done a lot for the upkeep of our Unicorn system. That went along fine – well, not really fine. It went along, but it brought us all three together, but it was an odd time because we were still – I was still reporting to the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies, the landscape people were reporting to their director, and people – the directors were coming and going, so we had to work together, but the organizational structure had us working separately and taking separate lines of command. So Ned Keenan came in and said, "Okay, what do we have to do next, and what will work?" And we created taskforces. So the first thing was created a taskforce for acquisitions. It was called the ATF – the Acquisitions Task Force. We had jokes about that. That was bringing people from the three programs to figure out how to best use SIRSI, because it was supposed to be integrated and we were using it separately. So, we integrated that, then we integrated cataloguing. We still did not have a library as an organizational structure. We did not have a library director. Then we needed to – Ned Keenan said, "Okay, it's time to bring this all together." He created the position for Library Director, and Sheila Klos was hired. She came in, I think, 1997 or 1998, and a year later, the big decision was made – to go back and retrospectively convert all of the records that were done pre-Library of Congress classification for Landscape Architecture and Byzantine Studies because those two programs had used a system they had started before OCLC, before the world was sharing everything. A librarian at Harvard had created the Brinkler System. So, he created classification systems by subject area. And he created a Brinkler for Byzantine Studies and a Brinkler for Landscape Architecture. So, even after both of those programs went onto OCLC, they continued using their very beloved classification system. The scholars loved them. They were used to them; they worked for their fields. But for the cataloguers, and therefore for the entire library staff, it was an incredible amount of work. They'd have to re-class everything. This is a lot of work. I mean, it's a scientific hierarchy. At one point, they had stopped. I think it was the time when we integrated when we created the taskforce, Ned Keenan said, "No. We're going to have split libraries. We're going to have the old Brinkler stuff and everybody is going to go LC. We wanted that. The librarians were happy. The scholars, especially the older scholars, were appalled. The world was coming to an end. We had the library separated, but this was in the old house still. We had books everywhere. We had books in closets, we had books up to the ceiling, and we had books double stacked. They were used to that. They knew where their books were. Then all of a sudden, we had a separate little collection that was LC. And again, everything physically was separate. So, there was the pre-Columbian library, the landscape – we called it the garden library – and the Byzantine library. So, then we had the split collection. Sheila Klos was hired and she was told, "You decide with the staff what we should do." And we decided we should retrospectively convert it. That was a year after she started. And then in – eight years ago, I guess it was 2005 – we moved over physically and that was when the books were integrated. So, it was huge. You asked me about Harvard, but even more importantly in my career here, it's been the relationship of the library with its programs that has undergone complete evolution. So then, we still had SIRSI Unicorn, and then it was getting to be – oh, then Harvard selected their new system. The graphical user interface, and that was a long time ago now. I don't remember what year. They selected it, they got comfortable with it, they were happy with it. So, the same year that we moved over here, we went onto HOLLIS fully. Now, our records were in there. Our titles were showing in HOLLIS as being held at Dumbarton Oaks, but that was the only thing. We were not using it for creating our orders or for paying or for doing cataloguing work. We were doing all of the cataloguing work in our system and then uploading it to HOLLIS. So, this was going to be a huge change. Well we did it the same year we moved in [laughs] – just about did the tech services staff in.
JW: What were some of the biggest issues you faced during the move from the Main House to the new library building?
BG: There were so many issues. It was a lot of work. Sheila took care of most of the planning work, of working with the book movers, but then we had to monitor the work, and I would say one of the biggest issues was communication – because it was just a lot of physical logistics that had to happen. The book movers were still here. The contractors were finishing up the work on the house. There was this list. I forget what they called it. It was kind of like the checklist at the end; all of the little stuff that didn't get done during the big construction. So, all these contractors were still running around doing stuff. We were supposed to – we had to monitor any contractors. They couldn't be alone in the library. So, one of us had to be there babysitting. The doors were still locked – we couldn't go – it was extremely stressful. I think the stress came from – the construction was delayed. We had a smaller window of time to move than we had anticipated. The fall semester was still going to start on time and we had to be ready for primetime in, I think, six weeks. Ned Keenan was out of town, and the director of Landscape Architecture was out of town – maybe even moving. I think they were in between directors. Again, this – now, this wouldn't mean as much because we operate – the organizational structure is our own command. But then, we were still very much intertwined. So, what were the issues? The issues were keeping track of the books, getting the staff settled in, and all of that had to happen in a very short time. There was a lot of clean up. Even, "where are these books?" and "how are we going to manage this?" and "what kind of buttons are we going to put on this?" And then right after that, they had to start the HOLLIS – using HOLLIS. So they had to learn a new system. We had a shadow database in case any didn't load properly. We had this old database of our stuff and they'd have to go back in and look. So, it was double and triple work to do the same function – for tech services. This wasn't so much for me, but for my colleagues. For me, it was getting used to being physically separate from Pre-Columbian Studies. And even though we were in the same building, we were on different floors. And again, it was – the beginning was extraordinarily rocky in settling in. I think definitely the library works better in that new building and it's well-designed, but the stress was such that it took years for people to get over that.
JW: Were you consulted at all with regards to the design of the new building?
BG: Well, we were initially. Sheila worked very closely with the planning committee for the building. So, Sheila did, yes.
JW: And what factors, if any, make the Dumbarton Oaks's collection different from those in other libraries that are research institutions?
BG: Well, I tell our readers and Fellows when first come to the library – all of the scholars – I tell them, for Pre-Columbian Studies, what's special is we collect comprehensively in a very narrow field. So, even though the Library of Congress and the University of Texas at Austin have probably almost all of the same books as we have, our collection offers the advantage of that's all we have – the art history, anthropology of the cultures from pre-conquest up until the early colonial period and from Mesoamerica, central America, and the Andes – where they might have most of our books but in a wider collection of the entire history and anthropology and art history of Latin America. And ours are open stacks, and I also collect gray literature. One of the long-term projects that I've done here, which is, I think, one of my major sources of pride and a good legacy for Dumbarton Oaks, is to collect dissertations from Latin America in archaeology. Years ago, people would say, "Oh, it would be great if you could get these dissertations out of Peru, so when Jeff Quilter was Director, we started – the thing is, they don't have anything like UMI down in Latin America. In Mexico, they have something similar, because a lot of Mexican archaeologists are funded by the government, so they have to turn in a copy, and in Colombia as well; but in Peru they don't have anything like that. So, one of our Fellows said he'd go back home – one of our Peruvian Fellows – and send me stuff. And so he started photocopying down there – he had grad students do all of this photocopying – and these manuscripts or these photocopies would come loose in these giant packages that look like – for some reason, they were wrapped in burlap and sewn. Everybody hated them when they came, they were like, "Oh no, Bridget got some more dissertations." And because the photocopying was often poorly done – some of them went back to the fifties – so they were photocopies of typescripts with bad margins, and they used paper – it's a size that they use in Latin America and Europe called A4. So, they'd come in and sometimes we could use them and just bind them, but sometimes they weren't bindable, so we'd have to re-photocopy them and make better margins, or try to darken them or lighten them or whatever. And so it was an incredible amount of work, but then – we have the only collection, and we started with the north coast of Peru, and then he helped us with dissertations out of the universities in Lima, and then the southern area of Peru, which, in some cases – we have dissertations that even the libraries and universities no longer have there, or, if they have them, people couldn't get to them. It was during a period of the Shining Path, and places were not easily accessible, so we have a really important collection. And one time at my conference, the collection development librarian at Harvard asked me what tools I was using to collect because we were getting all these things that they weren't, and I thought, "Ah!" [laughs]
JW: To your mind, has this collection of dissertations proved useful to the scholarship coming out of Dumbarton Oaks?
BG: Definitely.
JW: How so?
BG: Well, people come here asking for it. And we kind of – an unexpected consequence was we'd get inter-library loan requests for these, and we don't lend much on inter-library loan. Period. And these – we have the only copy, so we have to be careful, we have to be sure we're going to get this back. I like to make our resources available to the scholars, so when we do lend them, we lend them with a lot of restrictions: this has to be used in the rare book room or special collection, under the supervision of a librarian. So, definitely it's noticed that we have them, and people are – one thing they comment on, and this was – we needed special funding to do this because it was expensive to – they all needed original cataloguing, like I said, they needed a lot of checking, they needed re-photocopying, but especially the original cataloguing. We'd send them out a lot, and we asked for more money, and the Byzant – the Director who came from Byzantine studies would say, "Why do you want these? I mean, most of the times the conclusions are, you know, later [laughing] disproven." We said, you know, "It's not the analysis, it's the raw data." And that's what our archaeologists would say. A lot of time these never get published – this data never gets published, so it's the raw data. And we convinced him, and eventually – again, back to our connection with Harvard: back in the day, there were no pre-Columbianists in Cambridge, but now we have Tom Cummins – there are a couple of chairs in pre-Columbian studies, [like] Gary Urton and Bill Fash. And they'd say, "Oh, definitely, you know; these are worthwhile." So, not only have our connections increased as far as library technology, but subject area also.
JNC: How many dissertations have been collected?
BG: Maybe between 200 and 300. And then, unfortunately, we wanted to do it with Mexico and Costa Rica. Individuals said, "Oh we'll go back and help." But then we ran into issues with author permission. And the Costa Rican project – they said, "Well you'd have to get the permission of each and every author." Now what Colombia did – we had to send their institute of archaeology a letter stating who we are and what we do: our collections do not circulate and we can put any restrictions that they needed to on them. So, we got a lot of great literature from Colombia, and not just dissertations, but the reports that they have to do, like the surveys before they excavate and the site reports afterwards. We were able to get all of those.
JW: So at this point in time, the libraries are integrated, you and your colleagues have secured some unique materials – what do you think the next big step is going to be in making the library as useful and user-friendly for scholars as possible?
BG: Digital initiatives. We're in the middle of that big step. And it's huge. It touches everybody, even people who aren't doing anything with HTML or Plone, Omeka, just because – it's very interesting – it creates a need for more refined description and more refined data on everything. An example is, Jan said, "Let's participate" – and we're happy about this – "Let's participate in Harvard's project to digitize rare books." So he asked each program to select a few rare books every year and we have funding to send them up to Imaging Services, and they have the coolest, snazziest equipment to photograph the books, and they do a really good job. So, we were like, "Okay, we'll send our books up." Well guess what? You don't just pack them up and send them. Most of our book – there's a software that can create meta-data, so you put in the equivalent of a catalogue record and it creates the meta-data for every image. But most of our books don't qualify, because, you know, they're just too special. They don't fit either the size or the quality of the image, so we had to create the meta-data, and thank goodness for Wendy Johnson, who's a cataloguer who had just been trained in meta-data because she's working on this big garden archive project. Well, meta-data is the equivalent of cataloguing each page. Of course, most of it is repeated, and you think, "Okay, well you just put in a page number or image number," but no, because then you have to decide: what do you do when pages aren't numbered? what do you do when there's a section that's not numbered, and then there's a section that is, and then another unnumbered section? how do you refer to them? You can't just say, "Unnumbered 1." So we had – and guess what? in this world, it's not all decided, and what we used to do for cataloguing – and I always notice this between us and the museum – that everything we had to do was already decided, like, they started in the 60s; they had international congresses to decide how to do this. We just had to learn the rules. But in the image world, they haven't ever agreed on all of those rules. So now we were getting into that, and Wendy would call Harvard and say, "Well, you know, what do you want us to do for this?" And they said, "Whatever you want." [laughs] "We recommend that you decide and stick to whatever you decide so that you remember." [laughs] So we had to have all these meetings, and it was so detailed – pew! "Well, what do you want? Do you want the fore-edge, and do you want these hinges, and what are we going to call these?" But it was very interesting, but it was a ton of work. So, they went up, and they just came back. And Sheila went and unpacked them, and now our records are in Hollis. If you go to those books, you can click on the link, and you can see the books and page through them. So, it's a big thing. That was just one thing. And then what – people used to do cataloguing of books. Like I said, Wendy – she's now working with the Garden Archive Project – she and Sheila are in constant consultation with Harvard, because it's a catalogue record for a letter, or some text that is linked to an image. It might be – it's a photograph, or it's a PDF of the letter. And then the transcription and all of this – okay, but how does that affect me? Well, it's expected of me – like I say, I used to – I never did book exhibits before. When we moved into the library, I had to learn to do book exhibits, physical book exhibits, so that was a big learning curve. But I got it down, you know, it got to be routine. And then they said, "Well now we want you to put it online." That was another thing to learn, and the first year I did it with Omeka, because we didn't have Plone up and running yet. So, I did it with Omeka, and the next time I had to do it with Plone; and now, like I said, we're getting more finely tuned, where we're creating the digital facsimile of the whole book, not that that's part of that project yet, but it could be. So, it's always one more level getting to the information. The other thing that has changed greatly in my time is that we care about letting the whole world know what we have. When I started here, we were told, "Mm-mm, we don't have the space, we don't have the people, that's not what we're about. We're here for the specialists. You know, we decide who comes and how many, and they have to know what they're doing. We cannot hold any hands. And when they come here, they come here to use our books." Like, they used to say, "We're not even going to borrow inter-library loan for them, or rarely." Because the idea is that the Fellows come here to use our materials. When they're back home, they can get inter-library loans. But you can't do that anymore. The world is all intertwined, and it was knocking on our door anyway. So, it was like, we have to decide how we're going to manage this, how we're going to control our image, how we're going to control our digital access, and how we're going to control their needs. So, now we – Deb gives them training on accessing Harvard's electronic resources. We pay our part of accessing the electronic resources, and then we offer them to the Fellows. But that's all changed in the time that I've been here.
JW: Did that change occur under Mr. Jan Ziolkowski's directorship?
BG: Mainly.
JW: Could you characterize his directorship, especially as it pertains to the library system?
BG: Oh, definitely. Whereas Ned Keenan – what Ned Keenan did was get us organizationally integrated, which was no small feat, and then had the library built and moved – that, again, no small feat. But then Jan has – I would say what he has done is brought us closer to Harvard, and he wants Harvard to know how much we offer them. He wants us to always make ourselves known as a good resource to Harvard. And the digital world – I remember – well, he has shown – they all show a great interest in the library, but partly it's – we've come so far in the last fifteen years. The library was always a good resource, but, to tell you the truth, the attention – it was usually thought of as, "Well, it's taking care of itself, and they're fine." But then they realized that we needed more support and space and all of that. So I think it just gets a lot more attention. So ICFA – the Image Collection and Fieldwork Archives – and the library are separate, but we have to know of each other's work, and it had gotten to the point, you know, where it couldn't be like – kind of like George Bush when he said "a thousand points of light," all of these volunteer organizations that will take care of things. Well, we can't just depend on ourselves reaching out collegially. We needed more structure, so he holds monthly meetings, where he brings us all together, people can report on what they're doing, and he and Yota are there to hear what we need, and, you know, do we want Harvard to come down, like somebody from the copyright office. Because the other problem that comes up for everything that's online is what we can put online versus – okay, for example, with my exhibits, I can put books in physical exhibits, where we don't have copyright concerns, but that same book I cannot put online unless – well, we thought we couldn't, so we would not put any of our facsimiles online. Well, it turns out that we can with certain restrictions, but we learned about that through this librarian lawyer who came down from Harvard – [laughs] – ,who said, "Everyone's a lot more – they self-restrict a lot more than they have to." So, it's his job to train people in what they can do. So, that's a big deal. The reason I mention this now is – at one of these, I think the second meeting we had, Jan had developed a mission statement for Dumbarton Oaks, including the library, and he said he wanted the library to be at the forefront of digital initiatives. And I remember thinking, "Too late!" [laughs] But then all of a sudden – we were – especially ICFA – I mean, that's separate from the library, but we hear about it. They're doing so much with digital initiatives. And I see the point now, that we're the right – we're a good size, we're big enough, and we have really unique resources, so it makes sense that we put all of this effort into making them available digitally. And now we have enough people, and people with the right training and education, to make it happen. So that's one of his big contributions.
JW: So we're reaching the end of the interview. Maybe we can shift gears one last time to talk about life in general at Dumbarton Oaks: the social atmosphere…
BG: Well, one of the things I've enjoyed is having the whole community of Fellows. For the most part, it's wonderful to have them here, you know. They come; they're so excited to have this opportunity. I get to work very closely with experts in their field, and then they leave, but most of them come back, whether it's to speak at a conference or come as a reader, or sometimes I just communicate through email with them – so, to just know all of these people. I don't know – I think that, even though academics are a quirky crowd, as a whole they're pretty happy with their lives. I mean, they chose it obviously, out of passion; they never thought they were going to make a lot of money. When I talk to other people who work – either librarians who work with other categories of patrons or patrons from other walks of life, I think I'm pretty happy with my patrons. And my colleagues – I think we have great people here, who really care about their work. And, again, I forget it, and I take it for granted, and then I go somewhere else – when I go to my conference, they're also a good group of librarians; but I hear about the pressures they're under. So, it's good. This isn't social so much as institutional, but a good thing is, we can still – Dumbarton Oaks can still pay attention to individual people and individual books, and other places can't do that anymore. I mean, they have to buy wholesale books that were selected by somebody else, and you have to buy the cataloguing that comes with them, and you can't do anything. And we still have – we're still allowed, we're still funded to catalogue; do original cataloguing and talk to individual researchers. So, that's very nice, and through that we get to know the people, and then we get to keep really qualified staff.
JW: Do any memories, positive or negative, stick out about your time here at Dumbarton Oaks?
BG: Oh lots. [laughs] I'd have to pick…so many… I don't know. I remember – I don't know which ones to tell. But when Elizabeth Boone interviewed me, I remember she said, "We get some people who have a prima donna complex. So, tell me, how would you deal with that?" And I thought, boy that was a really good question. But it's not too much of a problem in Pre-Columbian Studies.
JW: Do you remember your answer to the question?
BG: Yeah, and actually I do remember, and it's kind of what I do. I said, "I pretend I don't notice." You know, I just treat everybody like – I address the issue at hand. And it does work, like if people are trying to push their weight around, or want special services – just pretend like it's gone over my head [laughs].
JW: Is there anything that James and I have neglected to mention that you would like to discuss with us?
BG: I don't think so. I hope I said enough about the Harvard – the evolution of our relationship with Harvard.
JWC: You did mention that Harvard gets a lot from Dumbarton Oaks. What do you think that you gain from Harvard?
BG: Well, in part it's name recognition. If we have to deal with an outsider, and we say, "Oh, we're part of Harvard," they listen. [laughs] And also now a lot of support – not so much me in collection development – but tech services. And I'm so out of the loop now that I don't know the details, but they deal with their Aleph people, so the systems people – Aleph is the software behind Hollis. They get systems support, they have to deal with the accounting office up there because – see, when I did acquisitions, we just managed all of our own accounting here. And then the finance office here reconciled with Harvard, but now the reconciliation has to start within, and our Director of Acquisitions, our Manager of Acquisitions has to reconcile all of the accounts in the Harvard system. So, it's more work, but also a lot of support. See, that's a double-edged thing, you know, because it's a very complicated system; but I think everybody's happy that we're in Hollis. I mean, all of my colleagues, I think – we had gotten too big, and the world is too sophisticated to try to do it on our own anymore.
JW: You mentioned that you've got a very unique group of patrons at Dumbarton Oaks and you have very unique collections – how has working here changed your conception of what a librarian is and does, if at all?
BG: I don't know if it's changed it. I think it's allowed me to be the librarian I had envisioned in the library that I had envisioned. And that's what's not true very many places anymore. I mean, the big university libraries, Ivy League, and the big public flagships, they can't do it anymore. So, I think it's confirmed for me.
JW: Well, unless we have any more questions…
JNC: There are a number of people whom we unfortunately cannot interview, and I was wondering if you had any interactions with Seka Allen, for example, and could say anything about what she did here.
BG: Oh…I did. I overlapped with her for years, but I don't know if I can remember – because I did – my interaction with her was mainly having lunch with her; and I liked her a lot. She was one of the people in one of the Byzantine studies programs that really reached out to the pre-Columbianists; but as far as what she did with the index, I don't remember. I just remember it was very physical, it was cards and papers and cutting and pasting. But she was a well-trained old-school librarian or archivist.
JNC: Thanks.
JW: Thanks you so much for your time.
BG: You're welcome.]]>
EG: Elizabeth Gettinger.
AS: And Anne Steptoe.
JNSL: We have the honor today of interviewing James Carder. We are here at Dumbarton Oaks to speak with the Archivist. Do you guys want to start with a question?
EG: Sure. So, I guess just a sort of start up question – we see that you were a Junior Fellow here in the '70s?
JNC: Yes, I was.
EG: And so we wanted to hear how you first got involved with Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were.
JNC: I actually first got involved very modestly when I was an undergraduate. I was working on an excavation in Yugoslavia at the Palace of the emperor Diocletian and wanted to read an eighteenth-century description of the palace by Robert Adam, a rare volume of which the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine library had a copy. And I somewhat naively came to Washington to work in the library as an undergraduate and learned – then as now – that undergraduates don't have easy entree, but I did manage to get a photocopy of that book sent to me, which was otherwise hard to come by. I was on a Ford Foundation Archaeological Traineeship Grant, so there was money for doing that sort of thing. So, that was my first introduction in the later '60s, and then when I went to graduate school I applied for a Junior Fellowship and received it, as you said. It was a two-year – it turned into a two-year fellowship at that time and I finished my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: So, what was the fellowship program like when you first arrived here?
JNC: It was, I think, pretty much the same as it is today in many important aspects. Like today there were more Byzantine Fellows than Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Architecture Fellows. One difference that I remember, and I think it might have been both a difference of chance and possibly a difference of design, was that there were more art historians in the mix of Fellows than there has been in subsequent periods. There were easily five if not six art historians in my group, which made for a very nice situation in terms of getting intellectual stimulation from your peers. Ioli Kalavrezou was a Junior Fellow as was Ruth Kolarik and Jeffrey Andrews and Kathleen Shelton. And Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow in my second year. And besides that, Otto Demus and Hugo Buchthal and Carlo Bertelli were Fellows, and Ernst Kitzinger came occasionally from Harvard. And, of course, Bill Loerke was Director of Studies, so there were a lot of Byzantine and Early Christian art historians around. The other thing that I remember very much about my fellowship years was that there was a great camaraderie, and the Fellows themselves organized parties and all sorts of events, sometimes costume parties, where, for example, at Seka Allen's home, we put on elaborate silk and brocade clothes and masqueraded as some historical figure, real or imagined!
JNSL: What did you dress up like?
JNC: I think I was an emperor. It wasn't very – my costume wasn't particularly successful, as I remember, but I tried. Many of the staff, including Sue Boyd, who was assistant or associate Byzantine curator at the time, as well as Seka Allen – Jelisaveta Allen – a research librarian – were very conscientious in inviting Fellows to their houses or otherwise organizing events for them. There was a real spirit of being part of a group that was well taken care of.
AS: Did this social camaraderie extend between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian fellows, or was it more of a Byzantine community?
JNC: It did extend among all of the Fellows. I believe – and I really should check the archival record on this – that there couldn't have been more than two Pre-Columbian Fellows and maybe only two Landscape fellows, or possibly only one. The numbers in those junior programs – junior in the sense that they came later in the institutional chronology than the Byzantine Studies program – and really only began having Fellows in the early '70s. I remember Frank Alvarez in Garden and Landscape and Peter Joralemon in Pre-Columbian. But even though there were only three or four non-Byzantine Fellows, I think they were always included in the parties. Then occasionally there were Byzantine-specific activities, such as an exhibition at the Walters or something like that – then it was just the Byzantine group that went.
EG: How did you find the atmosphere here academically; was it an easy place to work on your dissertation? What resources were of the most value?
JNC: It was a dream. I didn't have too much to compare it to, though I'd had a Fulbright the year before I came here in Germany, and I was using primary material libraries in Wolfenbüttel and elsewhere and not necessarily so much using secondary resources. But I had that as a benchmark. But here, even before I came, I received communications asking what microfilms or -fiches I might need that I would be expecting to work on as they wanted to check whether they had them or not. And if they didn't have them, they'd do what they could to get them, which I just found wonderful and remarkable. I don't think I ever needed a secondary resource, a book or whatever, that they didn't have or couldn't get. And at that time there was a liaison person to the Library of Congress, and he had the wherewithal to make a weekly trip to the Library of Congress and bring back materials that Fellows and others had requested. I don't think that program lasted much longer, but it certainly was in effect the two years I was here and that, of course, just doubled the possibilities of doing research. So, I thought the resources at Dumbarton Oaks were terrific, as I believe people continue to think to this day.
AS: Were there any academic mentors that you met and became close with during those two years?
JNC: Yes. As you probably know from the history of Dumbarton Oaks, there actually were, in the early period, faculty members – permanent faculty members – here, and that was just being dissolved, in a way. But Ernst Kitzinger was still here – or at least occasionally – when I was a Junior Fellow. Although he was frankly more in Cambridge than at Dumbarton Oaks, though he did come to Dumbarton Oaks for several months and, so, he did have a presence. And he and I discussed many aspects of my dissertation. Hugo Buchthal, I don't think, had a professorship but he had an appointment of some sort while I was here, and he was invaluable. And then people like Kurt Weitzmann would come around, and he had asked me to write some catalogue entries for the "Age of Spirituality" exhibition that he was planning for the Met, so we knew each other in a way, and his advice was great. But I also think that my peers were terrific. We did the same thing that's done today, we gave progress reports on our dissertation topics or our research topics depending on our level. And it wasn't pro forma; people thought about them and critiqued them, and if there was some tangent that perhaps the speaker hadn't considered, someone in the group might say you should look at this book or you should consider this primary source of some ancient author and see what they have to say. I found it invaluable.
AS: How often did those occur?
JNC: Those research reports? I think on average once a week, as they do now, scattered throughout the academic term – followed incidentally by a sherry hour. There was also sherry served before lunch on Tuesdays, I think it was. I think Jan has now revived this and has it at his house, but that apparently was a tradition that Mildred Bliss had inaugurated before her death in 1969, and I don't know if it had continued unabated until my tenure here in the mid-'70s, but I think it then sort of fell off the board soon thereafter.
JNSL: Did you ever hear any anecdotes from the older, say, the older Fellows or older scholars about Dumbarton Oaks while you were here as a Junior Fellow or any stories about some of the early days that caught your ear or that stand out in your memory?
JNC: I didn't – I don't remember much, if I did, and so consequently I think I didn't. I heard innumerable times the story about climbing over the perimeter walls to swim illegally in the swimming pool. I must have heard that fifty times from fifty different people or people reporting on their best friends who had come over the wall at night to swim, and otherwise I don't remember anything either boring or juicy. I'm not sure how much I was really aware, too, of the institution and its institutional history. I don't know how much I was aware of the Blisses, although I did meet Jack Thacher who was still alive at the time. I had a friend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, David Owsley, a curator, who knew Jack Thacher, apparently fairly well, and he suggested, since he knew I was coming as a Junior Fellow, that I – that Jack Thacher invite me over for tea or something, which he did. He talked about the Blisses, and I remember now that you mention it, thinking that I should somehow know more about the Blisses. It's too bad I don't have a time machine and could go back, as I know a great deal more now. But he talked about Mildred Bliss at this tea.
JNSL: And how did you come into your current position today? What was the story behind that journey?
JNC: When I finished my dissertation and left Dumbarton Oaks, I started as an assistant professor, first at Case Western Reserve University while someone was on sabbatical, and then I came back to Washington where I was at Mount Vernon College and then at George Washington University at the Mount Vernon Campus. And in 1989, I received notification from Sue Boyd that there was a notice of a job position – but it was a part time job position – at Dumbarton Oaks for someone to advise on the objects that are now formally known as the House Collection. Apparently, the president of Harvard University had received some letters questioning whether some objects were in the best care, and the president had written to then director Angeliki Laiou, asking if there was curatorial responsibility for these prints and drawings that were hanging on walls and that sort of thing. And so she realized in a way that there wasn't – there was a Byzantine curator and a Pre-Columbian curator and so forth, but the so-called House Collection was not particularly well situated in anyone's sight lines. So, I interviewed with her and was offered this job, and the first element of it was to do an assessment, a condition assessment of things – especially things of value – and things that were possibly in harm's way. And I did that, and while I was doing that assessment I was also trying to get any information on these objects, because there were no dossier files and, really, no sort of curatorial management for this part of the Collection – the House Collection, as we know it today. So, I was bothering people asking where invoices might be kept or where conservation reports might be kept, and so forth. And that caught Angeliki Laiou's attention. So, she asked me to start putting together a complete dossier for the House Collection. You can see the snowball moving down the hill here!
EG: When was that?
JNC: This started in '89, as an advisor; and I became a staff member in '92. So, I was here during her entire tenure. When Ned Keenan came, early on he talked to me and said that he wanted to revisit the new library project and even revisit it situated under the North Vista – that very controversial location where it had started out in the 1970s. He said, "I need to find all the plans and all of the correspondence and documents from the '70s to see where things were left off." And so he went around looking for them, and of course there was no Archives at the time and things were where you might least likely think they should be. But since I had also taken this route trying to put together things for the House Collection dossiers and had literally looked in the attic and in the basement and in people's file drawers – really just any place – I had something of an unwritten road map of where things were. So, I was actually able to put my hands on these drawings which I knew to be rolled and stored under this building in not the best of circumstances, and I also was able to put my hands on the correspondence files. But there was no logic to it, and they were in cardboard boxes, and I think they were labeled but there wasn't any reason to know that they were there. So he was both horrified – Ned Keenan was – and relieved, and he said, "Would you be willing to take on the reorganization of the archives in much the same way as you took on the dossier building of the House Collection?" And I said, "Yes." So, that's how I came to be House Collection Manager and then later Archivist.
EG: So, what were some of the goals of the archives project and what was the organization of it?
JNC: The mission of the Dumbarton Oaks Archives is to retain and conserve in perpetuity any item that is of importance to the institutional history of Dumbarton Oaks. And that, of course, can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, and a caveat to that is to understand the physical limitations of space, at least in terms of hard copy or hard object storage. So, not every scrap of paper that happens to have survived is fair game for the Archives because it would overwhelm the real estate. So, the first objective was to find out what was still around that really was critical to retain and, if it was in deteriorating condition, what to do to make an analog copy of it somehow to keep its shelf-life going. Then, to find a way to organize it so that it could be easily accessed by people who would want to see this material in the future, and to weed out things – but not capriciously – weed out things that shouldn't be saved. And so I spent the first two years of my life as an archivist just interviewing people in their offices and seeing and telling them that I thought that it was very fair game if they were actively using files or materials that these files should continue to reside with them, as that was a very good use of institutional space and resources. But, if they had things that were just clogging their file cabinets that they themselves felt should be retained for the institutional memory, these should come to the Archives. And so, things began to flow in, and it was greatly interesting to me to make coherency out of all these disparate files and images and objects. And the system I devised now can be added to very easily. For example, when Alice-Mary Talbot retired recently – although she had been a very faithful contributor to the Archives – she did one final sweep of her office files and took things out that she didn't think Margaret Mullett would necessarily need and sent them down to the Archives, and that's how it's grown. And it works pretty well, as I think you can attest because you've been using files from the Archives.
AS: What role do you see the Archives playing at DO?
JNC: It has an absolutely critical role in that we've never written either a periodic history, other than the annual reports or biannual reports, or an official history of the institution. There are a number of history-like discussions – the Pre-Columbian Studies program has a good one and so forth. But, there's a lot of very important institutional activity from the past that hasn't been chronicled in a historical narrative, but it is captured in the correspondence and in the interim reports to the president of Harvard University and so forth, and this material sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. And this material really informs us as to what happened and what people thought they were doing and how they went about their business as they defined it at the time. And it shows that there were mistakes and how people learned from them and how the institution moved on. I think every institution needs an archives and it should use its archives to find out who it was. Here we also use the Archives to check when scholars propose things to us – either fellowship applications or research proposals or what have you. We can go back and see what they've done for the institution before, what we have on file. It's not always complete, but it's very useful. And unfortunately when a scholar dies we often use the preserved archival material for writing an obituary, because sometimes we're the institution that has the best knowledge of the contribution that that particular scholar has made to the field of Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Studies
JNSL: Could you perhaps comment on the uniqueness of Dumbarton Oaks in terms of an institution and what its mission is – both the museum and the professional library, the fellowship program, and its sort of general position here in Washington?
JNC: In a certain sense, Dumbarton Oaks is not unique, in that it's a research institute. There are many research institutes, and they tend to have all of the same phenomena: they have libraries, they occasionally have collections that support the focus of the research, they have a fellowship apparatus, and so forth. But Dumbarton Oaks is, to a degree, unique, and part of its uniqueness is the mandate of its founders, the Blisses. They wanted the institute Dumbarton Oaks to be in Washington, D.C., and although it was to be administered in many ways through Harvard University, they did not want it at Harvard, and during their lifetime they were very clear on that point. They thought things that happened at Harvard were perfectly wonderful and that the student body and the faculty interaction with the student body and all of these good things were what a university of great standing such as Harvard should have. But, for them Dumbarton Oaks was something other, it was, in a way, a retreat, and although they wouldn't have used and didn't use the term "ivory tower," in a way it was just that. Dumbarton Oaks was something other than an urban campus, it was sixteen acres of beautiful gardens, it had an ambiance of sophistication and, to a degree, elegance in the architecture and appointments of that architecture. It allowed people the breathing space and the environment in which to be reflective in their studies. And then, of course, the studies programs themselves are not your average studies programs. You don't have a choice in Byzantine studies between twenty different research studies programs so that you might apply to them all and choose the best one that responds. If you're a Byzantinist and are going to go to a research institute in America, Dumbarton Oaks' Byzantine studies program is probably the first and, to a degree, only choice, and Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Architecture are very similar. In a way, the narrow foci of this institute ensure its quality and ensure its ability to remain vibrant and relevant. If we did twelve other things from ancient to contemporary abstract expressionist studies programs, we would dilute ourselves. You have to be very wealthy to do that. CASVA is very successful because of its high level of funding and amazing resources. But to be a CASVA you have to be very wealthy and you also have to be very astute at what you collect as research materials and what mix of people you bring together in a far-ranging research institute. So the very small focal nature of Dumbarton Oaks makes it unique, I believe.
EG: Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and the Bliss archives at Harvard which I believe were moved to Harvard in the '80s?
JNC: In 1982, right? In 1982. That was, of course, before my time. I believe from what I've read is that the Blisses themselves had deposited at Dumbarton Oaks a considerable collection of their correspondence and memorabilia. How well organized it was and how topically organized it was I can't say because I know it was completely rethought and re-catalogued at Harvard and wonderfully so. The woman who took that on as a six-year project – I don't believe she was working on it full time necessarily, but I think she was working on it consistently – she did a really remarkable job putting together a first rate finding aid and so forth. Anyway, Dumbarton Oaks had this on its premises, and it had other related things that the Blisses themselves had not accumulated. And the librarians here put this material into folders and boxes because they were, I think and rightfully, concerned about it: one, in terms of making sure that it didn't get lost or misused or thrown out or left to deterioration, and two, they were concerned that they didn't really have the physical room to store it. Until the new library was built, the Main House, as you well know, served as the complete campus with the exception of the Fellows Building, and that really wasn't used for much other than the purpose of feeding and housing Fellows. So, the Main House was really everything: it was library, it was research space, it was meeting space, it was museum space, it was everything, and as Ned Keenan was fond of saying, it was at two hundred percent capacity when he came as director, and that was very true. There were bookshelves in the hallways, and there were often bookshelves in people's closets. And, you know, if you said, "I have 125 linear feet of Blissiana memorabilia, where shall I put it?," there wasn't an easy answer. So in 1982 under Giles Constable, it was decided that everything sort of pre-1940, the date of the Blisses' gift of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, would be sent to Harvard which was willing to accept it to establish the Bliss Papers, and that was done. And everything 1940 and after would remain at Dumbarton Oaks. But as I've said, not much was done with this later material until the '90s. It was in boxes and filing cabinets, and I don't think anyone much cared about these archival materials. The problem with the decision was that there is now a segregation: there is a sort of Bliss family, residential pre-1940 group and a Dumbarton Oaks institutional, post-1940 group of documents. So, there is a segregation. But, there is in fact a seamless continuity between these two groups of documents, and anyone who is researching the origin or the early years of Dumbarton Oaks has to use the Bliss Papers at Harvard to get the complete picture. So, it's a little inconvenient. On the other hand, Harvard is a wonderful caretaker and curatorial manager of such things and they're in perfect storage conditions and housings. Although I personally would like to have the Bliss Papers closer to hand, but I don't think they need to be sent back here. I'm not going to compare them to the Elgin Marbles, because I don't think we would have lost this material, but they're at Harvard and well cared for in a way that perhaps historically Dumbarton Oaks wouldn't have had the physical space or the staff to look after them.
AS: After the Archives, you've had the opportunity to work on a number of publications, lots of cataloging projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most memorable projects?
JNC: Yes. I started using the Bliss Papers in order to complete the dossier files for the House Collection, learning, as I just explained, that many of the pre-1940 documents were at Harvard. And since many of the objects that the Blisses acquired that are now at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired before 1940 – in fact the vast majority of them were – much of their dealer correspondence and any other kind of ephemeral reference to an object that might be in the House Collection would be at Harvard rather than here. So, I was able periodically – usually yearly – to get a small budget line item to go to Cambridge and sit in the Archives for a week or so and just call up box after box after box of correspondence and either key-enter it into my laptop or get a Xerox of it and enter it into the dossier system. And that really allowed me to get a much better understanding of where the Blisses came by their Renaissance, Baroque, Western Medieval, Asian, and other collections, the documents for which didn't end up in the Byzantine Collection department because they weren't relevant. As you can imagine, for one good document you read five hundred that are very interesting but aren't relevant, so I also knew to a large degree what else was going on in the Bliss Papers, and I soon realized that there was a player out there in the Blisses' life, Royall Tyler, who was just absolutely instrumental in forming the Blisses'– that is the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. I mean, but for Royall Tyler, I think the collection as we know it today would not exist. And as it happens, the Royall Tyler Papers are also at the Harvard Archives. These are a long series of correspondence between 1902 and 1952 mostly from Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss. And when I was asked to do some catalog entries and essays for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia – when Byzantine objects and American paintings from the House Collection were asked to go on loan there – I alerted Rob Nelson, then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University – who had been asked to do the Byzantine Collection essay for that catalog – that he should look at both the Royall Tyler Papers and the Bliss Papers at Harvard. And he did, and it opened his eyes as it had mine, and so we then began to think about how useful this correspondence would be if it could be transcribed, annotated, and published in whatever format – hard copy or perhaps electronically, or both. And so, we wrote up a proposal, and the project was put into the works. And so, now when I go to Harvard, I'm also looking at the Bliss-Tyler correspondence. The correspondence starts in 1902 and ends roughly in 1953, the time of the death of Royall Tyler, and I'm through '35 on it. The '30s is the most voluminous part of the correspondence run, and '35-'39 is still a sizable chunk, but in the '40s and early '50s it drops off, so I'm about eighty percent done with the transcription. I've written an introductory essay to what will be the first chapter, and I've annotated the letters from that first chapter. I'm hoping soon to do the second chapter, and Rob is working on the '20s and '30s material – he's working on the '20s material now. And when the '30s' correspondence is transcribed, that will chronicle the meaty, Byzantine-centric part of their buying and corresponding. So, we hope in a year and a half time, if that's not too ambitious, to have this at least in a good draft form. It's going to be huge – that's the unfortunate part of it. It's – if you publish every letter, which I think we should, even the ones that say "Thank you very much, it was a delicious meal," and they occasionally do that, although these are intellectual people who take some time to write what they want the other person to know about life as they see it and art as they know it. I think if we publish it all, it's going to be very lengthy. If it's in hard copy format, it would certainly be two or more volumes, and there's cost implications there. If we publish it electronically, it'll be very usable by people in the future no matter how it ends up, because you can search it – if the spelling is correct, hopefully it will be. And, for example, I was talking with Gudrun – I don't know how anecdotal you want this interview to be, we can scrap this at the end if you like – who was interested in why the Blisses never acquired significant enamels, Byzantine enamels. And I said, "Oh well, you know, they really wanted to and they wrote to Tyler and Tyler to them about getting a significant enamel," and she said, "Oh, that's very interesting. I'd always wondered if they just didn't like enamels or what." And I said, "You know, once this document is done, you'll be able to, even in a Word format, type in the word enamel and just graze through their correspondence finding every time the world enamel is mentioned. It'll just be easy to sate your curiosity as to what the Blisses were doing with enamels, or icons, or manuscripts, or Stravinsky, for that matter. It's just going to be much easier to do research on the Blisses, if anyone is interested to do that. So, those were my two primary uses of the Harvard Archives, for the House Collection dossier files and this Bliss-Tyler project. And, in the interim, every time I've found something of interest to me about the Blisses or about Dumbarton Oaks, I've typed it in a document, a so-called chronology, called "master chronology," that is easily three hundred pages long now in Word format, and is just date, line item, and the source, taken both from primary materials such as the correspondence and secondary materials that tell the life of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks.
EG: Is that something you intend on publishing someday?
JNC: I don't at the moment, although I think a history of Dumbarton Oaks is long overdue. Certainly this chronology will remain at Dumbarton Oaks, and it can be migrated to whatever technology is used in the future.
EG: So, in terms of your role as the manager of the House Collection, could you speak a little bit about what your impressions were of the Blisses' mission in collecting the House Collection and about their acquisitions there?
JNC: Yes. If I could answer it slightly differently, I would say that when I came as a Junior Fellow to Dumbarton Oaks and long thereafter when I talked to people at Dumbarton Oaks or colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks I always had the strong impression that the Blisses collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare landscape books and sometimes botanical prints and manuscripts, and that they had a focus of collecting that brought about the collections as they were then displayed. And then they had some household furnishings and some paintings and sculptures, but in a sense just as they had clothing and a wine cellar: these were part of the comme-il-faut nature of being a wealthy resident. Since I have taken on a curatorial role as House Collection manager, I realize that the Blisses were considerably broad in their collecting interests. And we tried to make this point in our first special exhibition, "The Collector's Microbe," where we talked about how the Blisses not only collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, but also Asian and American and this, that, and the other. And I see my role as House Collection manager not only as a true curatorial position to protect and catalogue the collection as it has come down, but also as an advocacy position to make sure that the Blisses' vision for Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of art, isn't interpreted in as narrow a way as I understood it initially and I think others have understood it. And this is proven, I think, much beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you look at what they collected in the '37 through 1940 period when they knew that they were gifting the property and its collections to Harvard. That's when they bought a Degas and a Riemenschneider and a Rouault and other great paintings and sculptures knowing that they weren't going to ever really live with them, but believing that this "home of the humanities," the famous phrase that Mildred Bliss uses in the preamble to her will and testament and was used other times in her correspondence, needed to have these great things; that great art inspired great conversation which inspired great research. And the same was true with music. There is absolutely no reason to continue musical offerings at Dumbarton Oaks in a Harvard institutional fellowship arena, because it wasn't a music research institution. But the Blisses were adamant about that and really hoped Harvard would find the wherewithal to continue some kind of musical programming. And the Friends of Music series, which was inaugurated in 1946, was the result of that. All this they saw as being for the Fellows. The music was for the Fellows. The art was for the Fellows. The garden was for the Fellows. Yes, they eventually were opened to the greater and broader public, but that isn't the Blisses' initial interest. The uniqueness that we talked about earlier in the Blisses' vision was that this was for scholarship and fellowship enrichment. So, I see that also as part of my job description to try to make the House Collection a little bit more integral to the institutional wealth.
JNSL: What is the most exciting project that you have been a part of in your time at Dumbarton Oaks, of all these wonderful things, the one closest to your heart that brings back the happiest memories?
JNC: Had you not qualified your statement at the end, I'd have given you a couple. But, the most exciting event – clearly and without a doubt – was the planning for and all of the activities that ensued with the building of the new library and the renovation and rehabilitation of the Main House, including the Music Room. This would be the thing that is dearest to my heart and that makes me the happiest. But the whole renovation will stand out in my memory after I leave here as being my most important contribution. That said, it was arduous and it was painful and it was time consuming and often laborious, and I often thought I never, ever wanted to do that sort of thing again. There are the seemingly never-ending meetings over minutia on plans and the inevitable problems that come up when you're planning for new architecture and the renovation of historically significant architecture. But, it really was terrific; I learned enormously from it. I had great colleagues and superiors – Mike Steen, certainly, who was project manager on a consulting basis, and certainly the director Ned Keenan – and working with great architects, I really loved that. The renovation of the Music Room ceiling is probably my fondest part of the project, especially because the results were, to my mind, so stellar, and I worked with great people on that project as well. But the removal of a world class collection from its housing, the incredible amount of detail work of making sure you knew every object's condition and crate housing and shelf storage housing and this and that and then bringing it all back and making new mounts and new vitrines and designing all of that in the interim before it comes back…. Again, I never want to do it again, and probably won't have to, but those are once-in-a-lifetime curatorial opportunities that would probably be distasteful to many who are not curators, but I think are just the meat of what you do when you're in charge of a great collection.
AS: If we could go back a little bit to your curatorship of the House Collection, to what extent have acquisitions been active after the Bliss days?
JNC: The House Collection is not an actively acquiring collection. That said, we do still acquire, although not in the way or to the degree that the Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or rare book collections from the library might collect. They would want to collect great examples of their particular genres, if they can be acquired legally on the marketplace. That is their mission. Their collections are not necessarily static as they were deposited by the Blisses. The House Collection, on the other hand, is. What remains from the House Collection is a kind of finite collection of Blissiana material, some of which was sold off to increase revenue for collecting in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian. We don't do that any longer, but we do acquire for the House Collection occasionally. We acquire furnishings when things wear out, especially Middle Eastern carpets. We also – although we haven't done much of this in my tenure – we also buy Blissiana material, if it's relevant. We would certainly try to buy any portraits of the Blisses that came onto the market. And they had their portraits made many times – Mildred Bliss, in particular – but they didn't choose to retain them. The one painting of Mildred Bliss that hangs over the fireplace in the Refectory they actually gave away to a friend, who later gave it back to Dumbarton Oaks. If there was some significant object that the Blisses had owned that had left Dumbarton Oaks, we might try to get it back if it was relevant to us. There have been pieces that have come up for auction – furniture in particular – that we know the Blisses owned that we haven't tried for. We just don't need it.
JNSL: Was anything ever stolen? Was there ever any – as far as you know, were there any issues with that?
JNC: There have been a few thefts, particularly of things in the gardens. The Pan figure that sits in an arched bricked area pointing towards the Acadian pool that's called Lovers Lane Pool was stolen twice and returned once and not recovered the second time. The artist who did that sculpture was Francis Sedgwick. A cast of it had been acquired or given to his daughter, and she still had it. So, after much convincing and effort, the daughter agreed to make a new mold from her sculpture from which our Pan was recast. One of the eighteenth-century putti riding dolphins that are in the Fountain Terrace was stolen, also twice, once recovered, and once not. And fortunately they are an exact pair – they're not bilaterally symmetrical, as bookends are, they're literally the same object cast twice, so we made a cast of the existing one. There are two in the garden, and one of them is modern, cast from the other, which is the original. Smaller things have been stolen, but theft has been minimal.
EG: So, could you tell us a little bit about the interaction with the House Collections with the Fellows and the scholars and if that's changed over time?
JNC: I don't know if it's changed over time in the sense of predating my arrival here, because I don't really know what happened vis-à-vis the Fellows and the House Collection. When I first came, we used to do an orientation for the Fellows, which is still done, but that orientation also included a tour through the house and especially the areas where there was significant architecture and interiors or significant House Collection objects that might be of interest to the Fellows. They also had a tour with the Byzantine curators of the Byzantine Collection and they had a tour with the Pre-Columbian curators of the Pre-Columbian Collection. The House Collection tour got dropped after five years or so, I don't quite remember, because the schedule of what the Fellows did upon arrival just became somewhat onerous and the House Collection was expendable. So, we've never done that again except by request. And certainly when we reopened, there were a number of requests that I take people through the house and show them what happened during the renovation, and this involved taking both the docents and the Fellows. Also, occasionally, Fellows are interested in House Collection objects, especially the western medieval ones, and so of course they come to my office and, like any reader, they sit and read the dossier files and look at the historic photographs and so forth, but that's somewhat unusual. And every now and then someone is interested in the Blisses so they come and ask questions.
EG: Is that also true of the Archives? – interest in the Archives?
JNC: I have a lot of interest in the Archives from the studies programs, especially the directors. They change fairly frequently, as you know, sometimes every five years, sometimes every ten years, so they often, depending on their interests and the way they want to define their ongoing or upcoming projects – they want to see what's happened. Sometimes they have that material in their offices, but frankly a lot of the historical material is in the Archives, so they check out what they need. Also, by chance, I have a number of scholarly files that relate to research or projects that were given to Dumbarton Oaks by, especially, Byzantine scholars, although in one case by a Pre-Columbian scholar, and when Fellows are working on similar topics, they come and use these materials. However, I've had about ten Fellows in the twenty years that I've been here do that, so that's not a huge number.
EG: Is there much relationship between the House Collection and the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections in terms of organization and exhibition?
JNC: Yes and no. The three Collections are all part of the same department, which is the Museum department. There's a little bit more of a sophisticated curatorial apparatus for the two primary collections, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian, less so for the House Collection, but we meet sort of on equal grounds otherwise. The exhibition space, so-called, for the House Collection is the Music Room, and it is by plan and tradition a different type of exhibition space than the gallery type of space that the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections use. We have decided to retain a kind of residential, Edwardian, Kunstkammer look for the Music Room – no wall labels, no vitrines. Yes there are spot lights and there are a few museum fittings, but they are meant to be discrete. The only – I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, that's why I said yes and no. So, let me end by saying the new thing that we've done recently since the Collections were reinstalled is to bring collecting at Dumbarton Oaks and the Museum Collections at Dumbarton Oaks into something of a unified focus. And the Bliss Gallery – which was inaugurated with that reinstallation – has a vitrine which, as of tomorrow, will have an inaugural exhibit of animal bronzes, which come from at least two of the Collections. We had wanted them to come from all three of the Collections and they could have, but the Pre-Columbians needed their very few animal bronze sculptures for the permanent installation. We will probably do a hard stone exhibition there at some time, which will be House Collection Asian, House Collection European, Byzantine, and Pre-Columbian, in order to show that the Blisses were interested in artworks made of hard stone from many cultures, and that way refocus attention on their collecting and collecting interests rather than on the cultural nature of the collection. And that certainly was true, as I said a moment ago, with the inaugural special exhibition – hallway exhibition – titled "Collector's Microbe," which put objects from all three Collections into the same vitrines and onto the same walls in order to show that this was a Dumbarton Oaks collection in the singular, our literal and legal title – we are the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute and Collection "singular," and I think that use of the singular was purposeful – I think that was by choice.
EG: Other than the creation of the Bliss Gallery, the House Collection has always been housed in the Music Room?
JNC: Housed, in a public sense, in the Music Room. Housed, in an institutional sense, throughout the building, so the paintings and furnishings that you see on the first floor – what we call the first floor gallery, the hallway between the museum wing and the Founders Room, for example – the paintings in the Founders Room and so forth, these are all House Collection items, including the Founders Room itself, the boiseries, the wall paneling of the Founders Room – these are all accessioned House Collection items. They are now actually on public display to a degree because we've just started running docent tours on Saturday by sign-up appointment, but that's a very new and historically unique moment in our public persona. But, we've always had House Collection objects used the way the Blisses wanted them to be seen and that is as beautiful things to delight, inspire perhaps, staff and Fellows and scholars. So, there's a public space and a private space, and there's a big storage space where a number of things don't see the light of day at the moment, because there's no room for them.
JNSL: Are you aware of any attempts either in the immediate past or the more distant past to take some of the stories associated with Dumbarton Oaks and its history and turn them into any kind of dramatic or sort of novelistic element? Has anyone ever shown an interest in doing that, because when I listen to these stories I think sometimes it sounds like it would make a great movie, or make a great play, or make a great story?
JNC: I've never heard of such a thing. I do think that a history of the institution needs to be written.
JNSL: That's something that several people whom I've interviewed have said.
JNC: And I think through the Oral History interview project and through the archival holdings, both the Bliss Papers at Harvard and the ones that we've now talked quite a bit about, it's all there. One might identify additional people to interview once one started writing a history, as always is the case with biographies or institutional histories. But easily eighty percent of it is already there, it just needs the time and the interest.
EG: So, have you noticed any significant changes over the time that you've been here since your undergraduate 'til the present, in terms of the academic or social or even physical setting here at Dumbarton Oaks?
JNC: Let me start with the physical setting. The physical setting was in need of renovation by the time that Giles Constable became director. He pointed that out in the interview that I did with him, and he wrote about it in his biannual report several times. He points out that well-made buildings are not like the buildings that he or I, as he put it in his interview, might buy because we can't afford to buy better-made buildings. We have to replace the roof every twenty years, whereas roofs on better-made buildings last for fifty years in all respects. But when he came to Dumbarton Oaks, the fifty year time bomb was about to explode. And it was absolutely true – the infrastructure of the physical real estate of Dumbarton Oaks was in dire need of renovation. And he was the one that reinforced the third floor – the attic floor, which is now used for the publications office space – in order to house shelving for the Byzantine library, and in Thomson's tenure, the courtyard gallery was built and all of that space underneath which had been just dirt was excavated to form a connection between the basement of the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian Collection and underneath the Music Room, which allowed for offices and shelving and storage space and so forth. So, the physical plant improved fairly steadily. Air conditioning was added in the Constable era, and the physical plant continued to improve steadily in the years that I knew the institution. It improved dramatically in the '90s and at the turn of the century with the acquisition of new real estate: the director's house and the apartment building La Quercia, which took a certain amount of pressure off of the existing real estate, including some questionable legal pressures: the old director's house, now the Refectory, probably could not have housed a family of more than two people because using the upper floor as a bedroom space might have been considered illegal from a life-safety aspect. There were reasons to move on and certainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the decade we're in, the building of considerable new physical space – the library, the gardeners' court – and the renovation of the existing physical spaces was a remarkable change. That's the easy answer. Socially, I don't know. I was in my twenties when I was a Junior Fellow, and the parties and the swimming pools activities and going into Georgetown for impromptu, on-the-cheap dinners and beers was great fun. Do Fellows still do this today? Probably. I think when you interview some of the younger Fellows or staff, that's an interesting question to ask. I see Fellows being very serious here. They're very nice and when I interact with them on a social level I always enjoy that, but I see them being very serious, and I have a feeling that was always the case. That hasn't changed, but possibly the pressures of the world and the paucity of job openings in academic humanistic professions and just the need to spend your money wisely and move on and get your research and your dissertation done or your next book done and so forth leaves you little time to have a beer and a pizza. I don't know. You had a third prong on that question?
EG: Academically.
JNC: Academically. Oh, the standards here have always been very high, remarkably high I think, in everything – the choice of people that come. I know that sounds slightly self-serving, so forgive me. But the publications, the programs and projects that the institution has sponsored – I mean, Dumbarton Oaks has a stellar record, and I don't say that because I'm "in-house." I think I could write a critical review if I had to, but you know, you look at the history of what this institution has done in the world and here in its self-appointed research areas or interest areas, and it's just remarkable, it's remarkable.
AS: Has the evolution of the faculty to speak of here at Dumbarton Oaks changed the academics?
JNC: The Blisses and the early administrators wanted some kind of faculty presence, a kind of senior mentorship, I believe from what I've read. Let me back up to say that I think the Blisses initially just wanted senior research people here. When more junior people came and were given a kind of task working half day on their dissertations and half day on putting together a census of Byzantine objects in America or, if they were text people, looking at textual references for objects. (If you haven't read David Wright's paper on the early years of the institution, I highly recommend it to you.) I think the Blisses and the administration realized that there needed to be a kind of mentorship program for the more junior people who came – that this was something that would be very valuable. And because of the Harvard association, a kind of academic model was first chosen where there would be professors. But, it didn't make a great deal of sense because they didn't have students and they didn't give classes, per se. I mean, they might offer seminars maybe or give occasional lectures, but they didn't – it just wasn't a good model. And if they became tenured – initially a few of them did – what did they see their role to be? Did they see their role to be tenured faculty who fortunately didn't have to teach so they could spend one hundred percent of their time doing research, or just what? And so it was hard, it was a very hard model to keep going, and I think they were right in doing away with it, and in providing academic leadership and academic mentorship in other ways through having a coterie of like beings of all stages of life physically in one space. As is true now with the symposia and catalogue projects and the coin and seal seminars that are run in the summer, people with similar interests can come from different institutions and talk together, talk to senior members, talk to junior members. Dumbarton Oaks facilitates that, makes the bread and butter of that happen. It would only happen otherwise through email or through something much less interactive.
EG: So, sort of in closing, could you talk a little how you see the role of the Archives and the House Collection in the future?
JNC: The Archives should be exactly what it is today, only better. It should have every significant bit of Dumbarton Oaks institutional, intellectual history that's pertinent to the institution, housed there. It should be user-friendly, it should be – in a conservation sense – secure and well maintained. If we ever enter into an economic period and a digital period where things like that can be more easily accessible through digital technology, then that should happen. It happens obviously to a degree because everything you're doing will eventually become, if it hasn't already, part of the Archives and this comes in digital format, so the transition is underway. The House Collection should also carry on as it is, should maintain its course, ensuring that its role in both the Blisses' lives and in the institutional life of Dumbarton Oaks should not be forgotten. Its status should be maintained and honored because many of the art objects – by no means all, but a good many – are museum, world-class pieces that show a great level of connoisseurship and interest by the founders of this institution. Maintenance of this Collection should be insured, because it isn't inexpensive to maintain an art collection. But Dumbarton Oaks has and, I hope, will continue to do so. And I think that it should. In bad economic times, or when the world has moved on, one has to make choices, and it's possible that things will change, but for the moment I think we should stay the course for both the Archives and the House Collection.
JNSL: Thank you very much.
JNC: Thank you very much.
JNSL: It's been wonderful.]]>
Can you describe the concept behind the exhibit?
Exhibition-making starts with an idea around selected objects rather than with a fixed display plan. In the case of All Sides Considered, which was developed with the intention to highlight and exemplify the research of objects in our Maya collection, we were interested in exploring the many layers of each selected object or case study – the material specifics and cultural signifiers studied by archaeologists, art historians, scientists, and anthropologists. To bring the scholarly and scientific analyses into the display, expansive label text was of the essence; yet, so as not to distract from the aesthetic value of the objects, a display setting had to be created that would be able to bring these two sides into play and keep them in balance.
The solution we came up with was this: approaching the gallery from the museum entrance, the visitor perceives mainly the colorful accentuated pedestals carrying the highlighted objects. Text and further interpretative material comes into sight only after the interested viewer has entered the area. In general, our interest in experimenting with settings is a crucial aspect of the museum's exhibition program to activate the relationship between art, art scholarship, and visitors.
It was important to place the objects in prime locations within the narrow gallery. Set in cases that are positioned perpendicular to the walls, the artifacts are accessible from all sides. At the same time, the placement prescribes a passageway through the display; the visitor walks right up to the artifacts and then is gently forced to 'slalom' around them.
Each case study is equipped with a stool that resembles not unintentionally a lab stool. It invites the visitor to linger and engage with each object and the rather text-heavy information, which includes 'hands-on' items, slide shows, and a movie clip.
What are some new elements that you incorporated into the display?
One of the novel things about All Sides Considered is the interactive nature of the displays. Incorporating the interactive elements into the labels presented several challenges to the museum team. The most difficult elements to incorporate were the iPads. The challenge arose during the design phase of exhibition planning. We needed to come up with a way to incorporate seamlessly the iPads into the labels so that visitors would feel as though they were interacting with the exhibition itself, not with iPads. It was also imperative that the design allowed visitors to use the touchscreens without access to any of the buttons. While we did not want visitors turning the iPads on and off, we needed a display that allowed the museum staff to do so. Similarly, we needed a design that securely held the iPads but made it easy to remove them when maintenance was needed. After many hours of brainstorming and several prototypes, we came up with a successful design. However, it was not until the displays were installed, the labels applied, and the iPads running that we all breathed a collective sigh of relief and stepped back to admire our work. Although the iPads require some maintenance, they are an absolute success. They allow visitors to touch, hear, and explore the Dumbarton Oaks Collection like never before. I look forward to dreaming up new ways to use this exciting technology!
How does the exhibit reflect the current state of/trends in Maya scholarship?
The exhibit showcases several exceptional Maya objects from the Dumbarton Oaks collection that were carefully reexamined by experts over the past three years. It focuses on the objects and the science behind the recent Dumbarton Oaks publication Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks. Six case-studies outline recent findings about the Maya, and illustrate some of the epistemological underpinnings of current Maya research.
Much knowledge about the Maya is derived from iconographic analyses, as evidenced in the comparative dating of 2,000-year-old etchings on a greenstone pendant. Careful observation and informed comparison with other objects often leads to new findings, including the discovery that four carved spheres in the Dumbarton Oaks collection are the earliest known Maya bone bells.
For example, experts in the fields of geology, mineralogy, conchology, biology, and physical anthropology contributed scientific opinions and analyses – from radiocarbon dating to X-ray diffraction analysis – to the study of a Maya mosaic mask. New technologies are also helping scholars to better visualize and experience the objects they study. A 3-D digital model revealed subtly carved features on a Maya stela, and X-rays exposed the production process of a rattle bowl with a hollow base.
Mayanists also rely on experimental archaeology to refine their understanding of ancient practices and production techniques. A carving station in the exhibit allows visitors to experiment with tool types used by ancient Maya carvers.
The exhibit is about the scholarly research process – the slow, painstaking work that underlies groundbreaking discoveries about the Maya. As museum visitors listen to a rattle bowl, flip through x-ray images, examine a 3-D digital model, and compare images or specimens, they are taking a scholar's approach – and perhaps gaining a new appreciation of the thrills of Maya scholarship.
Watch this video, in which Chris describes the workstation designed to allow visitors to experiment with tool types used by ancient Maya carvers.]]>
A new Museum exhibition, Animal Bronzes, recently opened in the Bliss Gallery at Dumbarton Oaks. The artworks on display highlight Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss's collection of bronze animal sculptures that come from a wide variety of ancient cultures, including the Chinese, Egyptian, Scythian, Roman, and Incan. The Blisses' fondness for animals and birds was well known, and they seemed to delight in discovering how various cultures artistically interpreted these creatures. The artworks in the Bliss Gallery are of relatively small scale; however, the nearby Byzantine Courtyard Gallery features a large-scale ancient bronze horse, acquired by the Blisses in 1938 in anticipation of their gift of the Collection to Harvard University in 1940.]]>
The artworks in Still Life & Landscape, all from the Dumbarton Oaks historic House Collection, range in date from the early sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Artists in the exhibition include Claude Lorrain, Jan van Huysum, David Roentgen, Odilon Redon, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Still Life and Landscape can be viewed in the Special Exhibition Gallery during the Museum's opening hours, 2pm-5pm, Tuesday to Sunday.]]>