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As a residential research institution, Dumbarton Oaks has always provided living accommodations for its fellows. While the accommodations may not always have been faultless, fellows often reminisce over their time at Dumbarton Oaks with fondness, appreciative of the chance to get acquainted with colleagues outside of the work environment. From its inception as the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in 1940, the number of fellows has grown from only two senior fellows and five junior fellows pursuing Byzantine research to between thirty and fifty scholars working in a variety of fields. This growth has required Dumbarton Oaks to acquire and renovate existing residences.
When the Blisses' estate was converted into a research institute, they commissioned Thomas T. Waterman to refashion the Beatrix Farrand–designed "Dwelling" on S Street. Although built in 1934, the Dwelling was intended to be the future quarters of resident scholars at Dumbarton Oaks once the property was transferred to Harvard University. This occurred in 1940, and the first fellows took up residence in February 1941. In keeping with Edwardian-era traditions, fellows were separated by gender, with unmarried men residing in the Fellows Building (then called the Quarters), and women residing in bedrooms in the Main House and in what is now the Refectory. It was customary for the fellows to take all three meals together each day—lunch was provided as part of board—affording myriad opportunities for both scholarly and casual discourse and bonding. Meals in the Fellows Building were opened up to all staff under Giles Constable, who served as director from 1977 to 1984, in order to make socialization opportunities more accessible. In 1981, Dumbarton Oaks hired architect George Hartman to restore the Fellows Building, an undertaking that included enlarging the dining room, adding a front porch to accommodate a fire escape system, and installing central air-conditioning, among other improvements. This building is today known as the Guest House, and as the name suggests, serves as housing for visiting lecturers and other Dumbarton Oaks guests.
In order to accommodate the growing number of Fellows, Dumbarton Oaks leased apartments in an apartment building on Wisconsin Avenue called Sherry Hall, beginning in the 1970s and lasting until the 1990s. Sherry Hall is generally described as having had suboptimal conditions and, as it was the residence farthest away from the Main House, it was an interim solution at best.
Subsequently, in the spring of 1994, Dumbarton Oaks acquired La Quercia ("The Oak" in Italian) in order to expand fellows' housing. La Quercia was constructed in 1922, and had functioned as a multifamily apartment building. In 1995, central air-conditioning was installed, and, from 1997 through 1998, the building underwent a series of masonry and paint restorations—repairs that were both aesthetic and functional. Now that the new Fellowship House has been completed, La Quercia is used to house visiting scholars during the academic year and Harvard interns during the summer. In the future, Dumbarton Oaks will continue to use La Quercia in this capacity, perhaps even expanding the scope of its Harvard-related activities and other academic programs.
During the summer and fall of 2008, two new properties on R Street were acquired to provide additional housing accommodations: the Oaks, a seven-unit townhouse, and the Dumbarton, a one-bedroom condominium. The Oaks subsequently underwent a large-scale renovation process, which was completed in August 2011 and included the installation of a new roofing system, new heating and cooling systems, and a new meeting room, among other upgrades.
As it became clear that La Quercia required a great deal of restoration and even then would be unable to meet certain needs of the fellowship program, Dumbarton Oaks began to look into acquiring a new building to house its fellows. After scouting various properties around Georgetown, a building at the corner of R Street and Wisconsin Avenue emerged as the best solution. Named the Fellowship House, this new building, which underwent a large-scale construction project after its acquisition in 2010, has twenty-five residential units as well as a large space for receptions and meetings. Notably, the new building has achieved LEED Gold status for its strong dedication to environmental sustainability, demonstrated in part through its green, or living, roof and its reduction of impervious surfaces. As director Jan Ziolkowski stated during the groundbreaking ceremony in 2014, the new Fellowship House "does not belong to a single class of Fellows or even to all past and present Fellows put together. Rather, it is meant to embody and facilitate a larger ideal of fellowship." The Fellowship House contributes to the institution's efforts to transcend interdepartmental divisions in the service of building increased unity toward a shared Dumbarton Oaks mission.]]>
Wilhelm Koehler's collaborative research plan, which brought about the creation of the Research Archives of Byzantine monuments between 1941 and 1944, was not destined to endure at Dumbarton Oaks. The catalyst for the change was the arrival at Dumbarton Oaks of the Princeton University medieval art historian, Albert Mathias Friend Jr. (1894–1956), known as Bert Friend to his colleagues. In 1943, Friend was first appointed to the Dumbarton Oaks Board of Scholars, an eleven-member advisory group charged with making recommendations on all scholarly activities at Dumbarton Oaks. (This board was later abolished in 1975 and replaced by the senior fellows committee.) As a board member, Friend immediately began proposing alterations to the Dumbarton Oaks academic program. Foremost among his proposals was the recommendation that Dumbarton Oaks offer greater support to Byzantinists of recognized standing in the field and, most importantly, facilitate the publication of their research: "All research that is worth while should eventuate in publication. When this is realized by all concerned, the trivial and the isolated types of work which have plagued the humanities are not likely to waste the energies of scholars and the funds of Dumbarton Oaks."
Friend strongly felt that Dumbarton Oaks would only become a premier Byzantine studies center by making such prestigious appointments, preferably of long-term duration, and by allowing the appointed scholars to engage in research that would lead to groundbreaking symposia and publications. In making these recommendations, Friend was supported by his fellow board member, George La Piana (1879–1971), who was a senior fellow in residence at Dumbarton Oaks during the 1943–44 academic year. Both men believed that junior fellowship appointments should continue at Dumbarton Oaks, primarily in order to insure continuity in the fields of Byzantine studies. Friend recommended:
I would keep the system of Junior Fellows much as it is at present but I would reduce the number, as I have had to this year, to three or four. We could then get the best young scholars who would profit by working at a higher level of efficiency than in the past. I don't think there are, at any one time, more than four or five in the country in the Byzantine field who would be worth having, yet in order to get new blood their presence is essential.
However, Friend and La Piana argued that junior fellowships should typically be limited to one-year terms and that only those who had shown great promise should be reappointed at the more senior rank of fellow—Milton Anastos, Paul Alexander, and Ernst Kitzinger were held up as examples. Indeed, each of these men were appointed as fellows in 1945 and as assistant professors in 1946.
Friend rose rapidly in the administrative hierarchy at Dumbarton Oaks, although he was disappointed not to have been named director of the institution in 1946, a position that went to John Seymour Thacher. However, Friend was named resident scholar between 1944 and 1946, Henri Focillon Visiting Scholar in Charge of Research in 1947–1948, and director of Byzantine Studies from 1948 until 1954.
In a review of the state of Byzantine scholarship in America, the Byzantine art historian Kurt Weitzmann summarized Friend's contributions at Dumbarton Oaks:
In the two succeeding years A. M. Friend became the Director of Studies and devoted much of his time to giving to the institution a more permanent organizational structure. He brought to Dumbarton Oaks Sirarpie Der Nersessian, well known for her various studies in the Byzantine as well as in the Armenian field, as a permanent senior scholar, a position which will give her the opportunity to center her energies on her comprehensive work on the illustrated Greek menologia as well as on many aspects of Armenian art. He also established a second category of researchers, so that a group of younger scholars, consisting at the moment of Milton Anastos, Paul Underwood, Ernst Kitzinger and Glanville Downey, is enabled to embark on long range projects in the Byzantine field. Moreover, Friend has achieved the integration of research in various aspects of Byzantine culture, including, besides the arts, history—represented by its doyen, A. A. Vasiliev—theology, literature, music, and other fields, thus giving to Dumbarton Oaks the character of a well rounded institute in the Byzantine field.
—Kurt Weitzmann, "Byzantine Art and Scholarship in America," American Journal of Archaeology 51, no. 4 (1947): 414.
In December of 1963, curator Elizabeth P. Benson and director John S. Thacher opened the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art. The collection, formerly exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, was beautifully installed in a glass-walled pavilion designed by the architect Philip Johnson. In addition to the art collection, Robert Bliss had also given Dumbarton Oaks 2,400 books on Pre-Columbian art history, anthropology, and archaeology, and this library would provide the basis for the research program. In 1964, soon after the collection opened, Dumbarton Oaks appointed a Pre-Columbian Advisory Committee. Initially tasked with making recommendations on acquisitions for the collection, the Committee soon also came to advise on lecturers and conferences as well as on publications resulting from these events.
Central to this early period in the development of the Pre-Columbian Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks was Michael D. Coe, professor of anthropology at Yale and a noted Mayanist. In 1963, Coe authored the Handbook of the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art and, in 1964, he was appointed Advisor for Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks, a position he would hold through 1979. Coe also gave the first Pre-Columbian public lecture at Dumbarton Oaks. On February 7, 1964, he delivered a paper, "The Beginning of Mesoamerican Civilization," which would be the basis for a 1966 Dumbarton Oaks publication, An Early Stone Pectoral from Southeastern Mexico. This would be the first of a now 37-volume series of occasional papers in a series published by Dumbarton Oaks titled Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology Studies.
Michael Coe also led the first Pre-Columbian symposium (then called a conference) in 1967. Titled the "Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the Olmec," the papers would be published by Dumbarton Oaks the following year in a volume edited by Elizabeth Benson. The Olmec civilization was of particular significance to Dumbarton Oaks, as one of the first pieces of Pre-Columbian art that Robert Bliss had acquired in 1912 was an Olmec jadeite carving, although at the time of its purchase it was not yet recognized as being Olmec in origin. In addition, scholarly understanding of the antiquity of the Olmec culture had recently profited from the advent of carbon-14 dating technology, which helped to date the Olmec civilization to early within Pre-Columbian history (ca. 1500–300 BC).
After the death of Mildred Bliss in 1969 and the appointment of a new director, William Royall Tyler, who served from 1969 to 1977, Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks began to quickly evolve into a research program that was parallel, if smaller in scale, to the Byzantine Studies program. (The Garden and Landscape Studies program, then called Studies in Garden and Landscape Architecture, underwent a similar transformation at that time.) In 1970, the Robert Woods Bliss Fellowship in Pre-Columbian Studies was created, and the first fellowship was awarded to Arthur G. Miller. Miller worked for two years on a catalogue of the Teotihuacán mural fragments in Mexico, work that Dumbarton Oaks published as The Mural Painting of Teotihuacán in 1973. In 1971, the number of Bliss fellow appointments in Pre-Columbian Studies was increased to two with the appointment of the first doctoral candidate junior fellow, S. Jeffrey K. Wilkerson. In 1973, the program invited its first visiting scholar, Floyd G. Lounsbury. Summer fellowship appointments were first made in 1980.
The Pre-Columbian Studies program evolved in other ways as well. Although the program was initially grounded in the collection and the early publications and lectures were focused on Pre-Columbian art history, the research program quickly grew to be more inclusive of the varied disciplines that make up Pre-Columbian studies. Pre-Columbian history, anthropology, ethnography, and especially archaeology became important components of the studies program. This was due in large part to the next program director and curator, Elizabeth Hill Boone, and the noted archaeologist, Gordon R. Willey, who had served on the Board of Advisors since 1963 and would transition to the board of Senior Fellows in the 1970s. He was an influential chair of the senior fellows committee for over a decade between 1973 and 1986. During this period, the Pre-Columbian library also grew exponentially under the stewardship of librarian Bridget Gazzo and transitioned from a specialized art library to a world-class comprehensive collection. Since 1963, the Pre-Columbian library has since grown to more than 33,000 volumes.
In his oral history interview, former director of Pre-Columbian Studies, Jeffrey Quilter, emphasized the unique significance of the Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Studies program:
Pre-Columbian studies as a field or a discipline or area, realm, arena of discussion or interaction, really only exists at Dumbarton Oaks. So, by the very framing of the discourse as Pre-Columbian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks created a place and a space where art historians and field archaeologists and those who work in the early colonial period on documents and those who work in remote antiquity can all—not always all at the same time, but over the long haul, over years—have a place to meet, exchange views, and interact in ways that they often don't get to do, or at least get to do as easily, elsewhere.
Midday mealtimes have always played an important role in the culture of Dumbarton Oaks, providing an opportunity for fellows and staff to both socialize and strengthen interdepartmental bonds. For over sixty years, midday dining took place in the Fellows Building (now the Guest House; see post) until the Refectory was opened in the fall of 2006, occupying a space that had once been the director's house. Dining, however, did not always include the entire institution. Prior to the directorship of Giles Constable, from 1977 to 1984 (see post), only the faculty and the Fellows dined together; the general staff were excluded. Constable, in an effort to "democratize" Dumbarton Oaks, both opened up the midday meal to all staff and fellows and switched the dining style from a formal, served affair to buffet-style, allowing diners to come at their convenience and sit where they wanted. Constable remembered this change in his oral history interview:
Of course, when I went there, the memory of Mrs. Bliss serving tea and Sirarpie Der Nersessian presiding at the lunch table and ringing the bell for the servants to come in was still there. And there was this rather strong and not altogether bad sense of being one large family with a number of family retainers. But that is not the basis upon which a serious scholarly institution can run. And on the straight-forward level, one of my first initiatives was to open up the Fellows Building. But even so, the feelings of resentment were so great that some of the staff would never come to lunch. Above all, Irene Vaslef, who is my dear friend, still is, she absolutely refused to come to lunch because she had so bitterly resented being kept out for so many years. And I absolutely sympathized with that.
Today, fellows and staff continue to enjoy the midday dining tradition at Dumbarton Oaks in the Refectory, sharing in chef Hector Paz's delicious and eclectic preparations. Following are some images of the midday meal at Dumbarton Oaks.]]>
At the end of November, 1940, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection was formally conveyed to the President and Fellows of Harvard College by the founders, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss. The magnificent gift, consisting of the former residence of Mr. and Mrs. Bliss with the beautiful gardens, of the famous collection, and the excellent Fine Arts Library, envisaged also the continued acquisition of objects for the Collection, the further development of the Library, and the pursuit of research in the Byzantine and Mediaeval humanities.
Though connected with Harvard, Dumbarton Oaks could be developed in a direction which would make it possible for other than Harvard students to partake in its activities. By admitting only students with a record of some years of graduate work, a patent weakness in the present academic training of young scholars could be corrected. Normally, a graduate student who has passed his generals for the doctor's degree must rush into a job which absorbs him completely. He can hardly spare the time to work on his thesis, and his scholarly training has come to an end at a point where it just begins to dawn on him what scholarship and original research mean. At least for a number of particularly able students, Dumbarton Oaks, as its founders had foreseen, could offer an opportunity for research and intellectual development unhampered by a heavy burden of duties, since it was not difficult to provide at Dumbarton Oaks attractive living quarters and study rooms. . . . We expect that eventually a certain regularity in the yearly turn-over of older Fellows into suitable positions elsewhere and their replacement by younger scholars will develop, which would provide at the same time for a continuous circulation of new blood, and for the establishment of the necessary tradition and continuity in research and scholarship.
There are two serious lacunae in the scholarly equipment at the disposal of the scholar who investigates the problem: first, the written sources have never been systematically collected; secondly, while the smaller objects like ivories, manuscripts, etc., have been studied and published, the monumental material, consisting of structures and of their sculptural and pictorial decoration, has never been comprehensively investigated and coordinated. It is not difficult to account for this neglect. Both tasks are of such a scope that no single scholar could hope to tackle them successfully. But we were in a more fortunate position. Dumbarton Oaks offered an opportunity to fill the gap and thus to make an important contribution to the solution of the crucial problem which had defied the efforts of earlier scholars.
The research program of Dumbarton Oaks . . . implies that individual efforts of a group of scholars are directed towards a common goal of broad historical scope. That means that to a certain degree the individual scholar yields his independence in favor of collaboration with other scholars. I hope my report on the program has shown that the limitation of independence is in fact negligible and involves no sacrifice on the part of the individual that would endanger his scholarly integrity or would entail any suppression of original thought and independent judgment.
—W. Koehler, "The Dumbarton Oaks Program and the Principle of Collaborative Research," Speculum 18, No. 1 (January, 1943), 118–123.
At Dumbarton Oaks, the junior fellows had been working to build the institution's Research Archives on Byzantine sites in Europe and therefore had specialized knowledge of European and North African cities, monuments, and artworks. In 1943, they were asked to join Harvard's American Defense Group and to "contribute to the war effort important information concerning works of art in the following countries: Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Tunisia." Their task was to prepare for the commission detailed lists and manuals on the art, monuments, and customs of these areas. In a letter of July 6, 1943, the Harvard Group's Dr. Hugh O'Neill Hencken, curator of European archaeology at the Peabody Museum, wrote to Milton Anastos, then a Dumbarton Oaks junior fellow:
Recent correspondence with the War Department makes it clear that our lists should be made in terms of culture in general rather than of art alone. Consequently, items should be starred not only in accordance with their artistic and scholarly importance, but with regard to what value, sentimental or otherwise, is set upon them by the local population. Wherever possible, this value should be briefly explained.
We are also asked to supply information about the culture of the population in general, their religion, national and religious festivals, including pilgrimages (if possible with the dates on which these occur), and any special or unusual customs, a knowledge of which would aid American troops stationed in the region.
Margaret Ames Alexander, a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, was assigned Hungary and Tunisia. Her report on Hungary exemplifies the War Department's needs as described in the letter to Anastos. Alexander's report includes a basic introduction to Hungary, information regarding its council on monuments, festivals, pilgrimages, holidays, and a detailed list of monuments and artworks. However, it was her work on Tunisia for the Commission that fostered her lifelong interest in the Roman and early Byzantine floor mosaics in that country, and her later detailed study of the mosaics built her scholarly career.]]>
The Byzantine Studies program had its first fellows in 1941, the Pre-Columbian program in 1970, and the Garden and Landscape program in 1972. Since 1970, the interaction among scholars of these different disciplines has proven to be fruitful, and many scholars who have spent time at Dumbarton Oaks fondly recall such interactions when they have been interviewed for the Dumbarton Oaks Oral History Project. For example, Pre-Columbian fellow Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle has spoken about the value of the weekly reports that are attended by members of all three programs. He called the experience "always enriching," and noted that attending them made him able to see "the world from other people's points of view." Fasquelle also asserted that in order to study at Dumbarton Oaks, one had to be "willing to talk a language that isn't just your own" and "be open to exposure to other fields and other ways of looking at data," and that the results of such exchange could "only be productive and good." He even went so far as to say that his archaeology fundamentally profited from the interdisciplinary interaction at Dumbarton Oaks.
In a similar manner, Annemarie Weyl Carr (Byzantine fellow, visiting fellow, junior fellow, and visiting scholar) discussed how individuals in different fields shared "common curiosities," which had "been very exciting to look at together." Carr reflected that it was through her interactions with members of other fields, particularly in the Pre-Columbian Studies program, that she "discovered anthropology," a breakthrough that proved to be "critical" for the success of her studies. Profound dialogue could even take place in more casual times and places. Byzantine Studies fellow Elizabeth A. Fisher remarked that it was a conversation "just over lunch" with a scholar in another department that "opened [her] eyes" and induced her to consider "human capacities that [she] hadn't thought about."
Interdepartmental interactions at Dumbarton Oaks can be fostered in many ways. One way is through shared residency, formerly in the Fellows Building and now in the Fellowship House. These "close quarters" allow for the spontaneous meeting of neighbors. Collaborative projects also facilitate a "better mixing" of fellows in the words of Mark Laird, who cites the contemporary art installations in the gardens as one such venture that has resulted in a "better harmony at the institutional level." Another example is the ability of the fellows to attend events such as colloquia and symposia sponsored by programs other than their own. Peter Jacobs, a former Garden and Landscape Studies senior fellows and the first recipient of the Beatrix Farrand Distinguished Fellowship, said he "enjoyed very, very much" attending the presentations of Fellows in different fields.
Maintenance of rapport among the three branches did not come without its challenges. Many scholars remember a time when it was perceived that the standing among the three programs was not equitable. Many thought that the Byzantine program was favored because it was the first to be established and that, with the creation of Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Studies, these later programs necessarily had a junior status. When asked how Dumbarton Oaks had solved the problems of coexistence, former director Giles Constable replied:
Well, I doubt if they'll ever be permanently solved, I think, the way you have three such different programs, not to mention the physical side of the garden and the museum. I don't think that people often realize that D.O., although a fairly small institution, is an immensely complicated one with very different interests in these three fields which, inevitably to some extent, are jockeying for position with each other. The Byzantine was the senior program. And the Byzantinists, not only at D.O. itself but throughout the world, have always thought of it really as a Byzantine Institution and that most of the resources should be going there. Any cut-back they saw as very much at their expense.
This perception notwithstanding, the directors of Dumbarton Oaks have endeavored to make the three programs at Dumbarton Oaks increasingly equitable and productively intertwined. It has been the mission of each successive administration to obtain a balanced consideration of each of the programs so as to maximize their individual potentials as well as the potential of Dumbarton Oaks as a whole. And an important benefit of this effort is that Dumbarton Oaks' scholars, often to their surprise, obtain inspiration from and engage in meaningful discourse with their colleagues from other disciplines. In the words of Henry Ford: "Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success."]]>
It is our hope and expectation that the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens may in time attain as high a standing in the study of, and for its publications on, Garden Design and Ornament as the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection has already attained for its scholarly work and research. Thus will the unusual potentialities of its Gardens be fully realized.
A big question was where to house this new center. Conversion of various outbuildings, including the director's house, was considered as was the possibility of a new freestanding building, a prospect that at the time seemed too expensive. On August 16, 1949, Mildred Bliss wrote to Robert Patterson, who had become a consulting landscape architect:
Mrs. Farrand writes that she feels the cool house is too small, even for a start of what the Dumbarton Oaks Garden Centre ought to become. However, as I see no other suitable place, and as building is out of the question for a few years, and as for every reason—Harvard psychology, founders' age, economic conditions, etc.—I think it would be better to start, get the centre running and able to prove its usefulness. Later a more spacious and suitable centre can be constructed.
The creation of a brick-and-mortar center, however, was not to happen until the early 1960s. Consequently, Mildred Bliss's focus momentarily shifted from a research center analogous to the Byzantine Studies program to a "dirt-gardening" approach where garden fellows would work directly out of doors. In 1952, an advisory committee was formed, and soon thereafter fellowships were awarded. However, the annual reports indicate that the program was strictly praxis oriented. Indeed, the annual reports listed the program first under the "Gardens" section and later under "Gardens and Garden Library."
In the second half of the 1950s, things began to change. In 1956, the first true landscape architecture fellow, Ralph E. Griswold, was appointed, thereby initiating a scholarly fellowship program in garden design and garden history. In early 1957, a new advisory committee was appointed, and this committee recommended establishing three categories of fellowships: a senior research fellowship in landscape architecture (for a "mature professional landscape architecture"), a junior research fellowship (for a recent graduate), and garden scholarships (for "possibly two or more undergraduate students").
In 1958, the Blisses and the institution began discussions on a new museum wing, to accommodate just about everything that at the time had not yet found permanent housing: the Robert Woods Bliss Collection of Pre-Columbian Art and its library, the Byzantine coins and seals collections, Antioch mosaics which were in storage, and the landscape architecture rare book collection and garden library. Through the Blisses' patronage, Dumbarton Oaks commissioned Philip Johnson to design this addition, which was slated to be built where the Rare Book Collection presently is located. His building was envisioned as twice the size of the structure he eventually built in the Copse. The Blisses admired the modern design and, as Mildred Bliss put it, were "ready to try something new;" however a domed glass pavilion essentially in the front yard of the Main House was too radical a departure for them to countenance. They therefore decided to construct two new additions, putting the Pre-Columbian Collection and coins and seals in a reduced-scale Johnson building somewhat out of sight. Thus was born the Garden Library and its eighteenth-century style Rare Book Reading Room, designed by the more conservative Frederic Rhinelander King. With this addition, the landscape architecture center was brought indoors.
After the death of Mildred Bliss in 1969, the Garden Advisory Committee realized that the existing program needed to change. In their 1969 report, they wrote:
Fellowships were awarded exclusively to professionals in Landscape Architecture. However, the number of applicants from the practical side was never very great, and in recent years the Fellowships have been awarded to persons in related fields who have a scholarly or historical interest in garden and landscape architecture. . . . Thus the profession of Landscape Architecture does not appear at this time to be a very promising source of candidates for Fellowships.
They therefore recommended that the library be headed by a scholar who "could direct the building of the collection and also find qualified candidates for the Fellowship program." In 1971, the program held its first annual landscape architectural symposium, "The Italian Garden," chaired by David Coffin. And in 1972, a studies program in Garden and Landscape Architecture was officially inaugurated, and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall was appointed the first director of the program; she remained in that position for the next sixteen years.
The Studies in Garden and Landscape Architecture program had evolved from the praxis-oriented gardening focus to a scholarly program concerned with the history of garden design. As stated in the minutes of the Garden Advisory Committee meeting of January 9, 1973: "The research program should emphasize the study of the history of landscape architecture and the history of horticulture." The Garden Advisory Committee was dissolved in 1974 and replaced by the Senior Fellows Committee in 1975. In the late 1970s, under the directorship of Giles Constable, Dumbarton Oaks standardized its fellowships for all of its studies programs—Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape. Under the new structure, fellowships, junior fellowships, and summer fellowships were to be granted, and this system continues to the present day.]]>
Lester Houck, the first student in residence, arrived last Friday, and is apparently very happy in the quarters. Several members of the American Council of Learned Societies who were here last Saturday for tea and to see the collection spoke very highly of him and said that he was exactly the type of person who should be here and that if all of our students were of the same quality, Dumbarton Oaks would be setting a very high standard in scholarship. Then yesterday, Miss Florence Day, who is chiefly interested in Persian and Islamic art arrived. I put her into the room formerly used by Miss Godden as a sitting room, as Miss Godden assured me that she did not need the room at all. As it has its own bath and is separate from the other rooms on the third floor, it was most convenient to be able to use it. I did not want to put her down in the garage all alone. Professor Morey is scheduled to arrive on Sunday with two of his pupils. Morey, of course, will be in the house, and the two students will be in the quarters with Houck. This will fill up one end of the quarters. I doubt whether there will be any more resident students this year. Focillon is particularly happy about this as he, as well as Koehler, feel that for this year at least it is wise not to have too many.
Lester Clarence Houck (1911–80), the first junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, received a baccalaureate in 1934 and a doctorate in 1937 from the University of Michigan. His dissertation was titled "The History of Leo Diaconus, An Edition," which he planned to prepare as a publication at Dumbarton Oaks, although he never brought the work to press. In 1939, he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
In the Underworld Courier 1, no. 17 (June 5, 1941), the occasional newsletter that the staff at Dumbarton Oaks sent to the Blisses in California, he is described as
six feet, six inches tall. He lowers his head when going through many a door; is lean—as so tall a person is apt to be—with a head which is distinguished in an intellectual way. The written word, the recorded thought, is his absorbing passion. Perhaps his selections from the research library are along certain definite lines, but from the general literature sections, he borrows, 4 or 5 at a time, books ranging from Dante and Gerard Hopkins to Harold Nicolson and Maurice Baring. His humor is plentiful, if pedagogic, and though his scholastic opinions appear to be quite firmly established, he has a pleasant receptivity to the potential usefulness of books with titles such as: Mazes and Labyrinths. . . Origins of Applied Chemistry. . .
On May 30, 1941, at the end of his fellowship, Houck wrote to Mildred Bliss:
When I left Italy in September I felt that I should not find any place in America where my researches could be appropriately carried on. I was astonished to find that you had conceived here a center for such studies. May I tell you how grateful I am for your having made possible this opportunity for me to carry on my studies in Byzantine history during these four months and my admiration for your generosity and vision?
He went on to recount the first "Commencement at Dumbarton Oaks, May 1941":
I presume that you have been made aware how much the presence of Prof. Focillon and Prof. Morey, perfect Nestors, have contributed to the success of our mutual work. Last Tuesday after the final colloquium we had dinner together and then "exercises" in the music room in which degrees and diplomas, honoris causa, were bestowed in Latin. I have before me the citation or 'epitaph' I composed for Prof. Focillon and I have enclosed a copy with the thought that it might interest you.
Houck's Latin "epitaph" for Henri Focillon reads as follows:
Henricus Focillon, vir eruditissimus et reverendissimus, indigator et pacificator atrium Orientalium et Occidentalium earumque imperator benignus, fons et origo librorum, socius regalis horum Quercorum Dumbartonensium, cum Focus atrium, ut nomen suum indicat, focus calens, ardens, benevolub, jocosus, plenus inspirationis sit, hic et nunc Doctor Eloquentiae Convivalis, hoonoris causa, Quercorum proclamatur et omnibus privilegiis ad hanc honorem pertinentibus induitur!
Salve, Doctor!
[Henri Focillon, a man most learned and most reverend, investigator and pacifier of the arts of the East and the West and their benign emperor, fountain and origin of books, royal Fellow of these Dumbarton Oaks, since he is a Fireplace (as his name indicates) of the arts, a fireplace warm, ardent, benevolent, jocose, full of inspiration, here and now is proclaimed Doctor of Convivial Eloquence of the Oaks, for the sake of the honor, and is endowed with all the privileges pertaining to the honor!
Hail, Doctor!]
Houck was a junior Fellow between February and June and September and December 1941. However, when the United States entered the Second World War after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he left Dumbarton Oaks and joined the War Department's Office of Strategic Services, an intelligence agency, where he was chairman of the Dissemination Branch in the office of the Assistant Secretary of War. He remained there until at least 1946 and did not return to Dumbarton Oaks.]]>
Wilhelm Koehler was born on December 17, 1884, in Reval, Russia (modern Tallin, Estonia). He studied art history, completing his dissertation in 1906. In 1932, he became the Kuno Franke Visiting Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard University. After Harvard's medieval art historian, A. Kingsley Porter, died in a drowning accident in 1933, Koehler was chosen to replace him. At the inauguration of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection on November 1–2, 1940, Koehler gave one of the inaugural lectures, "Byzantine Art in the West," which was subsequently published in the first volume of Dumbarton Oaks Papers.
As a medievalist and a Harvard University professor, Koehler was seen as a natural choice to help shape Dumbarton Oaks's academic program. He was invited, therefore, in 1941 to be one of three senior research fellows (also called senior fellows) and to help direct the research of the first class of junior fellows. The other two senior research fellows were Charles Rufus Morey and Henri Focillon. At the time, the nascent academic program at Dumbarton Oaks had no definite direction. Charles Rufus Morey arranged for the junior fellows to deliver a series of five colloquia under his direction. According to Paul Sachs, chairman of the Dumbarton Oaks Administrative Committee, Morey was "anxious to start a series of seminars of a more scholarly nature than Professor Focillon's symposium in which he hopes the students will play an important part." In the May 13, 1941, edition of the Underworld Courier, the newsletter that the Dumbarton Oaks staff sent each week in 1941 to Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss in California, one of these colloquia is referenced:
As to the second of the Colloquium meetings organized by Prof. Morey for the discussions, among a small group of scholars, of problems taken from their work, or from that of the D.O. junior fellows, Miss Florence Day spoke about the glazed pottery of Mesopotamia in the Parthian Period. Her talk was illustrated by photographs and drawings from her own notes, thrown on the screen by means of our new lantern which can project opaque objects as well as normal slides. Miss Day speaks clearly and with assurance, and made her points well. A lively discussion developed afterward, in which Myron Smith, Dr. Holland and Professor Morey took part. Miss Day answered their questions ably and made an excellent showing throughout. One of the main points in her description of Roman-Syrian wares related to the so-called Parthian pottery was illustrated by the lamp from the attendant's desk at the main entrance to the new wing! We removed shade and globe and had it in a place of honor as Exhibit A. There is a resulting uneasiness in the thought of so really good an object being subject to the hazards of its exposed position.
Before long, however, confusions in the direction and nature of the academic program at Dumbarton Oaks began to become evident. For the academic year 1941–42, director John Thacher decided to make Koehler senior fellow in charge of research, in which capacity he would direct the junior fellows in collaborative research on Byzantine monuments. This research was to be assembled in what came to be called the Archives of Byzantine Art for future scholars. Paul Sachs described the new endeavor:
A part of each Fellow's time is devoted to his own individual investigation; the rest of his time is spent on a clearly defined central plan of research, and this central plan constitutes the backbone of our scholarly activities. It has been decided to undertake simultaneously two collateral and interdependent projects, the one devoted to the written sources, the other to the monuments of the period. The first of the two projects, the collection of the sources with a view to future publication as "Fontes" of Byzantine art, requires no detailed explanation. A brief comment on the second project may be of value in illustrating the organization of that part of our research work devoted to the monumental remains of the period. A portion of the Roman Empire is assigned to each Fellow. In the course of his work, he becomes thoroughly familiar with the peculiar artistic dialect of the region and its development during the period in question. In regular meetings presided over by the "Senior Fellow in charge of Research," reports on the progress of the work in each region are given. These meetings offer the opportunity for a continuous exchange of views and discoveries between the Fellows who are obliged to relate their material to the background of contemporary developments in the regions. The accumulated evidence resulting from these studies and discussions—a critical and detailed summary of all available information concerning each monument and photographic reproductions of all pertinent illustrative material—is filed at Dumbarton Oaks under the name of "Archives of Byzantine Art." In the progress of the work, the assembled archaeological data will be integrated with the collateral project, the "Fontes," devoted to the collection of the written sources.
Paul Sachs wrote enthusiastically to the Blisses about the group research dynamic, calling it "a beautiful and inspiring thing" and praising the "camaraderie" that Koehler fostered, steering the Junior Fellows away from "tension" while avoiding "pedantry." However, Mildred Bliss, a devotee of Henri Focillon's more contemplative approach to scholarship, did not fully appreciate Koehler's interest in detail-based collaborative research, and their relationship, already somewhat tenuous, grew increasingly strained. Indeed, when Koehler's appointment at Dumbarton Oaks had first been announced, Mildred Bliss wrote John Thacher from California:
You can imagine with how much interest we await the general result of Prof. Koehler's visit. He will give great intellectual stimulus to the staff and one likes to think that he is going to be closely interested in Dumbarton Oaks. You won't forget, will you, that Focillon does not agree with Koehler's approach to his subject and that it is Focillon who seems to us to have the Golden Key.
Thacher wrote her back:
You know how I feel about Koehler and I hope that as you get to know him better that you will think that perhaps he, too, may have a golden key, if perhaps of a slightly smaller size!
However, Wilhelm Koehler's collaborative research plan for the junior fellows at Dumbarton Oaks was not destined to endure. In February 1944, Koehler developed a bad case of pneumonia and was hospitalized for a few weeks. In his absence, Senior Fellows George La Piana and Edward Kennard Rand asked each junior fellow to provide an outline of his work, describe his plans for the following year, and provide any additional comments that he had on the functioning of the institution. They also requested that several of the junior fellows write papers for a symposium that was scheduled to be held six weeks later. La Piana and Rand circumvented Koehler's authority by making these changes in order to diminish Koehler's Archives project, as they felt strongly that "the time has come to broaden the scope of creative scholarly work at Dumbarton Oaks." Although they felt that the Archives project was "a very significant part of the work at Dumbarton Oaks," they also asserted that it could not "be allowed to develop at a rate which would handicap the whole conception of scholarly activities at Dumbarton Oaks."
In the end, Koehler wrote a detailed description of the Archives project and its aims, which he submitted for a Board of Scholars meeting. Rand and La Piana attended this meeting, but Koehler did not. Using the conclusions the Board of Scholars reached at this meeting, the Administrative Committee subsequently decided that the Archives project should be adjusted so that Junior Fellows would no longer be expected to split their time; instead, they could either work solely on the Archives project, if they chose, or on their own project. When apprised of the decision to lessen the amount of time spent on researching monuments for the Archives, Koehler responded: "You can count me out completely. I shall not play ball." He immediately resigned his responsibilities at Dumbarton Oaks. Paul Sachs reported:
The Committee has learned with regret of Dr. Koehler's decision to withdraw from the Board of Scholars and as Senior Fellow in charge of the Archives, especially as the Committee fully appreciates the important contribution he has made to the work at Dumbarton Oaks in his inauguration and direction of the Archives. In view of his emphatic statement to the Chairman, the Committee can only accept Dr. Koehler's decision and will proceed to make arrangements for the coming year accordingly.
The Byzantine art historian Kurt Weitzmann, a friend of Koehler and eventually a member of the Board of Scholars, later called the whole situation "deplorable."
On May 6, 1944, Koehler wrote to Dean Buck on the Administrative Committee explaining that his decision to end his involvement with Dumbarton Oaks and the Archives project was in no way shaped by "petty arguments," but rather because he believed that the Archives project (which he said was "well advanced and bearing its first scholarly fruits") would now be "doomed to failure" under the influence of the Administrative Committee. Witnessing the end of his program for collaborative study just as it was beginning to show clear signs of success devastated Koehler. However, he would remain affiliated with Harvard: he was named William Dorr Boardman Professor in 1950 and retired emeritus in 1953. Koehler continued his scholarly work until his death on November 3, 1959.]]>
JSR: You're welcome.
AdC: And so just to begin, how did you first come to know about Dumbarton Oaks and what were your initial impressions of the institution?
JSR: Well, I knew about the – about Dumbarton Oaks long before I ever visited there, by reputation. But I guess my first real knowledge about Dumbarton Oaks would have been when I was a graduate student and the conferences that Dumbarton Oaks organized, particularly the conferences on the Olmec and the Chavin, which were subjects that particularly interested me. And the publications of those conferences I certainly read as a graduate student; they were cited frequently. So, I came to know Dumbarton Oaks by its reputation long before I ever visited the institution. My first visit to Dumbarton Oaks was at the invitation of Elizabeth Boone, who was the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies at that time, back in – I think it was about '92, maybe '92, '93. She invited me there to discuss possibilities of organizing a conference, and we discussed at that time several different possible themes. That was my first time to really truly enter the building and get to know Dumbarton Oaks. She put me up at the Fellows Hall, which I think it goes under a different name these days, and I was very impressed with the elegance of the institution. And what impressed me even more than the elegance and the collections, I think, was the warmth and hospitality I felt from the staff, from the administrators, and from the Fellows that were there – that feeling, immediate feeling of collegiality that one had there. It was a very inspiring place to be. I can certainly see the value for senior and junior scholars spending time in the library, but also spending time rubbing elbows with other colleagues. I particularly liked being able to become acquainted with the Byzantine scholars a bit, learning more about their studies.
AdC: And so you've been involved with some symposia and some of the resulting publications at Dumbarton Oaks. Could you characterize the symposia at Dumbarton Oaks and what the atmosphere is like at those conferences?
JSR: Let's see how to characterize the conferences. They're very – they take on the feeling that one gets, kind of a very respectful feeling of scholarship that Dumbarton Oaks exhibits and you feel immediately when you enter the building. They are always very well organized and, yes, one has a feeling that if you're in the audience that you should feel free to ask questions and interact with those who are delivering the papers. There's a real strong sense of hospitality. The hospitality is outstanding, from Dumbarton Oaks, from just greeting you at the door as you arrive at the conference and the coffee and refreshments that are served, the banquet, it's just a very wonderful experience. I would say, and at the same time, there's a – kind of a very, a sense of seriousness to these conferences, so that you right away get involved in taking an interest in the subjects that are being discussed.
AdC: Are there any symposia that stand out in your mind as being more successful than others?
JSR: I guess it depends on your measure of success. Some of the conferences have attracted larger audiences than others, but I'm always surprised at the good attendance, which has been at all of the conferences. Even when the conferences seem to focus on what I had expected to be quite solitary subjects, they've attracted a large audience and a somewhat diverse audience, not just the people whose field of research fit particularly into the theme. I guess one of the conferences that I enjoyed the most, besides the Formative Ecuadorian conference that I was involved with, was the Inca conference, which attracted the senior scholars in the field. And one had a chance, as not quite that senior scholar, to be able to observe the interaction among the very revered Inca ethno-historians at the conference. And on that occasion, we also were – the Senior Fellows and the participants in the symposium were invited to a kind of soiree at the home of the Peruvian ambassador, which was quite an occasion. So, that was a conference that particularly impressed me.
AdC: Wow. So, were you able to get to some of the off-site symposia that Dumbarton Oaks was able to organize?
JSR: No, and that's something that happened after I moved off the Senior Fellows board, although the one in Peru was being organized at the time I was still on the Senior Fellows Committee, and I had hoped to get to that, but I was unable to get there. But I was pretty pleased that the new innovative thing to do, partly stimulated by the renovations that were happening at Dumbarton Oaks, which made it impossible to, I think, for one, possibly two years, to actually hold it on site at Dumbarton Oaks.
AdC: So, speaking of being on the Senior Fellows Committee, what were your responsibilities as a Senior Fellow, and how would you describe the atmosphere of those meanings?
JSR: Responsibility, as I saw it as a Senior Fellow, was to help – well, we were expected to attend two committee meetings each year, one in the fall at the time that the conference was held, and another in January or early February to help to make decisions about who would be Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks in the coming year. So, I saw that my responsibility in each of those instances was to offer advice and to enter into discussions about things that were of concern to the pre-Columbian program each time. Most of our time, I would say, was spent on considering proposals for future symposia and reviewing applications for the fellowships, and then deciding on the fellowships, which was quite a difficult process every year. And there were many more excellent applications than there were possible fellowships available. In the time that Ned Keenan was the Director, plans were underway for the building of the new library and other facilities there at Dumbarton Oaks. So, he would bring blueprints of those to the meetings, and we would look them over, and he would occasionally ask for our opinions about what changes – how the changes might impact or effect the pre-Columbian program. So, those are, I think, the responsibilities: to offer a perspective. And I'm an Andeanist, so from a professional point of view, I would try to reflect the Andean archaeology perspective. Others were Andeanists, but art historians, and Mesoamericanists, and so on. So, each of us tried, I think, our best to try to represent our own perspectives. But, generally we – there wasn't often much disagreement among us. I always enjoyed going to those meetings. They were always very, very civilized. I found them interesting, and again, the hospitality of Dumbarton Oaks was excellent and made it a very pleasant visit.
AdC: As a Senior Fellow, do you think that Dumbarton Oaks was able to strike a fair balance when accepting applications from various potential Junior Fellows – striking a fair balance between the Andeanists, and Mesoamericanists, art historians, and archaeologists?
JSR: We certainly tried to, and I think we did. We were – in selecting Fellows – we were, in the first place, selecting them on the basis of merit or how well they would fit into the community of scholars at Dumbarton Oaks, and how well suited their project was to making use of the resources of Dumbarton Oaks. But beyond that we also tried to consider whether we had more representations of art historians and good representation of Mesoamericanists and Andeanists. It wasn't always true that we had the numerical balance in any one year, but I think over time, while there might be more Andeanists one year than Mesoamericanists, the next year there very likely would be more Mesoamericanists than Andeanists, and I guess the thing would be true for art historians and archaeologists. There, in my memory – I'd need to go back and actually count it – but in my memory there were probably more applications from Mesoamericanists than from Andeanists, largely because there simply are more archaeologists who work in Mesoamerica, studying Mesoamerica, than there are Andeanists. So, there was probably a bias there, and for that reason. I would guess, probably, that was reflected in the number of fellowships over the years. But we certainly did try to achieve a balance.
AdC: And did the Senior Fellows have any interaction with the Fellows and Junior Fellows once they were selected?
JSR: Yes, it would be the next year. So, in January we would have selected the Fellows for the coming year, and the conference in October would be our first chance to interact with them. And since many of us would be staying in the Fellows Building, that was the same building in which the lunches were served, and so, I think, our first interaction would be with them over lunch time. And then the Director would usually arrange times, social times for us to meet with them in the afternoon. So, we were able to get acquainted with them, I think – perhaps not spend as much time as I would have liked, but certainly we were able to spend time and get to know the Junior Fellows.
AdC: And in addition to these responsibilities that you just mentioned, did the Senior Fellows Committee ever discuss larger theoretical issues when it came to pre-Columbian studies.
JSR: You mean, getting into really academic discussions about pre-Columbian issues? I guess, if that's what you mean, the extent to which we might get involved in such discussions would be, if we were, as we were reviewing different proposals for future conferences. We might get involved in discussing themes that we thought might be pursued within the context of conferences or discuss new – what we thought might be an idea, a marginal idea for a conference, and who might be approached to organize such a conference. But within the meetings themselves, we wouldn't have engaged in discussing, say, our ideas or evaluations of archaeological or art historical theories that might pertain to the archaeology. But outside the meetings, at dinner, or as we were walking back to where we were living, we very likely would engage in such discussions.
AdC: I guess, in addition to that, I wanted to get at sort of whether or not, as a Senior Fellows Committee, you discussed Dumbarton Oaks's roll in pre-Columbian studies; whether or not it could expand its focus geographically into the American Southwest or temporally into the early colonial period and that sort of thing.
JSR: Yes, we did discuss that on occasion. Certainly, I think, I can't remember the name of the conference, there was one proposal that would have involved the American Southwest, and we discussed whether or not we should encourage that and whether or not that might set a precedent that we might regret later. Also, with respect to South America, extending beyond the Andean region, which we did, and we had one conference on what's called the "intermediate area of Chibcha," and that took some discussion. There were some proposals having to do with Mesoamerica that would have involved colonial, a sort of colonial theme. The proposal was good, and we went back and forth on deciding whether or not we should venture into historical periods or not. So yes, we did get involved in that, and we didn't all agree on how to pursue that. There were aspects – I can't remember which conference it was right now – aspects of a conference where there was going to be some historical theme, at least partly, part of the conference. And I think we managed to convince ourselves that it was justifiably included within the purview of pre-Columbian studies.
AdC: So, was it your opinion that generally these sort of expansions were good or bad?
JSR: I think they were good, yes. I'm in favor of being more inclusive.
AdC: And you – while you were a Senior Fellow, Jeffrey Quilter was the Director of Pre-Columbian Studies for that whole tenure?
JSR: That's correct.
AdC: And how do you think he impacted the pre-Columbian program? Could you characterize his directorship?
JSR: Yes. I knew Elizabeth Boone briefly. My first interaction with Dumbarton Oaks was with Elizabeth Boone, and then at the time of the conference, and then when I became a Senior Fellow, Jeffrey had taken over, and I was really quite favorably impressed with both of them, in that both of them seemed to me people that took initiative. But of course I was working much more closely with Jeffrey. He was the person that really, I think, took a lot of initiative to try to maintain the standards, maintain the kinds of excellent programming that Dumbarton Oaks had had, to bring in some new ideas. And of course he was Director at the time when all the planning was going on for the renovations. So, he was working a lot with Ned on the aspects of the plans that would affect the Pre-Columbian Studies Program. And he would come back to the Senior Fellows Committee and discuss these with us and ask for our suggestions and our support. Not on some things. I don't know if you know that the Fellows in Pre-Columbian Studies used to be down in the basement area, and some people found that not a very pleasant place to work without any sunshine. So, he worked quite hard to try to get some space, which they now have, which is really beautiful space, very pleasant work place in the new library. So, in that regard, with respect to the space and with respect to programming, I think Jeffrey was a good leader and good director. I'm certain he worked very well with us in the Senior Fellows Committee.
AdC: And in a similar vein, did you have much interaction with the directors of Dumbarton Oaks as a whole while you were on the Senior Fellows Committee?
JSR: With Angeliki – not much informal interaction with her. She always attended the Senior Fellows meetings. She kept more to herself than say Ned Keenan did. She mostly attended the meetings and observed and listened and would enter in occasionally, in comparison to Ned, who had at times a tendency to enter in, let's say, a little more than he might have. But of course he was very much concerned about the new library, the renovations of the place, and would want to discuss that extensively. And also outside of the meetings, I saw that Ned took more time to try to interact with us individually.
AdC: And were there any parts of the goals of these directors, including Jeff Quilter, that you particularly liked or you particularly didn't like?
JSR: Mmm.
AdC: You touched a little bit about the renovation of the library and gaining new space for Pre-Columbian Studies. Is there anything else that pops out in your mind?
JSR: Well, I think what I particularly liked about Jeffrey was his ability to be, to provide leadership, and to be kind of flexible about things. There was a lot of focus on the changes that were going on, and I think we learned that we weren't going – that at some point the renovations were going to interfere with space for the symposium, so we were going to have to find another venue. It was Jeffrey that came up with the idea of going abroad and going to Peru, to set a precedent, the possibility of holding it elsewhere. So, I think, in terms of innovation, I would say that I particularly valued Jeffrey, and I can see that Joanne – I gave a talk in March at Dumbarton Oaks this year, and my first occasion to really see the inner workings of Dumbarton Oaks again – and I can see that Joanne Pillsbury has really followed on, in the footsteps of Jeffrey, in being a real leader and innovator as well, as well as continuing the tradition of hospitality of Dumbarton Oaks.
AdC: You've been involved with Dumbarton Oaks over a good number of years. How has the field of pre-Columbian studies at Dumbarton Oaks grown and changed since you first became involved?
JSR: It's grown. It hasn't really grown all that much. That was one of the concerns that we as the Senior Fellows Committee had, that in comparison to the Byzantine program, it didn't seem like we had as large a share of fellowships as we deserved. We had always a significant excess of good applications beyond what we could offer the way of Fellows. And my impression is that that has stayed pretty much the same. We each just – in my memory, every year we asked the overall director if, with the support of Jeffrey, if it would be possible to add another fellowship or two. And so, I know they're disappointed that that's never happened. Although perhaps if it had been allowed grow much, it would have lost that real collegial feeling that I think the Fellows get when they're there; a small group interacting amongst themselves. Having some of these conferences at other venues is certainly a way that it has changed, and certainly the new facilities – that's a big change. Those are about the only things that – there probably are changes that I'm simply not aware of.
AdC: Your remark about the disparity between Byzantine and pre-Columbian brought to my mind your earlier comment about how you got to know some of the Fellows and some of the Senior Fellows in Byzantine studies. Was this while you were a Senior Fellow?
JSR: Yes, while I was a Senior Fellow. There would be some of the Byzantine scholars staying in the Fellow's Hall, where I would stay when I went up there as a Senior Fellow. I usually stayed a couple of days afterward and arrived maybe a couple of days earlier. So, I'd spend time before the committee meeting and after the committee meeting. I might spend some time in the library doing some research of my own, and that would give me an opportunity to get to know them. And I also usually brought my wife. She usually came a long, and she's a very outgoing person, so she would engage some of the scholars in conversation. And then I would arrive and carry on conversation with them, so it was very nice.
AdC: Is fostering more of a relationship between these different branches something that you think Dumbarton Oaks should be more invested in?
JSR: I think it's a good idea. I find that cross-disciplinary interaction can be very stimulating, and can – when you're interacting almost all the time with scholars in your own field, the number of new ideas becomes more and more limited. When you interact occasionally with scholars from other fields, not even archaeologists or art historians, but in the case of Byzantine studies, it would be a different region of study and a different tradition of research from pre-Columbian studies. It introduces new ideas and can be very stimulating. So, I think it, from an intellectual point of view, it's something that Dumbarton Oaks should encourage.
AdC: How would you describe the roll Dumbarton Oaks has played in the development of pre-Columbian studies over the years, and what direction would you like to see its role take in the future?
JSR: Well, let's see, the role, how to characterize the role of pre-Columbian studies. I think it's set a kind of standard of scholarship that others have followed. It has focused, I think, research on particular topics and themes that otherwise might not have had that sort of focus. It's been related to the interaction in comparisons between archaeologists working in Mesoamerica and in the Andean region. I'm thinking of some of the conferences that derived from the Dumbarton Oaks conferences that were held elsewhere at times, that were stimulated by Dumbarton Oaks. It's provided the solid publication series, and I think I'd like to see it more or less continue in the direction that it's been going. And I mentioned I'd like to see the number of fellowships increased, and I think that that would be an important thing for it to do. But Dumbarton Oaks has been representative of somewhat conservative – from a theoretical point of view – somewhat conservative scholarship, that is, if you look at the symposia, you don't see a big impact of the kind of theoretical changes that occurred in archaeology from the 1960s through today. You see some influences, but you don't see that impact. You see more what I would describe as a cultural-historical approach, and I think that's because the archaeology has been tied partly to art history. And I think that's a good thing because there are other venues, there are other places that have marched off in other theoretical directions. So, I like the kind of steady course that Dumbarton Oaks has kept to over the years, and I'd like to see it continue in that direction.
AdC: How important do you think outreach to Latin America will be in the future of Dumbarton Oaks – Latin American scholars and Latin American universities?
JSR: I think very important. Of course it's hard to predict how things will develop in Latin America, but certainly the number of Latin American scholars has been increasing significantly in Latin America. The number of Peruvians, Ecuadorians, and Columbians who have gone ahead and gotten Ph.D.s and gone back to their countries is increasing. That could change again if economic conditions deteriorate. It's also true for Mexico; that's true for Central America, and I think that it's very important for Dumbarton Oaks to engage those scholars or involve them. We tried over the years to be sure we had some representation among the Fellows from Latin America, not just North Americans studying in Latin America, but Latin Americans who are studying Latin American archaeology coming to Dumbarton Oaks. I think they're pretty important, and I'd like to see some of the future conferences held in Latin America as well.
AdC: What other venues do you think might be good venues for such conferences?
JSR: Ecuador would be a good place. There are good museums that could accommodate them. Bogotá. Several places in Mexico. You could begin to get creative and hold some at some archaeological sites, but I wouldn't like to see it happen with great frequency because I think it's also very valuable to have them on the premises of Dumbarton Oaks. So, maybe once every five years or something like that would be what I would favor, having it somewhere else.
AdC: Well, I think you've answered just about all the questions I have. Is there anything else you'd like to add or any other stories or memories of your time at Dumbarton Oaks that you'd like to share?
JSR: No. I'd just like to, I guess, close by saying that, how much I enjoyed being a Senior Fellow, enjoyed all of my visits, and enjoyed the interactions and very much appreciated Dumbarton Oaks, and will continue to try to attend conferences, as I'm able.
AdC: Alright, well thank you so much for joining me today.
JSR: You're welcome.
AdC: I appreciate it.
JSR: Well, thank you for including me in this.
AdC: Absolutely.
JSR: Alright.
AdC: Alright. Take care.
JSR: You too. Bye-bye.
AdC: Bye-bye.]]>
AC: Thank you.
JWC: How did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?
AC: Well, it goes back a long time, because, I think, my first very clear memory of Dumbarton Oaks is 1955, I think – it may have been 1954 – when I was a junior high school student. My father's cousin, Hugo Buchthal, had a fellowship here, and my father was very fond of Hugo, and so we came to visit him here; and I confess, my memory of that place, with its sort of owl-eyed, European-looking, terribly earnest people, seemed little short of bizarre. And had anyone told me at that moment that my future life would be involved with Dumbarton Oaks, I think I would have frozen in terror. But that relationship between my father and Hugo Buchthal was in fact very germinal for my own life. My father enjoyed his relationship with Hugo very much, was very interested in his work, and so when, as a college student, I became interested in the Middle Ages, it just seemed to me that everything I was taught in college was hopelessly incomplete, because, somehow, the crank that was making western Europe turn, I believed, was being turned farther east. And so I retained the sort of curiosity about what was happening in this place called Byzantium. Then, after I graduated from college, I went to the Walters Art Gallery and professed to be interested in the influence of Byzantium on the West; and Ernst Kitzinger, who knew my mother, said that I could come and use the library. And at this point, coming back, it was absolutely magic; it was just remarkable. He would let me sit up at the reading room, at a big table – I could surround myself with books – and he invited me to the 1964 symposium on the Crusader art, which was one of the great symposia. So, I went off to graduate school to study the impact of Byzantium on the West, but soon thereafter decided that you couldn't really study the impact of Byzantium on the West without knowing what Byzantium was, and that's been the question I've been pursuing ever since.
JWC: So, do you remember any of the things you encountered on that first trip you made here that may have come back when you started to study here, things that seemed inconsequential that you then realized would be instrumental to your learning.
AC: I think unquestionably the sense of intellectual commitment, which just pervaded – I got the sense that this was – if you wanted to be intellectually committed, boy this was the place for that. I found the objects in the museum just inscrutable. And at that point, in '54, I liked anything the ladies wore – large, big skirts and lots of fabric. And sort of – some silver plates, some busted stones? I couldn't understand what people were interested in.
JWC: And do you think that the interest you later developed in the West and then in the East was influenced at all by these early experiences you had, where you didn't necessarily know but later, or was it something you developed on your own?
AC: I'm sure that, from the eager conversations between my father and Hugo Buchthal, that curiosity was instilled at that point. It took shape very, very slowly.
JWC: Now when you came back as an undergraduate, were there any other people who, like you, maybe knew a scholar here and just came to visit, or were the people you were interacting with primarily Fellows and visiting scholars?
AC: Actually, when I came back to use the library in '64, I think the only person I really interacted with at all was Ernst Kitzinger once, and otherwise I just tried to make myself inconspicuous, because I did feel extremely exceptional and privileged. It wasn't until I was a Junior Fellow in 1970-'71 that my fellow Junior Fellows – Gary Vikan, Leslie MacCoull, John Wiita – began to become a circle of Byzantinist acquaintances.
JWC: Now, before we get to the time you spent here as an actual Fellow, can you tell us a little bit about that '64 symposium? Because, you know, there seem to have been a few rapid-fire ones in the early '60s where big things seemed to be happening.
AC: Yes, they were very dramatic, and – well, I mean, just from walking into the Music Room and discovering an audience in which people, when they arrived, got into the middle of the row. Rows were very close together, and it was difficult to crawl over – and I thought, this must be the most intelligent audience I've ever seen. So, I went into the middle of a row and sat there; and a tall, handsome, white-haired man in the front of the room came striding down the central aisle crying, "Kurt! Kurt!" And I suddenly realized, that was Ihor Ševčenko, and "Kurt" had to be Weitzmann! I watched with enormous, you know, just fascination; and then to watch with this sense of incredible newness of every paper, and the hush and then the babble of curiosity which followed them, I found quite remarkable.
JWC: Have you seen things like that since, or was that a unique experience that's difficult to recreate?
AC: I think that I've seen symposia in which portions became that incandescent, and I guess one keeps coming back looking for that. In this past symposium, I found the sequence of Parker's paper and then Maxwell's paper produced for me that kind of incandescence – that suddenly very disparate things came together with combustion, which is very exciting.
JWC: So, can you tell us a little bit about the developments you think have occurred in this field that couldn't otherwise have come about without symposia like that, where you had these minds in the room that collaborate and just come up with something new.
AC: I think that – for me, I find it hard to imagine Byzantine studies, really, independently of the sort of fertilization, which has emerged from Dumbarton Oaks. The sort of Crusader development was certainly one of the major things. Then there was the work on Justinian; Van Nice's work on Hagia Sophia that generated extraordinary interest; the emergence of the seals projects has been just remarkable to follow. I think that the, for me, very germinal was, for instance, a colloquium which Angeliki Laiou had, "Byzantium in the Modern Greek Tradition," which sort of opened up an entire tradition in Byzantine studies which I found extremely dynamic. The Dumbarton Oaks Summer Institutes, paleography and numismatics, I think, have been, again for me, just sort of points of, for one thing, meeting other people who are interested in it, but also just opening up dimensions of questions that hadn't been there before.
JWC: So, with all this background, you came to Dumbarton Oaks in – '77 you said?
JWC: '70-'71, I'm sorry. Now, with the other Fellows that you were studying with at the time, had any of them had similar experiences with Dumbarton Oaks in the past, or were they being introduced to the institute for the first time?
AC: I don't know with Leslie MacCoull and with John Wiita. I know that Gary Vikan, through his work with Kurt Weitzman, probably had been in and out of the place before.
JWC: And knowing all of what Dumbarton Oaks had to offer, how did you first start to pursue your studies? Was your study here influenced in any way by the resources that you knew were here?
AC: I think that the first Junior Fellowship – I think I came to understand – I arrived here after I had a fellowship year abroad pursuing my dissertation topic, in which it became clear to me that I needed to do things that I was unprepared for. I think it was getting here that I began to understand what it was that was going on, that I would come into – I was working on manuscripts – come into manuscript studies thinking it was art history, because you look at the pictures – if a book didn't have pictures I would turn it back – and at that moment, was just really on the point where, thanks to Hugo Buchthal, who agreed to ride herd on my dissertation even though I was not his student, the practice of codicology was sort of taking over the study of manuscripts; and it was coming here that – particularly Cyril Mango and Ihor Ševčenko made me realize, no, you really have to take a book as a whole, you really do have to settle down, you need to learn paleography, you need to learn much better Greek, and I came to understand what the study of a book is. So, I think it was kind of an answer to a prayer, in a sense. Fortunately the next year my husband got a fellowship abroad, and I was able to go back and look at many of the manuscripts again, and approach them in whole new way.
JWC: That's very interesting. Do you feel that Dumbarton Oaks plays a similar role for a lot of scholars here, where they come in and it revolutionizes their way of thinking, or was that something that you felt was unique to your situation and the people you were working with at the time?
AC: No, I don't think it's unique at all. I would love to be able to give you some examples. I don't think that I've ever talked to my colleagues in that framework. I've asked them about ideas, but never about how did Dumbarton Oaks stand on that path. I think that different people have felt differently comfortable at Dumbarton Oaks. I think that I have – I feel as though I've probably felt less the pressure of other people, because I'm a bit of a lone ranger. I come in here, I don't really see who's there; I do see wonderful books. This said, it was wonderful to have colleagues as a Junior Fellow. When I came back in 1980 for another fellowship, again, two friendships that have been absolutely fundamental to my life, Alice-Mary Talbot, John Louden from the summer paleography seminar, Rob Nelson, intensely valued colleagues – have come out of friendships nurtured while I was here.
JWC: Can you tell us anything about what you took back from your second fellowship that you didn't get out of your first, either through just spending more time here or through having a little more perspective?
AC: The second one was a period of crystallization, and out of that fellowship came a spate of articles and a couple of the articles which I still prize very much; and also the basis for the publication for the dissertation came out of it. I think it was in that fellowship – in 1974, there had been a paleography workshop when Linos was here. He was enormously helpful to me. I think it was 1980 that Robert Browning was here, again, working on paleography; and, once again, the opportunity to work with a very, very skilled paleographer was wonderful for me. But I think that the 1980 one really crystallized the opportunity to take ideas which had been germinating and set them into place.
JWC: What was the main product – you said that it was your dissertation that came out of –
AC: Out of the Junior Fellowship.
JWC: That was your Junior Fellowship. What about in '80? What were some of the articles that you were working on at the time?
AC: At that time I was working on an article for the Art Bulletin, a manuscript by the great late Byzantine paleographer Ioasaph – it's at the University of Michigan – and the article on the manuscripts of Ioasaph and the illuminations that came with them. I wrote an article, which ultimately came out in Gesta on frontispieces in gospel books that continues to be a subject of great interest to me. And I wrote an article on the daughter of a late great Byzantine scribe, Theodore Hagiopetrites, who was herself a paleographer. And I think, since then, Rob Nelson has argued that she was not working, as I thought, in Constantinople, but in Thessaloniki where her father did. But it was the beginning of an interest which I also carried on for quite a while: the role of women in the production of Byzantine art. And that was the interest where I crossed paths with Alice-Mary Talbot.
JWC: And how would you characterize paleography at Dumbarton Oaks as a whole, as compared to some of the other sub-fields within the study of Byzantium? Are there a lot of people here who focus on that, or –?
AC: No, it's been very sporadic. I think that paleography sort of flickered in during the period of the sort of establishment of codicology as a manuscript technique. I think since then, since about 1980, the interest in the summer institutes, if it's language-oriented, has been simply with reading Greek, and they've been text seminars more than they've been paleography studies.
JWC: So, you've said that your main goal was to understand the East. What made you choose the study of these books as sort of the key to understanding the East?
AC: I think that what made me choose those books was that my professor, Ilene Forsyth, agreed to take on a Byzantine dissertation if I could get a card-carrying Byzantinist to ride herd on it, and Hugo Buchthal agreed to do this, even though I was not his student in any way. He was working on manuscripts and suggested that, well, here was an issue in manuscript studies which was craving attention, and because it was there I took it, and it – I think neither of us, neither he nor I, when I took it on, had any sense where it was going to lead, and it continues to be a very enigmatic group of books, but it did lead me very deeply first of all into Byzantine book culture, which is a wonderful way – something Byzantines themselves took very seriously, but it also took me into the peripheral areas of Byzantium, which have been of interest to me ever since.
JWC: Have you found your study ever intersecting with other areas of Byzantine history, or have you ever at times thoughts that it would be, you know, nice to sort of do some research into something else, or have you just stuck with the –?
AC: Well, I've been very much an art historian. I've tried to be, as much as I could, a social art historian, placing art into its historical and, to the extent that I can, literary context. But, no, I've been very much an art historian.
JWC: What can you tell us about the museum here and some of the artifacts that they have relative to your studies?
AC: Well, actually, relative to my studies, I think that the manuscripts, although there are not many of them, have been a constant thread. Since about 1990, I've turned more toward wall painting and icons. And although I've been always appreciative of just the visual delight of having some very fine icons, particularly the mosaic icons, there to look at, my particular interests have sort of gone in other directions.
JWC: What can you tell us about the actual physical collection of the manuscripts you were just talking about? How many of them are there? Do you know if they're used very often? Has there been much scholarship which has emerged from the materials that we hold here?
AC: Well, until recently there were four, and now there are five. And the Dumbarton Oaks 3, the New Testament and Psalter, is a manuscript, which has been infinitely used and delighted in. The others have not been as much studied, but I think that recently Gudrun has brought them out several times – and it's been wonderful – and beautifully displayed them, also with the computer images beside them, which has made them much more eloquent.
JWC: So, this is something that I'm curious about, the way that they're displayed. Now, I don't know if you've seen the actual exhibit, where they're out in what used to be the courtyard. They've been made very accessible for visitors who come in, and maybe especially for children. They even have a little part of the exhibit where people can take an actual piece of parchment and touch it and feel what it actually is. As somebody who came here for the first time as a young student in junior high and didn't fully understand or appreciate what you were looking at the time, how do you think the exhibits that are in Dumbarton Oaks may impact the future generation of Byzantinists? Is there a duty that Dumbarton Oaks has through its public outreach to build the discipline?
AC: Yeah. It has obligations in a number of directions, and I think that the direction which has been most exciting is making not only the museum, the exhibited objects, but the full body of its objects available to professors who wanted to bring their students to examine them, to talk with the curators, and to get the sense of really what it is to be in the presence, even tactile presence, of objects. And I think Dumbarton Oaks has been very exciting on this score, also for the various Fellows. They have wonderful sessions in the museum. I think that the museum publications have been fabulous for teaching. Gary Vikan's Byzantine Pilgrimage Art remains one of my favorite teaching tools altogether. Byzantine Security is also just a wonderful introduction to the eloquence of everyday objects. So, I think that that's been done marvelously. I think it's just much more recently that I've sensed an invitation to younger people, and with the manuscripts, I think that manuscripts are really a kind of object that is resistant to the whole museum scenario because they're like movies. They're an art of time, and you can't make them move in a museum. You can't go and turn the pages. One page is only – it doesn't really give you the excitement of manuscripts. On the other hand, the interactive medium, which are absolutely fabulous for students is also opening up manuscripts in an exciting way.
JW: Speaking of outreach, in 1987 I believe, you were a Dumbarton Oaks visiting scholar at Syracuse University giving public lectures and presentations. How would you say that contributes to that outreach? – the obligation, the Dumbarton Oaks obligation to outreach?
AC: I did the Dumbarton Oaks visiting lecture series, and I was also a Phi Beta Kappa visiting lecturer. I would love to see something like the Dumbarton Oaks lectures happen again because – the impact is very – it can have tremendous "spot impact." That can also be seen as very small impact, because it can make a tremendous impact on only a few people. In my case, I think I was at a – I tend to get mixed up with the Phi Beta Kappa lectures, but I think I went to several schools. In each school, there would be for instance one person who really caught on [snaps her fingers]. Later on, I've had a couple of people say, "Oh yes, I've heard you," which makes me think, yes, its something which can work. I think that it probably is a very expensive form of cultivation. The Dumbarton Oaks junior positions which they've cultivated in universities may have had a more durable impact on what I think has been one of the great challenges, which has been getting a place, getting positions within academia.
JWC: I'm not sure what the exact year was, but I know there was a similar program or maybe even the same program where individuals – I can think of two offhand, Ioli Kalavrezou and Herb Kessler. It was a similar public lecture series. When they discussed it, they may have been going at times to address the public, not even a university audience. Is this the same thing that you were doing?
AC: I don't know. I'm not sure, but I was not aware that the Dumbarton Oaks lectures were done very often. I'm not sure what the relationship was.
JWC: Can you tell us about some of the individuals you interacted with here from the administration – directors of the institution, directors of study? How do you feel that things – directors – have changed over time, the direction of Dumbarton Oaks and the focus on different areas of Byzantium has changed?
AC: One of the big changes that I've been very aware of was the withdrawal from archeological engagement. The center of my research in the end became the island of Cyprus, where the Dumbarton Oaks Conservation Consolidation of the Byzantine churches marked a tremendous threshold in our knowledge of Byzantine art, has made an enormous difference to the island of Cyprus itself, and has a considerable afterlife in my own life because I just finished up the publication of Asinou, which was one of the churches which Dumbarton Oaks had consolidated back then. I felt that as archeology ebbed at Dumbarton Oaks, engagement with the visual also tended to shift more and more toward the verbal. I think that Henry Maguire was extremely deft at weaving the visual into the projects of Dumbarton Oaks, sort of keeping it there. I think that Margret Mullett has been very conscientious to see to it that there is a visual dimension to things. I think that in some ways, the visual engagement of Dumbarton Oaks has ebbed, at least in the Byzantine world. On the other hand, I think the commitment that someone like Alice-Mary Talbot has maintained to making Byzantine texts available through study, through study projects, and through translation has made an enormous impact on what we have available to teach with. If we want to make Byzantine studies part of the Byzantine world, we need to have texts to teach with. She's made a tremendous difference in that respect. I think that – I can remember being very much exercised in Giles Constable's period when he suggested that it was fatal for Byzantine Studies to try to sever themselves from the West. I happen to work on the Crusades. One would have thought – I think fundamentally he is right, but I think he was premature. I think we needed to establish ourselves as worthy of independent academic lines, and once we had those, than absolutely knit the world back together again. I think Giles nowadays would have been perfect. I think Dumbarton Oaks has been, has brought people from Islamic studies, from Syriac studies, I'm from Western studies, all into the program.
JWC: There were two things from that I wanted to discuss. One, you mentioned the visual studies. As an art historian you've really dedicated your life to that. What do you think Byzantine Studies is missing if they forget the commitment to the visual, when people delve too deeply into the text and don't study the originals?
AC: The Byzantine culture was one which put tremendous emphasis upon visual presentation. Things needed to be to reflect the grandeur, the impressiveness of their church, particularly, and of their state. This dimension, to me at least, is absolutely fundamental to understanding where they put money. I just ran across what I think is a wonderful word. It's "iconomics." The iconomics of Byzantium needs to be taken into account [laughs.]
JWC: The other thing was when you were mentioning an evolution in what was being studied here, and bringing in people who studied the Islamic world and Western world. How do you believe that relates to the original mission that Dumbarton Oaks was charged with by the Blisses? As the academic world changed, we've changed along with them. How do you remain centered on the mission at Dumbarton Oaks?
AC: I've not seen this in any serious way in contradiction, so long as one remembers where the center of the world is, which happens to be Constantinople. I think Herbert Muller is absolutely right when he said Byzantium is the empire of the new middle. In this sense, the Islamic world, the Western world, the Slavic world are absolutely a part of the way in which Byzantium is in the world. One has to understand these things too. I would be distressed if I learned the center of the world was slipping into one or another of those.
JWC: What about some of the other areas of study here that are unrelated to the Byzantine: the Garden and Landscape or the pre-Columbian? In your time here, have you had the chance to interact in any –
AC: For me, that was the big threshold of my 1990 fellowship. That was a great fellowship of friendships. Nancy Ševčenko was here, Engelina Smirnova was here, Chrysanthe Baltoyianni was here. But Nancy and I decided that we were going to get to know the other communities. She particularly became engaged with the landscape community. I became absolutely captivated by the pre-Columbian. What this brought for me was this was the period in which I discovered anthropology. It was the pre-Columbianists who introduced me to this. The discovery of the pre-Columbianists was tremendously valuable for me. It led me to my determination to get a pre-Columbian line in my own university. Adam Herring, who is also a Dumbarton Oaks person, came to fill that position. The ability to look at visual things in anthropological rather than with a strictly art historical point of view has been critical. I found that really exciting and I am delighted that the communities are much more together now.
JWC: A lot of time it seems that in the different fields, scholars are studying similar topics in parallel - the history of the art and architecture in the Byzantine world and the art and architecture in the pre-Columbian world, for example. Do you think that there is opportunity for the knowledge that has been cultivated in one field to substantively impact the other? Or is there a reason why they've never been studied together?
AC: I think that in a sense, by and large they are going to be studied as specialties in their own paths, and yet pre-Columbianists and Byzantinists are living in the same twenty-first century and we're going to have common curiosities about the body, about ecology, about the visual, and these should produce points in which in the end, conclusions are convergent or divergent. But it has been very exciting to look at them together.
JWC: That's very interesting. Can you tell me anything about the social life at Dumbarton Oaks? You said in the 1990s you started to interact a bit more with the other areas of study. Is the academic life at Dumbarton Oaks aided in any way by the social activities that occur outside of the 9 to 5?
AC: I must confess I participated in them rather little. I am a bit of a lone ranger. This said, I mentioned as we went along friendships which have germinated here, which for me have been pure gold – just really wonderful friendships.
JWC: What about any of the different aspects of the estate? Have you been able to take advantage of the garden or the pool?
AC: For me, the garden has been – I adored the garden. I recently had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, which has hundreds of acres, and living in space I find wonderful. The space is smaller here, but having the garden I found really wonderful. I really loved it. And I enjoy having the art installations in the garden too.
JWC: They didn't have those when you were first here, right?
AC: That's right.
JWC: Has your experience in the garden changed at all over the periods you've been here?
AC: No, it's remained one of wonder. I love, on Mondays for instance, often the back gate is open and one can just wander in. Every now and again I've gotten locked in [laughs.] I can remember one spring lamenting the passing of the cherry blossoms. Giles Constable found me wandering among the drifting petals and I said, "Oh Giles, it's so terrible to watch them go," and he said, "Annemarie, it's just the beginning. Spring in Washington goes on forever." I find the gardens wonderful to participate in.
JWC: Do you have any other stories like that? Things that you can remember being particularly wonderful about your time here?
AC: I remember one morning coming scuttling in the front door in my usual mouse-along-the-floorboards way. As I left the door to come into the corridor, there was Angeliki Laiou in all her magnificence. I was so startled, I just turned to her with all with the excitement I had coming in with this big smile and she looked at me and said, "Well, you look happy." And I looked back and said, "Oh yes, I am. I always find something new." She looked at me and said, "That makes me very happy." It was a very warm moment. I feel very much that way about Dumbarton Oaks. I always find something new, and no matter how seriously it takes itself, I find that it brings a certain amount of excitement – positive energy and excitement, and it welcomes you with that.
JWC: Have you found excitement like that at other places, or is there something at Dumbarton Oaks with that spark
AC: I confess I found the Institute for Advanced Studies a very wonderful experience. My feeling is particularly strong for Dumbarton Oaks because ever since 1955, I've kept coming back. I'm like old pennies. It's very hard to exterminate me. I keep turning up again.
JWC: You didn't happen to meet the Blisses or anyone the first time you came, did you?
AC: No, I didn't. My parents, I think, had met the Blisses because they lived in Washington. I only heard about the teas.
JWC: What did you hear?
AC: Well, how important propriety of behavior was.
JWC: Are there any things that you think are important to talk about that haven't been touched on at this point?
AC: Gosh, we've talked on a great many things. I think that the big question which lies ahead of us all is where it's going – where it's going in the future. I think that I have great admiration for Margret Mullett for the openness which I think she's brought in terms of feeling easy among people and being somewhat more relaxed here. I think that here I fail Dumbarton Oaks. I have an enormous hope that the vitality of the institution continues to grow. And then comes the question, what are your recommendations? My only recommendation can be that you can't look to the past. You have to move with the direction in which the ideas are moving. For that, I think I'm still trying to finish up what I did. One has to trust younger people to take over.
JWC: Do you have a prognosis for Dumbarton Oaks? Have you seen the vitality growing, has it come in ebbs and flows?
AC: What I sense is a greater warmth toward it. I feel there have been ebbs and flows in the sense that Dumbarton Oaks stands in the way of younger ambition and at times where it felt it was more open to younger ambitions. I sense more warmth, and that makes me very hopeful.
JWC: You have a great wealth of knowledge, both about the field and the institution. For someone in the future, what would you tell them about Dumbarton Oaks, and what should they keep in mind to ensure this resource is here for posterity?
AC: To someone who is interested or –?
JWC: To someone who is interested in Byzantine studies as a whole, and in particular here at Dumbarton Oaks.
AC: My sense is that it's a wonderful place to be able to take seriously what you're interested in. My advice would be to concentrate on that. I pay rather little attention to social dimensions – the way in which one lives, whether one can have pets, whether one can have children, things like that. I have found it a wonderful place to go and really take seriously and take the opportunity to really sink into what is a serious interest to you. You are liable to find other people who are similarly interested.
JW: Thank you so much.
JWC: Thank you for being here today.
AC: Well, thank you.]]>
DB: Delighted.
EG: So, to start things off, could you tell me a little bit about how you first heard about Dumbarton Oaks and got involved there and what your initial impressions were of the place?
DB: First of all, I was attending conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, one of the few places in which there was a serious attention to landscape history. I was writing on landscape particularly at that time, so I was particularly interested in the level of research and the kinds of research. I was doing some research of my own on issues of public space in New York City, and ran across a whole series of letters from a landscape architect to an architect, and I was investigating that particular architect at that time, who was working in New York City. This was in the New York Historical Society. At any rate, I got enormously interested in what this landscape architect was saying to this architect, and though it had nothing to do with New York, it had to do with some site in Washington D.C. called Dumbarton Oaks, I got enormously interested in the story, and since I was talking about public places and landscapes, I got very interested and began to do research on her, and on her work, and I got very involved in how Dumbarton Oaks was designed. There was nothing at Dumbarton Oaks on that at that time, so this was the first vision of the actual conversations that took place between the architect, the landscape architect, but also with the client. There were many references to what Mildred Bliss had said, and what Mildred Bliss wanted, and some sketches from Mildred Bliss. I found myself with this research, which I had not intended to do, but became incredibly interested because of the vitality coming out of these letters and the interesting issues that were brought up by her. So, at that particular time there was a temporary head of the Dumbarton Oaks landscape program for a year, Diane McGuire, and she had decided to make the conference of her year in the post – to do it on Beatrix Farrand – both to do something for women's history and also to get to a greater depth about the site on which Dumbarton Oaks is sitting. So, I submitted – the conference was already set, so I was added at the last minute. That began to develop a different type of relationship with Dumbarton Oaks. For me it's always been a very important relationship, because it also represents the relationship with Beatrix Farrand, which afterwards became a main theme and about which I also wrote other things. I have discovered in Princeton some of her three-monthly visits to maintain a landscape, and I use them always as a form of education for a landscaper. So, my connection – I always see Dumbarton Oaks as part of Beatrix Farrand, as part of this story and also my evolution, which afterwards went from writing about landscape to doing landscape. That's a long answer to your question.
EG: Thank you. So, you had begun researching Beatrix Farrand and the history of Dumbarton Oaks before you came to the conference?
DB: No, I started going to the conferences and I knew about them, but I never put together what I was doing with Dumbarton Oaks. It happened to be the accidental coincidence of Diane McGuire setting up a conference on Beatrix Farrand that produced this criss-crossing by which the research which I thought was totally on a different track became part of Dumbarton Oaks also.
EG: So, what were some of the earlier conferences that you went to, what were those like?
DB: I remember they were very good conferences. I always discovered very interesting ideas in all of them. I remember one on the Italian villas with Wilhelmina Jashemski. I remember one on Italian; I remember a conference on French gardens. They were all, I felt, very high-quality and very interesting, and all under the leadership of different directors.
EG: They had varied themes back then? I don't know a lot about the earlier conferences.
DB: They were, though, very much tied to the gardens of a particular culture, be it classical culture or be it Italian or French or English. And Joachim Wolschke – I think it was much more taking periods but looking at them across a more mixed series of cultures, but all at a very high level.
EG: So, what were your first impressions of Dumbarton Oaks when you got there, both in terms of its reputation as intellectual center and the physical setting of it?
DB: Very academic. I did think, however, and this very strongly – it became a stronger impression over time – that it was very academic and very historic-bound, and I dropped away from going to conferences for a while, feeling that they only dealt with historical cases and not with modern; I also felt that they were only speaking to academicians, not to practitioners, and because I had become a practitioner at that point I was very interested in having something that had to do with the practice, and I felt that was not being addressed at all. So, we're all critics as well as – but that in no way diminished my appreciation of Dumbarton Oaks, which I always felt was a very special place and a very special intellectual source of ideas about landscape, and there is a dearth of them all over the U.S.; there's very few places in which landscape is discussed. So, it was a rare gem and I've always considered it a rare gem.
EG: Could you tell me a little bit more about the Beatrix Farrand conference, what your role was and what the mission was for the symposium itself?
DB: It was really to put on the table and create a volume of all that was known about her at that particular time. I never expected to be part of a thing like that, and I just dealt with the design of the garden at Dumbarton Oaks. It's amazing, though, that at the time I had never heard her name mentioned when I went to Dumbarton Oaks, and that's what really surprised me, and then on reading all this stuff I connected the two pieces and I said, "How come there isn't a monument to her at Dumbarton Oaks, how come there is nothing there that has told me that it's her garden?" I was incredibly surprised at that, and I think this conference did a very good job at really starting to do some work on Beatrix Farrand. I think there's a lot still to be done, although a whole series of books have come out after that. But I think that was the first serious attempt to put a story about her together. I can bring the volume to you, because it's interesting to see the different topics. This volume touched on another topic which I knew absolutely nothing about, but one of the things that was done which was very good was Beatrix Farrand gave all her papers to the University of California at Berkeley, so what is in that collection was presented there, which nobody had any idea what there was. McGuire, who was the acting director at the time, did an evaluation of her work, and there was a very interesting piece of work on all of her work on campuses; nobody knew that she'd done any campuses at the time. Actually I went on to take that, because I didn't know that part of my own university, Yale university, had been designed by her, so I went to the ones where she had done the biggest jobs, which were Yale and Princeton, and really went through all the material and extended what Diane had started here. But this was all totally new; people didn't know about this – then her work in England, and then the one that I did, which was the design of Dumbarton Oaks itself, what came out of that correspondence – then the issue of maintaining and preserving Dumbarton Oaks and gardens in general. But I can't tell you how new it all felt at that particular time. Here she was, the designer of the place that we were – just all of this stuff was totally new.
EG: That's just really shocking to me, that no one had really researched that before.
DB: No, really amazing. So, it was wonderful. It was a great conference. We were all sort of ecstatic at all of the things we'd heard about Beatrix Farrand that none of us knew.
EG: So, from your research on Beatrix Farrand, have you gotten a sense of her vision for the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, or her goals in the design of it?
DB: After that I really paid much more attention at general vision about landscape architecture, rather than about Dumbarton Oaks in specific. I was very interested in the design of campuses, because the design of campuses since the '50s has really been abandoned, taken over by parking lots. The stuff that was there that was good was not maintained. So, I wanted to see how she had approached it and how effective she'd been, and I very carefully went to both Princeton and Yale to look at what was left of her work. It was really incredibly good. It really had a whole series of principles that we would consider absolutely the latest right now, which is both using either native or adapted plants, and that in the university become a showcase of the local vegetation. And she created nurseries at each one that produced the material, which gave a much higher quality to it, and also that the different universities she worked with shared plant material among them. She created a sort of very high level way of planting, but with an educational motif, and no university has that right now; it's something that's been lost. Her landscape, both at Yale and Princeton, at Yale there's maybe ten percent of it; at Princeton maybe twenty percent of it. It's ceased to be the whole idea that holds the campus together. Because the campus is such a good American invention, of creating this place that really has spaces that are landscape, that are as important as the buildings. Then it seemed that someone who worked on this, who thought of this, would be very important. But Yale has paid no attention to it, and Princeton hasn't either; they've gotten rid of the all the nurseries and practically all of the landscape, and they've done a minimum maintenance sort of design. But the ideas – nobody has gotten back to them. The ideas are very valuable and the American campus is a very, very original and interesting idea, and therefore it deserves much greater attention. She was one of the few landscape architects who really had a general vision of it. There's a couple of others, but she touched on the most important campuses of the east coast.
EG: Have you noticed similarities between the Yale and Princeton campuses and her work at Dumbarton Oaks? Did she treat them in the same ways?
DB: No, not at all.
EG: Completely different?
DB: It's obvious that in Dumbarton Oaks she had a very good client who could spend much more money than a campus could on the landscape. On the campus, she always just said that a campus should mainly be grass and trees, and certainly Dumbarton Oaks isn't just grass and trees. It was a very different thing. Of course, after that it was passed on to Harvard, and at that time a lot of things were simplified precisely so that it becomes more campus-like, so although there still is an enormous part of the garden per se function, it became somewhat simplified, in the sense of trying to obtain a simpler garden. And things like the theater that is there; it's never used and it would be wonderful to sort of have it come back to life. There are things in there that had an enormous amount of life and which have disappeared within it. And above all the connection to what was the wild part, which is now across a wire fence; it belongs now to the park system of Washington D.C., which has done a very bad job of maintaining it. But that juxtaposition of the two pieces must have been enormously interesting, going from one to the other, which today you can't even recognize.
EG: Do you think that overall her landscape at Dumbarton Oaks has been fairly maintained?
DB: Yes, I think it's lucky. It's been much better maintained than Yale and Princeton, definitely.
EG: Has there been more of a conscious effort, do you think?
DB: Oh yes. For one, there's really a gardener. Most campuses today have crews that work lawnmowers and chop trees and that's about it, and many times bus drivers and maintenance crew for landscape are the same people. Dumbarton Oaks has had a really seriously trained head gardener there. Princeton, I must say, did keep its head gardener until way into the early '90s, James Smith, and therefore that's why it was a higher quality than Yale's. A head gardener kept some of the traits, although he was dealing with a crew that was a tenth of what he had before, and a sort of mentality in campuses about doing absolutely minimum for the landscape, and no budgets, he still was able to at least keep some of the old things alive and well, a much more knowledgeable level of landscape knowledge. And I think that getting some really seriously trained gardeners to head the maintenance of a campus is a really important idea. And I meant landscape gardeners. Landscape architects and landscape gardeners in the landscape gardening tradition are people that are trained essentially in England. We don't have training programs; there's just one starting now but we don't have training programs to make a serious landscape training effort that could produce the very knowledgeable people that could run such a thing, a whole campus.
EG: It must be really interesting to have worked both at Yale and at Dumbarton Oaks, in places that were both designed by her.
DB: It's a great experience.
EG: Does it give you sort of a different view on her work, as opposed to doing research?
DB: Yes, precisely because – and I have read comments about her, that she was the kind that did gardens for rich ladies and designed them over tea. Her profession, she – this sort of real put-down about women's work, particularly in gardens, is so unlike what she did. She worked in a professional way. It wasn't over tea nor with rich clients; she was lucky with Mildred Bliss, but certainly campuses weren't rich clients. The kind of work that she did – and you can read her letters every time that she comes, every three months to look over – there's such an attention to detail and such a view of the whole at the same time. I became very influenced by the work on campuses of hers. I feel very frustrated that the campuses aren't doing anything, and particularly Yale.
EG: To start getting back to the topic of symposia, have you been involved in any of the lectures or conferences in more recent years?
DB: Yes, but I only started coming when Michel Conan became director, because he suddenly put modern landscapes into the mix, and he also included practitioners and artists, and suddenly all the things that I had been complaining about disappeared, so I started coming again because of that. I had become sort of anti-history at a certain point, although I'd been writing history of landscape; I felt that landscape was too mired in the past, and that it needed to break out and work with new ideas, and so I didn't want to learn more about historical landscapes. I felt that it got in my way of what I wanted to do as a practitioner, so I ceased to get involved in the historical aspects, and I stopped writing, and therefore didn't present papers anymore. But I did start attending with Michel Conan's entry into the contemporary on the one hand, the issue of putting both practitioners and artists, who I think have contributed enormously to landscape, and finally also because I was starting to work in Asia at that particular point and he had paid an enormous amount of attention to Asian landscapes. So, all those three things touched directly on my practice and I became enormously interested. So, I was absolutely delighted when I was asked to be a Senior Fellow, because it felt like coming home.
EG: So, you'd say there's been a shift in the focus of the research at Dumbarton Oaks?
DB: Yes, I think that there's a wider world-view – that both the Middle East conference, the Asian conferences, the attention to China, to Japan, to Korea, the sort of pan-Asian view, has entered in different ways into Dumbarton Oaks, and has made it a much more cosmopolitan place than before; it was basically European history. And I think this makes it totally of the times. And I think John will certainly go much more in that direction, which I think benefits Dumbarton Oaks enormously. I still think that the tie with the profession itself is very weak, and practitioners and academicians – there's a colossal abyss between both, and there's very few people who cross it.
EG: Have you noticed there that there was a tension between the people that did the history of gardens and people who actually practice it? That was an issue there?
DB: It's an issue. So, the practitioners basically don't go; they consider, "Oh, these academicians, just boring stuff," and they do not pay attention to it, and I think it's to the detriment of the profession, because the kind of work, and particularly since touching on modern themes, is enormously relevant. I'm not saying the historical stuff is not relevant, it's just that it's all we had before, and I think that the inclusion of some of the newer stuff that's coming in is really very important for practitioners to be part of. And the other thing is that the effect that artists have had on landscape, partly because landscape, in different ways, since the twentieth century has pulled itself apart from the arts, so that no museum today considers that they would have a show on landscape, because it's not art. So, it's out there. And because artists got very interested in it, above all in the era of the earthworks, that they started working with earth forms and all of that and they influenced landscape practitioners enormously, but they also had an effect on pulling it back into the family of the arts. Still, a museum will exhibit work by an earthwork artist, but they won't exhibit work by a landscape practitioner. It's still out there. And ecology has had the effect, too, of putting it out there as something that is kind of anti-art, that you just try to be as much like nature as possible, and that you find the way that the systems work and that automatically gives you a design – which is total nonsense – and there is also another strain, which is that gardens and gardeners or landscape gardeners were in a large part women, and that work was put down as women's work, and therefore not part of the arts, even with people like Gertrude Jekyll – or Beatrix Farrand is another example. You know her work was totally forgotten; Gertude Jekyll also was practically erased at one point, and it's Beatrix Farrand who discovered that they were selling at some sale – I think it was the Red Cross – all the papers of Gertrude Jekyll, and she bought them and donated them at UC Berkeley. So, she was rescued by Beatrix Farrand. But the negative connotation, which is a gender issue – and then the ecology movement coming in and having that particular effect on it, this pushing it out of the arts, have been a very big hump for landscape reentering into the family of the arts. It is an art; that is what its value is. All the earth-artists really did start pushing landscape much more into the family of the arts again. But it's still not admitted. It's just starting to be seen as something that can be part of the family of the arts. So, Dumbarton Oaks can be an enormous influence in changing and helping that course of action.
EG: Do you think that it has been so far? It certainly seems like they've sort of broadened the topics that are researched at Dumbarton Oaks, and is that coinciding with the growth and changes in the field itself?
DB: The problem is this, that there still is this colossal gap between practitioners and academicians, and that gap still reigns. I think that a lot more work by Dumbarton Oaks needs to be done on both contemporary landscape and the art of landscape. Dumbarton Oaks is in an incredibly good position to be able to incorporate itself much more into contemporary artistic art, rather than just being a historical landscape academy. I'm hoping that that is going to be a future agenda.
EG: Switching gears a little bit, if I may, can you tell me how you got involved with the Senior Fellows board at Dumbarton Oaks?
DB: Well, it was through the invitation of Michel Conan to be a Senior Fellow. I didn't understand very clearly what a Senior Fellow could do within this, and so it took me a couple of years to really understand what it is that we could be useful at. I really think it is in two things, which is basically on setting the subjects for a conference, because that produces a debate of ideas for one thing – what is valuable at this particular time – and it sets a direction for Dumbarton Oaks. And the other one is of course in the Fellows that we choose, that whatever the fellowships we give to people also try to set up a direction for landscape. So, my own sense as a board member is that I really am enormously interested in both making sure that there is some fellowship going to take a look at contemporary landscape work, and the other thing is that it also be not just European, but I'm interested in the Middle East, I'm interested in Asia, that we keep a broad focus, that we don't come back into just European history. That's how I see my role.
EG: This European theme seems to be common.
DB: Is it?
EG: In both the Byzantine studies and – I guess less so in Pre-Columbian. But yeah, we've heard a lot that back for several years it was just entirely focused on European and really only European scholars coming in. It's interesting. Have you had a chance to work with any Byzantine scholars or Pre-Columbian or anything in your time?
DB: No, there isn't much exchange, so we don't really know what's going on. What has happened in these last two years is that we've had applicants who are applying to both programs. And this year there is one that is in both programs, for the first time, I think. But that's totally new; that didn't use to happen, and I'm very happy about that, because that may foster more communication, and I think that in landscape, the kind of work that they do, particularly in pre-Columbian, there is the possibility of an interesting relation. Partly because we know so little about the pre-Columbian stuff in landscape, and there's new stuff coming out that's very, very interesting. So, I think that that's another source of influence for landscape which may be fertile. With Byzantine there has been none. And actually I have a historian friend who proposed to me that why didn't we do a Byzantine landscape piece of research. The problem is that both of us are busy; we can barely come up for air so that the two times coincide for us to do it, and she got a fellowship for the Byzantine there, so she did a piece of research in Byzantine history but she never related it to gardens. And she was thinking, well, since it's never been done, what if we do it? But for her free time to coincide with my free time seems like a pipe dream right now. But anyway, it may still happen. And she's teaching in England now, so that makes it even more difficult.
EG: So, aside from that sort of theme, have there been any important or memorable topics of discussion at the Senior Fellows meetings?
DB: Yes, I think that the interesting discussions have been about the role of the contemporary, and the role of practitioners versus academics, and the role of art within this, and how can it be made more part of the discourse, since it's so important for landscape to re-enter the family of the arts. I think those have been interesting discussions. This year we were discussing the themes for our future conferences, and without going into the details of that, I think that the gist of the matter was, what is – and that was the interesting discussion – what is really – I'm not going to say important, but weighty matter for landscape now. And we were all over the place; each one of us has a different idea. That is what makes it interesting to discuss, because they're all very knowledgeable people, and so from each one of the fields, be it Chinese history or be it the landscape of the wars, that Kenneth Helphand has worked on, the views are differing, very different, and at the same time there are some bases by which we can unify behind some themes. So, the question was: what was something that is of interest to this particular present moment? And that's a very interesting thing to discuss. Whatever our solution is, the theme in itself was interesting.
EG: What were some of the proposed weighty matters?
DB: I don't know if John does not have to approve putting it out in public, so I would have to ask for permission, or you can ask him, but basically in just general terms, there was the issue of farming in cities, which has become a contemporary issue, because the attention to cities in the first place. And then in the second place the fact that now landscape is considered that it can be part of a city has also brought up this business of whether you can produce food in cities, and there's a whole series of both experimental programs for doing it, there are practitioners working on it and there's also a whole series of social movements behind it, so it is definitely of the moment. Another subject that we talked about was the role of animals in landscape, because they have been excised; it was always taught as if this is only plants. We know from ecology that plants and animals are totally united and they develop in unison in certain ways, and that they have been part of the history of gardens, but nobody has paid attention to it. So, there is an idea about working that topic in. And it is not the topic of zoos, in which they are sort of isolated, although the design of zoos is also trying to make them not isolated. But in having them rejoin the world and not be as this thing in cages. So, that was a long discussion about what were the different aspects of that theme. Then the other one is the issue of technology in landscape, and there's some very interesting things going on that are technological, and there has been technology in gardens from early on, from the Renaissance fountains that spurted only when you came by, etc, etc, singing fountains and so on and so forth. But there have been a series of developments that have both to do with materials and also with making a landscape active, and doing things, and sort of becoming robotic in some way. It also raises the question of the line between the artificial and the natural. Those are some themes that have been debated and are being considered for future conferences.
EG: That's very interesting. Could you tell me a little about the process of choosing the conferences each year?
DB: It depends a lot on the director, and obviously it changed enormously under each director, because of the subjects that were chosen and how they were chosen. So, I can't speak about the past but I know that it was very different. Now in this session with John, we all brought some topic to the table, and then we spent time discussing it, and John told us his preference and what he would like to do first and so on and so forth, thinking in terms of what were the ones that he was most interested in, but at the same time, letting us all put our proposals forward. So, he's backed what came out of these things, the proposals that we've made. He is both putting proposals forth too and at the same time modifying some of our own, saying, "Well, it would be interesting if this also took in such and such a part," etc, etc. With Michel, Michel would bring a series of both names and people and themes to the Senior Fellows to discuss, but he brought to the table both people that were interesting and themes that were interesting and paired them so that we would discuss them: this is interesting because there happens to be a person, or at the same time this is an interesting topic because such and such a thing is happening. And so, we would discuss what was the best way to go, and people would have suggestions about other names – put it together. But what happens too is that on certain subjects some people in the Senior Fellows know a lot more than others about a particular topic, so they really lead the shaping of it and propose the people, because they know them. We support them, we look at the material and then support them or say that well, this is not as interesting, it goes in this particular direction, shouldn't we turn it down, etc. But essentially for each conference then it becomes that some Senior Fellows are much more involved than others, depending if it's a topic that they are knowledgeable about.
EG: Have you had the opportunity to work with any of Junior Fellows during your time as a senior fellow? Obviously you choose them.
DB: No, we choose them, and we have a couple of meetings with them in a year. They present a summary of their work, and we've had that opportunity. And I think that the last group was a very, very good group; I was very pleased with it, and very interesting in what it produced. But yes, I've had besides the opportunity to interact with David Hayes – that was working on a Swiss landscape architect that Dumbarton Oaks just obtained all the papers from his studio. He's a contemporary landscape architect and so I'm very partial to that.
EG: Could you talk a little about – you've mentioned a few scholars that you've had the opportunity to work with, Diane McGuire and obviously John Beardsley and others. Are there others that you've worked closely with during your time at Dumbarton Oaks?
DB: No, I've worked closely with Michel Conan, and I have worked closely in the past with John Beardsley. And of the people at Dumbarton Oaks I became very fond of some of the Senior Fellows that were in this past group and some of the ones that are already there. We've had a least a couple years of working together, because we have a four-year term. Stephen Bann, the British landscape historian and art critic, absolutely superb Senior Fellow to have, is incredibly knowledgeable, incredibly worldly as far as he has connections with the landscape world all over the whole world, but very, very acute critic and has a very keen sense of foretelling trends in the artistic world – anyway, absolutely superb. I've had chances of interacting with him. I have with Kenneth Helphand, whose book on war landscapes I admire enormously, and Eric de Jong, the Dutch landscape architect who resigned last year, was also a very good Senior Fellow, and we continue to be in touch. He just came from Holland with forty of his students, and we set up a Twitter forum with his forty students and him and the Twittering population about public space, about public places, and it was very good, and it came out of our relationship at Dumbarton Oaks. Kenneth Helphand has also brought his students through my office and we had a discussion with them, so that's another layer that has come out of our Senior Fellow associations. Nurhan Atasoy, who's from Turkey, has been a very good Senior Fellow to work with. I think she knows most about Turkey on all levels, not just landscapes. But she has an energy that is beyond belief, and the Middle Eastern conference of two years ago was basically spearheaded by her with Michel, and she brought in some incredible people that it was a much broader view of Middle East than the separatist kind of pieces that usually comes up. We remain in touch, and I'm enormously interested in her work. But those have opened for me windows into other aspects of landscape that I was not familiar with, because I was not familiar with the Middle East at all; I've never delved in anything close to it. So, that's one of the added benefits of the Senior Fellows group, these other connections that occurred at a very high level with people that are very knowledgeable in their fields.
EG: Have you had the chance to work with any of the directors of Dumbarton Oaks, or interact with them really, like Giles Constable or –?
DB: I met Giles Constable at the conference parties, and I also met him when I went to do some research at Princeton, and I also worked very closely with Michel Conan, and now with John Beardsley. I did also work with John Dixon Hunt, and we set up a discussion about landscape in which I brought down one of my Yale colleagues and John put some other people together. It was a very interesting sort of – what will I say? – it was a day symposium. So, we were sitting around the table discussing the issues and it had a lot of effect on both me and the colleague that I brought down from Yale, who since then has gone off to the University of Wisconsin. So, I worked with John; I met Giles Constable but I didn't work with him. And then I sort of dropped out for a while from going to conferences, because of my trying to start a professional practice, and then I came back when Michel came in – so, only those.
EG: And have you had much opportunity to work with the library at Dumbarton Oaks or the collections?
DB: I started a piece of research, which is on hold because of my lack of time, and in which I'm very interested, and which has to do with drawings of landscape, but relating it to modern practice. So, I started and I found some interesting material but I barely started; I had three sessions of research and I had to put it on hold because my practice took over. But it's something I will complete at some particular time. I'm very interested in it.
EG: Starting to wrap things up, could you talk a little bit about what you see as the major changes in garden and landscape studies at Dumbarton Oaks over the time you've been associated with it?
DB: The main one we've talked about already, which is the shift from purely European-based focus to a much wider – world-wide – including all kinds of cultures. So, I think that's the main one, and the most important one. I think that the shift to contemporary is very new. Joachim, I think, started with the first attempt to do it; Michel carried much further; I'm hoping John will too. I think that's a big change, and one that I feel very strongly about. I think that the thing still lacking is finding ways of overcoming the enormous separation between the academic and the professional world. I think that that needs to be done. It's been started. I think it needs to go much further. What other things have I noticed? I think that the separation of the three different areas remains firm, no big break; I haven't seen a change. As I say, there's one Fellow now that's going to two programs. I think that it's not something you can legislate, but it is something that would be interesting, that we be able, since they're all there, to feed on the richness of the others. I think that the connection with the Fellows who are coming in on fellowships can be strengthened between the Senior Fellows and the Fellows coming in. I'm very interested in following up on the people that we've selected to see how right we were in what we read through their applications. So, I think that a little bit more interchange or exchange would be helpful, but I think that that has varied under each director, and I don't know enough to compare. What else? I do know that under Michel Conan there was a start of making a collection of work of contemporary practitioners, and the work of this Swiss landscape architect that David Hayes is working on is one of them. Patricia Johanson has given things; Stephen Bann gave things from the Scottish landscaper – I don't know why I blanked the name, but I have – and I have also donated things of my work, and I'm hoping that that will also be something that Dumbarton Oaks continues with, as a way of also trying to close this gap between academicians and practitioners. I think that landscape desperately needs both a connection to art and to its own history, but in a way that does not become a closed-off world. So, it needs to set up things that though they're about the history reach out to the modern world. I think that's all I can say.
EG: I think that's great place to end, actually. Thank you so much!]]>
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.]]>