The William R. Tyler Fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks support two years of travel and dissertation completion for advanced Harvard graduate students in areas related to the fields of study at Dumbarton Oaks. We are pleased to present two new Tyler Fellows for 2013-15, Deniz Turker Cerda and Julian Yolles.
Deniz Turker Cerda, Tyler Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies. Ottoman Victoriana: Istanbul's Last Ottoman Palace-Complex of Yildiz, 1876-1909.
Deniz is entering her fifth year at Harvard’s joint degree program in Middle Eastern Studies and the History of Art and Architecture. For the past year she has been researching her dissertation topic on the last Ottoman Palace of Yıldız in nineteenth-century Istanbul. Thus far, the archival hunt has taken her to Istanbul, London, Munich and Aschaffenburg. Her work focuses on the novel architectural aspects of this palace complex; especially those pertaining to curious prefabricated pavilions and inventive typologies for garden architecture. Read more… She is deeply interested in the global connections between sumptuous architectural displays and public garden ideals set about in the international exhibitions of the century and their immediate absorption into the Ottoman residential spaces both imperial and public. While imported European sale catalogues of ephemeral architecture and builders’ manuals form a part of her visual sources, expense accounts of buildings, gardeners’ notes, and landscaping costs constitute the more ample, and paleographically more arduous textual ones. She is excited to be joining the Dumbarton Oaks community for the next two years as a Tyler Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies, where she will benefit greatly from the library and photographic collections, as well as the verdant atmosphere of its gardens! While here, she also hopes to contribute to garden historiography by helping augment the Middle Eastern Garden Traditions Project.
Julian Yolles, Tyler Fellow in Byzantine Studies. Latin Culture in the Crusader States (1099-1187)
Growing up in the Netherlands, I was inspired by an archaeologist in the family to study the classics at the University of Amsterdam, and went on to study theology in a master’s program at Utrecht University before enrolling in a PhD in Medieval Latin at Harvard.
In the summer of 2010 I was an intern at Dumbarton Oaks, where I spent two wonderful months working on the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. I was able to explore a wide array of fascinating texts written by medieval travelers to Constantinople and Jerusalem. This sparked my interest in Latin writings from and about Jerusalem, and, three years later, I am pleased to return to Dumbarton Oaks as a Tyler Fellow to work on a dissertation in Medieval Latin that focuses on the Latin East of the twelfth century.
I am particularly interested in studying Latin writings produced in the Crusader States in this period as cultural artifacts that point to the existence of a brief but dynamic literary culture, and to view them within their wider Mediterranean, specifically Byzantine, contexts. For the academic year of 2013–14, I look forward to being in residence at Dumbarton Oaks, where I will be working for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library in the spring, while in 2014–15 I will travel to consult manuscripts in such varied places as Jerusalem, Rome, and London.