Graduate Student Museum Study Day
October 13, 2023 | In conjunction with the ongoing interdepartmental project “Passage Between Worlds: Exchanges Along the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages.”
Egyptian Textiles and Medieval Indian Ocean Trade
Friday, October 13, 2023
9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Applications due: July 17, 2023
In conjunction with the ongoing interdepartmental project “Passage Between Worlds: Exchanges Along the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages,” the 2023 Dumbarton Oaks Museum Graduate Study Day Egyptian Textiles and Medieval Indian Ocean Trade will consider Indian cotton textiles found in Egypt, India, and Indonesia and emblematic of a vibrant maritime trade network found east of the Mediterranean Sea in the late antique and medieval periods.
The workshop will be co-taught by Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Dumbarton Oaks), Anna Kelley (University of St. Andrews), Sumru Belger Krody (The George Washington Museum and The Textile Museum), and Arielle Winnik (Yale University), who will discuss the trade, manufacture, and use of textiles across the Indian Ocean in the premodern periods.
In the morning, these scholars will present their current research, with a particular focus on recent exhibitions featuring Indian textiles. After lunch, participants will spend the afternoon studying textiles from the Dumbarton Oaks Collection in object storage and the Cotsen Textiles Collection at the Textile Museum.
Funding
Dumbarton Oaks will reserve participants’ accommodation in its on-site Guest House for one night (October 12) and will arrange for Friday lunch in the Refectory. Participants should book their own travel to Washington, to be reimbursed up to $600 upon submission of receipts.
Applications
Currently enrolled graduate students in good standing are eligible to apply. Dumbarton Oaks does not sponsor J1 visas for Study Day attendees. We encourage applicants from graduate programs in art history, archaeology, history, classics, religious studies, and other fields who might benefit from close engagement with our collections and from training in material culture approaches.
To apply, please submit a CV and cover letter with a brief summary of the candidate’s research interests, plans for future research, and an explanation of why attendance is important to the candidate’s intellectual and professional development. All materials should be submitted as one pdf to museum@doaks.org. Applications are due July 17, 2023.
Past Topics
2022
Seals and Other Forms of Religious and Secular Art in Byzantium
September 23, 2022 | Dumbarton Oaks
In conjunction with the special exhibition Lasting Impressions: People, Power, Piety the 2022 Dumbarton Oaks Museum Graduate Study Day will consider the relationship between seals and other forms of religious and secular art in Byzantium. This workshop, led by Dumbarton Oaks curators Jonathan Shea and Elizabeth Dospel Williams and John Cotsonis, (His Grace Joachim Bishop of Amissos), Director of the Archbishop Iakovos Library, Hellenic College/Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, will explore the use of images in a variety of media to express piety, identity, group belonging, and social status.
In the morning students will visit and discuss the exhibition in the galleries. We will address curatorial selection, historiographic topics, function, and consider the relationships of seals to other media in the Dumbarton Oaks collection. After lunch, participants will spend the afternoon studying works from the Byzantine and seals collections in storage.
2021
Individual and Society in Late Antiquity and Byzantium
May 20–21 and 24, 2021 | Online
How did objects convey information about individuals and society in Late Antiquity and Byzantium? Much like today, people of these periods carefully constructed their public personas through textiles, jewelry, seals, and other artifacts. This workshop will consider how modern-day notions of identity apply to premodern concepts of individuals’ relationships to their broader social, religious, gender, ethnic, and official communities. In addition, we will discuss the pragmatic challenges of displaying objects associated with individuals in museum contexts.
This year’s Museum Study Day will go virtual. We can accommodate up to 12 graduate students in art history, archaeology, history, classics, religious studies, and other fields who might benefit from close engagement with our collections and from training in material culture approaches.
Schedule
- Thursday, May 20, 2021, 11am – 2pm EST: Methodological introduction and presentations
- Friday, May 21, 2021 EST: Individual object handling sessions with curators
- Monday, May 24, 2021, 12pm – 3pm EST: Wrap-up discussions
Currently enrolled graduate students in good standing are eligible to apply.
Organizers
- Elizabeth Dospel Williams, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
- Vladimir Ivanovici, Universita’ della Svizzera italiana
2019
Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion
October 4, 2019 | Dumbarton Oaks
Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion explores dress practice in late antique Egypt and the enduring aesthetic appeal of these textiles in modern times. As part of the scholarly programming associated with this exhibition, we are organizing a graduate study day to discuss the themes and content of the exhibition and to examine recent, unpublished textile acquisitions in the Dumbarton Oaks collections.
The study day will be led by assistant curator of Byzantine Art Dr. Elizabeth Williams, who curated Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion. In the morning, students will visit and discuss the exhibition in the galleries. We will address curatorial selection, historiographic topics, and a few outstanding individual textiles. After lunch, participants will spend the afternoon scrutinizing pieces in storage. We will consider techniques, materials, iconography, and function through close investigation of recent acquisitions, mostly drawn from the Bennochy Collection of textiles donated to Dumbarton Oaks by Professor Richard Rose. Students will also be introduced to the institution’s digital resources, including its Online Catalogue of Byzantine and Early Islamic Textiles.
Schedule
- 10am-12pm. Tour and Discussion of Ornament: Fragments of Byzantine Fashion
- 12pm-1pm. Lunch in Refectory
- 1pm-4pm. Study Session in Textile Storage
2013
Inspiring Art: The Dumbarton Oaks Birthing Figure
September 27, 2013
Miriam Doutriaux, the Pre-Columbian Collection exhibition associate, coordinated and chaired the event, which opened with a public lecture by Wendy Grossman on “Pre-Columbian Art between the Ethnographic and the Surreal: Man Ray’s Imagined Americas.” The following day saw five papers by specialists from the United States and Mexico who addressed the open questions that our enigmatic sculpture still poses, even 110 years after its first publication and attribution as Aztec. The study day provided a lively forum to discuss themes and topics around the notion of fake, copy, forgery, and influence.
Speakers
- Miriam Doutriaux, Dumbarton Oaks, “The Dumbarton Oaks Birthing Figure: An Introduction”
- Elizabeth Boone, Tulane University, “Right and Wrong: A New Look at the Tlazolteotl”
- Susan Toby Evans, The Pennsylvania State University, “Tlazolteotl and Her Sisters: Mistaken and Shifting Hierophanic Identities”
- Emily Umberger, University of Arizona,“Women Who Have Given Birth in Aztec Sculptures”
- Susana Pliego Quijano, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México, “Tlazolteotl in Mexican Art: Birth, Sexuality, and National Identity”
- Constance Cortez, Texas Tech University, “Tlazolteotl as Floating Signifier or The Use (and Abuse) of an Ersatz Aztec Icon in Popular Culture and Contemporary Art”
April 29, 2013
The museum organized and hosted a study day with specialists from various fields—text critique, art history, paleography, and codicology—to collaboratively study the recently acquired Byzantine Gospel book Dumbarton Oaks MS5. The day’s discussions were based on the scholarly research of Nadhezda Kavrus-Hoffmann, who had developed and submitted a report after a month-long research appointment at Dumbarton Oaks in August 2012.
2011
Cyprus from Byzantium to the Renaissance
April 1, 2011 | Co-sponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus; Chaired by Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University
Speakers
- Tassos Papacostas, King’s College, London, “Decoding Cyprus from Byzantium to the Renaissance: Relics and Sacred Topography, Cities and Countryside”
- Charles Stewart, University of St. Thomas, Houston, “The Cities of Byzantine Cyprus and the Latin Levant”
- Maria Parani, University of Cyprus, “Living in a Sweet Land: The Material Culture of Daily Life on Cyprus, Thirteenth–Fourteenth Centuries”
- Justine Andrews, University of New Mexico, “The Greeks and the Gothic: The Cathedrals of Nicosia and Famagusta”
- Ioanna Christoforaki, The Academy of Athens, “From Byzantine Province to Crusader Kingdom: Perspectives and Reflections on the Art of Medieval Cyprus”
- Cristina Stancioiu, California State University, Long Beach, “The Dead Among Us: Community and Commemoration in Cypriot Churches, Fourteenth–Sixteenth Century”
- Barbara McNulty, Temple University, “Negotiating between the Feudal and the Commercial: Family Portraiture on Cyprus”
- Allan Langdale, University of California, Santa Cruz, “Venetian Architecture and Spolia in Famagusta: Pragmatic or Programmatic?”
2010
Antioch-on-the-Orontes
April 15–16, 2010 | Dumbarton Oaks
In a new initiative, the Museum organized and hosted a Study Day in conjunction with the spring 2010 temporary exhibit on Antioch-on-the-Orontes. Ten speakers were invited to present their research projects, and the program reflected how contemporary approaches and interests have grown in scope since the original excavations. The goal was to provide a forum to discuss old material that awaits new interest and to connect with ongoing projects, as well as to facilitate new research in and around Antioch/Antakya.
Speakers
- Christine Kondoleon, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Antioch: The Exhibit Ten Years Later”
- Wendy Mayer, Australian Catholic University, “The Churches of Antioch in Late Antiquity: The Results of a Recent Project to Re-assess the Evidence”
- Andrea De Giorgi, Rutgers University, “Antioch and its Villae: A Social Perspective”
- Örgü Dalgiç, Dumbarton Oaks and Catholic University of America, “Looking at Antioch (Mosaics) from Constantinople”
- Amy Brauer, Harvard Art Museum, “From the Crate to the Classroom: Antioch Mosaics at Harvard”
- Cécile Giroire, Louvre Museum, “The Louvre’s Antioch Mosaics and the Re-installation Project”