In 2010, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection inaugurated a new pre-doctoral fellowship scheme, the William R. Tyler Fellowships. Eligible applicants are Harvard graduate students working on dissertations in art history, archaeology, history, or literature of the Pre-Columbian or Mediterranean/Byzantine worlds. The Fellowship funds a first year of research travel overseas and a second year in residence at Dumbarton Oaks to complete the dissertation and contribute to an institutional project that is related to the fellows’ research. We are pleased to introduce two members of the first cohort of Tyler Fellows in Byzantine Studies, who have been in residence at Dumbarton Oaks since the fall of 2012.
Konstantina Karterouli
Assimilation of Byzantine Art in the West of the Late Twelfth Century
I am a doctoral student at Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, writing my dissertation on the assimilation of Byzantine visual properties and objects into Western art during the late twelfth century. As a second-year Tyler Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, I also have the privilege of working with Museum Director Gudrun Bühl on an institutional project: the creation of an online exhibit that will accompany and supplement an on-site exhibition of four New Testament manuscripts in the Dumbarton Oaks Museum collection. The exhibition will open in April 2013, in conjunction with the Byzantine Studies Symposium “The New Testament in Byzantium.” All four manuscripts are being digitized for display on the Dumbarton Oaks website. Textual, iconographic, and comparative analyses of the manuscripts will accompany the online exhibit, to provide a contextual and historical perspective that will both enhance the museum experience and make these masterpieces available to distant viewers.
Jakub Kabala
Frontier Spaces: Imagining Eastern Europe, 800–1000
I am a graduate student in the Department of History at Harvard University, working on a dissertation on Slavic borderlands between the eighth and tenth centuries. Specifically, I analyze the imagination and representation of Byzantium’s Balkan frontier and the Carolingian/Ottonian eastern frontier, drawing on written sources as well as archeological finds.
As a second year Tyler Fellow, I have the opportunity to contribute to the Dumbarton Oaks online catalogue of Byzantine lead seals. Several thousand of the 17,000 lead seals in the Dumbarton Oaks collection carry geographical information indicating the location where they were struck. My task is to create an interactive digital map of these several thousand seals, to be added to the online catalogue. The map will enable not only the localization of individual seals, but also a visualization of searches across time, space, as well as title and office of the seal owner.