Plant Humanities Fellows and Staff

The initiative is administered by the executive director, Yota Batsaki, as principal investigator, and the curator of the rare book collection, Anatole Tchikine, as co-investigator. They are joined by post-doctoral fellow Ashley Buchanan, a scholar of early modern European history with an interest in the social, cultural, and political impact of medicinal plants and recipes in the early modern world. In September 2019, we welcomed our first academic-year fellows. Victoria Pickering comes to Dumbarton Oaks from a post-doctoral fellowship at the British Museum, where she worked on a project that brought together traditional and digital scholarship in working with naturalist Sir Hans Sloane’s manuscript catalogues. Rebecca Friedel is an ecological anthropologist whose research focuses on reconstructing a history of human-plant relationships in the Maya area of present-day Belize. Taylor Johnson, who joined as rare book assistant in June 2019, contributes her knowledge of book history and broad experience of working with special collections. Courtney Randolph is grant coordinator and may be contacted at PlantHumanities@doaks.org for questions about the project and related scholarly programs.