While a Tyler fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, I have been able to make major advancements in the writing of my dissertation and my program of research more broadly. Further, I had the opportunities to aid in the development of the Justin Kerr archive of photographs of Maya artworks and to conduct fieldwork in Central Mexico for a full year, neither of which would have been possible without this great institution’s assistance. While I am very grateful for these professional advancements, I am most appreciative of the community of scholars that I came to know while on campus. Their fields of research concerned a number of topics foreign to me, but they were always willing to share an interesting article or artifact that might help my own research along. At no other institution in the United States or abroad is it possible to engage with so wide a range of scholars studying aspects of indigenous American culture, and for that opportunity I am extremely grateful.
Trenton Barnes, Harvard University, William R. Tyler Fellow 2018–2020