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 Kuba Kabala, who is part of the first cohort of Tyler Fellows arriving at Dumbarton Oaks in the fall of 2012. Kuba writes:
I am writing my dissertation on the emergence and development of the Slavic world between Byzantium and Latin Christendom during the ninth and tenth centuries. My research is in large part a philological and archaeological analysis of Slavic borderlands: Byzantium’s northern frontier on the one hand and the Carolingian/Ottonian eastern frontier on the other. I take a two-pronged approach. First, I investigate how Byzantines, Slavs, and Latin westerners imagined and understood borders and space in their written works, how this imagination developed over time, and how it differed across the languages of my sources: Greek, Slavonic, and Latin. Second, I am studying the ninth- and tenth-century archaeological remains of the area to trace movement, contact, and confrontation in the borderlands. I am spending 2011–2012 as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main. Early in the fall I worked briefly on the excavation of Tarquimpol, a fortified city near the late antique Roman border in France. The library of the Römisch-Germanische Kommission has provided a great environment especially for my archaeological research. I continue to build geodatabases of archaeological finds in the Slavic borderlands, including Byzantine coin finds in ninth- and tenth-century Bulgaria, a subject I began to investigate at the Dumbarton Oaks Coins & Seals Summer School in 2011.