Dumbarton Oaks is accepting applications for 2002-2003 fellowships for landscape architecture, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian studies. Fellowship opportunities include junior fellowships for students who at the time of application have fulfilled all preliminary requirements for a Ph.D. (or appropriate final degree) and will be working on a dissertation or final project at Dumbarton Oaks under the direction of a faculty member at their own university. In exceptional cases, applications may be accepted from students before they have fulfilled their preliminary requirements for graduation. Full fellowships are available for scholars who hold a doctorate (or appropriate final degree) or have established themselves in their field and wish to pursue their own research. Summer fellowships are available for scholars in the three areas of study at any level of advancement. Practicing landscape architects who wish to apply may be considered for regular (i.e., not junior) fellowships if they have a master's as their final degree, depending upon their professional experience, publications in the field and the stage of their career. Those who are unable to accept fellowships for at least one full semester should apply for Summer fellowships.

For additional information and application procedures, visit http://www.doaks.org/fellowships.html or write:
Office of the Director
Dumbarton Oaks
1703 32nd Street, NW
Washington, DC 20007
Fax: 202-339-6419

Additional notes for applicants for Fellowships in Landscape Architecture (from www.doaks.org):
Applicants are urged to read the printed brochure carefully, especially as regards the application procedures. The following notes may also be useful:

Studies in Landscape Architecture, as its name implies, treats all aspects of the field: agrarian, architectural, art, historical, botanical, cultural, economic, environmental, geographical, horticultural, social and technological. The Garden Library Rare Book Room is especially rich in American and European materials that concern architecture, botany, horticulture and all aspects of garden design; our holdings comprise mainly books, but also drawings, manuscripts and prints. The Reference Collection has a wider scope, collecting material on garden and landscape architecture throughout the world, together with some works in social history, anthropology, geography, iconography, etc., as these directly impinge upon landscape architecture researches carried on here. It is normal for topics to be geared to the availability of materials in the Dumbarton Oaks collections, but fellows are encouraged to use the resources of other specialist libraries and collections in Washington.

Fellowships have been awarded in the past to scholars from all over the world and from a wide range of disciplines. Their topics have covered a wide range that can be assessed from the enclosed list of fellowship topics from the last 6 years. All research proposals are examined and ranked according to their own merit. However, we want to encourage proposals that engage one of the three following domains of research:
     (1) dialectic of figurative and discursive language for gardens and other designed landscapes;
     (2) reception and experience of gardens and other designed landscapes;
     (3) changes in production and maintenance of gardens and other designed landscapes.

Following in the wake of garden history many different disciplines of contemporary studies have been pursued at Dumbarton Oaks, either during Symposia and roundtables, or by scholars during their fellowships. It has become very obvious that many branches of the humanities (art history, art criticism, literary studies, history of ideas, philosophy...) and of the social sciences (social history, cultural geography, cultural studies, American studies, social anthropology...) were contributing to the development of studies of garden and designed landscapes into an interdisciplinary program.

Such a program may contribute significantly to studies of arts in contemporary as well as past societies because gardens and designed landscapes offer a specific relation to their users: they engage them bodily as well as intellectually. One does not look at a garden or a designed landscape as one looks at a picture or listen to it as one listens to music. In both of these cases modern audiences seek a disengagement of body experience when enjoying works of art. The same is true with the theater, with literature or with any kind of reading. Most of the arts invite a disembodied aesthetic appreciation. Gardens and designed landscapes, to the contrary, stimulate bodily experiences in order to lead into aesthetic appreciation: they demand motion, choice of orientation, selection of objects for attention (very often their experience is described as overwhelming, beyond words, or beyond the ability to capture with words, a flickering world of changing experiences). This sets very specific challenges for our domain of studies in the context of present discussions in the humanities and the social sciences.

(1) Dialectic of figurative and discursive language for gardens and other designed landscapes
The domination of linguistics as a model for the human sciences ignores the role of figures in communication, intellectual endeavors and especially in the development of cultural or shared habits, beliefs, judgments, etc. This is the more to be regretted when observing the growth of communication and persuasion through visual imagery in contemporary mass-culture. Studies of experiences of gardens and designed landscapes offer a broad range of opportunities for appraising mutual relations between discursive and figurative language. Discursive language relies upon discrete signs that command meanings, and meanings are attached to them within some systemic order. Figurative language relies upon images and forms amenable to continuous transformation, grafting and concatenation that are not bound to a specific meaning, and yet always demand interpretation from observers. Within any particular culture they introduce particular patterns of imagination that are explored and extended by the arts. However, developments of discursive and figurative language are mutually embedded. Studies of gardens and designed landscapes should allow an understanding of the dialectics of figurative and discursive language in a domain that engages body and intellectual experience. It should throw light upon their course of development according to cultural or social context, in particular under conditions of conflict or broad change such as westernization of non-western cultures.

(2) Reception and experience of gardens and other designed landscapes
Because gardens allow their users to engage ideas as if they were expressions of "Mother Nature," these relationships can be manipulated and intentionally used to naturalize ideas, to transform new ideologies into apparently eternal truth. Designed landscapes and gardens have been instrumental in the development and exercise of power in societies since late Antiquity. They have also been developed in order to naturalize pedagogical, political and commercial purposes. Garden art and landscape architecture are domains of highly contested meanings in societies. In particular in political democracies, in mass societies, in pluri-cultural societies, gardens are places where nature is summoned as a material for communication. All of this points to the value of studies of responses to gardens and designed landscapes, of expectations raised by new design trends and new discourse about landscape, and of social reception of these developments in society at large, in the media, in social praxis. Actually one may look at gardens and designed landscapes not only as objects of consumption, but much more as places of social agency.

(3) Changes in production and maintenance of gardens and other designed landscapes
An even more contemporary note should be added. Gardening has been a domain of human labor and action that has not only maintained a continuity of tools, gestures and working habits despite a tendency to alter constantly the stock of plants that were used, but also a continuity of beliefs and attitudes of a metaphysical nature. This has given way with the rise of new techniques since the early 19th century, and with the spread of mass society in the second half of the 20th century. Changes in landscape design have moved at different paces according to thesocial sphere of action to which they belonged (religion, transportation, agriculture, military or civil institutions...), following changes in economy and technology. Thus the whole domain of garden creation and landscape design and maintenance allows studies of deep practical cultural changes and the rise of new rituals of care and use of nature in contemporary urban societies as well as in past societies.