Research Spotlight

2024 MEMS Summer Awards

Based on my cursory study of animal reliefs in the Bharhut Stupa, I would argue that elements of a feral imagination of animality inform visual jātakas as well. As two noteworthy examples, I point to the depiction of the ruru jātaka (the image on top predominated by deer) and mahākapi jātaka (the image on the bottom predominated by monkeys) in Bharhut. In the ruru jātaka, the buddha-to-be takes the form of a deer, and in the mahākapi jātaka, he takes the form of a monkey. In both medallions, the buddha-to-be animal is depicted twice. In the representation of the ruru jātaka, he is shown transporting an individual on his back first and also as seated under a tree with other deer, but facing a different direction than them. In the representation of the mahākapi jātaka, he is shown forming a bridge between two trees by using his body. Other monkeys step on his body to leap from one tree to another. In the same composition, he is also shown seated under a canopy. 

What stands out about the monkeys and deer in these medallions is that the bodhisattva animal has qualities that make him both similar to and different from the other animals in the scene. In terms of physical appearance, he looks the same as the other animals, though he is a little bigger. Like other deer, the bodhisattva deer sits under a tree. But he faces a different direction. Similarly, the bodhisattva monkey leaps from tree to tree like other monkeys. But the demure manner in which he is shown seated while discoursing with the individual seated across from marks his difference.

Allison Grenda, History of Art

Project: Reading and Translating Byzantine Greek Texts

This summer, I attended the Trinity College Dublin International Byzantine Greek
Summer School at the Advanced level, funded by a MEMS award. This two-week,
synchronous virtual course consisted of four hours of reading and translation each day. Each student chose their own Byzantine Greek text, which we then translated as a group. The selection spanned the long chronology of the Byzantine Empire and included such canonical works as the Alexiad by Anna Komnene (b. 1083 – d. 1153) as well as more niche writings like the Life of Saint Dositheus, a biography of a 6th-century C.E. monk.

My chosen text was the Inaugural Address of Michael Choniates (b. 1140 - d. 1220), an elite Constantinopolitan sent to Athens - by then a fairly small city - to be its archbishop. While his private correspondences display a disdain for the city and its lack of grandeur, his first speech to his new flock is quite the opposite. Full of praise for Athens and its residents, Choniates heartily exalts them as possessing the same "Attic blood and Athenian spirit" as the ancient citizens of
Classical Athens whom he so admires. Choniates' speech, delivered from the
Acropolis, is laden with Platonic, Biblical, mythological, and architectural references, a work of high rhetoric far better suited to his elite contemporaries
in Constantinople than the average Athenian. Indeed, my classmates and I agreed
that this text was the hardest to translate of all that we had encountered! Nonetheless, I greatly enjoyed reading this text in its original Greek. I had been familiar with it via secondary sources, but no published translation exists, so it was
gratifying to struggle through the speech as a group and get a sense for just
how it was received by the Athenians (who, Choniates later notes, did not fully
comprehend the intricacies of his orations, an experience that I can sincerely
relate to). On a larger scale, as an art historian, I appreciated being able to merge textual evidence of Byzantine Athens with the archaeological and architectural remains I have long studied to produce a broader picture of the city in this time period.

My reading and translation abilities certainly improved during this course, and I look forward to continuing to use these skills and Byzantine Greek textual sources in my dissertation research. Thank you MEMS!

Augusto Espinoza, History

Women's Transformative Journeys in Sixteenth-Century Lima

Between May and September 2024, I conducted research at the National Archives of Peru (AGN), supported by the MEMS Summer Research Grant, which enabled my travel to Lima and sustained my work throughout this period. My initial plan, presented in Winter 2024 under the title "Unveiling Women’s Economic Engagements in Sixteenth-Century Lima’s Notarial Records," envisioned a focused three-week research stint. However, unforeseen challenges required adjustments to my schedule.

I initially set out to review a database of 103,340 entries from 164 notarial books(1535–1600) housed at the AGN. By the time I submitted my application for the Summer Grants, I had completed around 70% of this review. Despite my efforts, I could not meet the planned end-of-April deadline, ultimately achieving the review by the end of May. While this delay required a reorientation of my approach, it did not hinder the project’s overall progress. Instead, I shifted my focus to two primary objectives:preparing presentations for two summer conferences and compiling a subset of notarial records that highlighted women not only as active agents but also in more subtle, often overlooked roles—whether as background figures or as commodities seemingly stripped of any visible agency. These objectives were closely linked, as both presentations drew on examples that encapsulated the broader aims of my research.

By early June, I had completed an extensive review of over 103,000 entries in the central database and selected approximately 24,651 entries, which now form a specialized subset I created. However, my research in Lima was briefly interrupted as I traveled to Colombia for three weeks to attend a conference and conduct archival work. Upon my return, while preparing for another symposium in Puebla, Mexico, in mid-July, new questions emerged regarding the future direction of my project, further refining its objectives.

This shift led me to focus more closely on specific aspects, particularly the roles of women of color—both enslaved and free—as the notarial records offered a widerange of information about their economic and legal engagements. As a result, I reconsidered my review of the database subset, expanding my selection of illustrativecases, not only for my presentation at the 17th biennial GEMELA conference but also with an eye toward a potential academic publication in a leading journal. This goal was further solidified after my presentation at that symposium, where my work received the award for best graduate student paper.

Nessa Higginson, History of Art

After defending my dissertation prospectus in May, I embarked immediately upon
research for the first chapter I will write, which investigates botanical
etchings in early modern European scientific treatises. This work took me first
to London at the British Museum (BM), where I served as the Michael Bromberg
Fellow for Prints and Drawings, and then to Paris, where I consulted primary
sources at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN). The MEMS Summer
Research Grant supported travel and living costs throughout this time, allowing
me to make the most of a four-month trip.

During my fellowship at the BM, I studied the museum’s significant collection of prints and drawings by Robert. Among these, it turned out that the BM has two albums with prints from Mémoires, in earlier and later editions, by Robert, Bosse, and Chastillon. The albums had yet to be fully catalogued, so I created individual entries for their combined 470+ prints. To complement this work, I studied every edition of Mémoires held by the British Library and the Natural History Museum. At the latter, I identified two preparatory red chalk drawings by Robert.

In Paris, I spent three weeks conducting full-time research at the MNHN. There I continued to look at variant states of the artists’ prints, working to decipher when edits were made to the plates. I also reviewed the manuscripts of academicians such as Denis Dodart, Samuel Cottereau Duclos, and Antoine de Jussieu. These include Dodart’s presentations to the Academy explaining the value of the plant encyclopedia, as well as Duclos’ and Jussieu’s vigorous denunciations of certain of Dodart’s plant experiment conclusions. I also studied the papers of printer-publishers Nicolas and Jean Marchant, detailing what updates they believed necessary to the encyclopedia’s etchings. Tucked inside these notes, I found black and red chalk drawings that match plate additions, and even a pressed aster specimen. Another discovery from the MNHN is a dissertation on a “monstruous rose” by Jean Marchant, which will aid my research into when certain plants were considered outside or beyond “the natural.”

Working from these findings, I plan to have a complete chapter draft by summer. The support from MEMS was crucial to this early foray into dissertation research and writing.

Tyler Dunston, English Language and Literature

I also was able to see a manuscript of an epitaph poem written on the death of Margaret Cavendish, whose scientific lyric poetry is one of the subjects of my third chapter. In addition to gaining valuable experience in archival research, I came away with interesting findings. To provide one notable example: The Harley manuscript of Donne’s third satire includes a slight deviation from the poem as it is normally printed. While in most versions, one of the most important lines in the poem (which concerns the right of the individual to seek true religion without having to align themselves with any one party until they are sure) reads something along the lines of “To stand inquiring right is not to stray.”

However, the Harley manuscript reads, “To stand enquyering right is not to staye [my emphasis].” It could be a mistake, as the manuscript features a few lines which had been crossed out and corrected, but given the fact that Donne often shared slightly different versions of his poems, it could also be an alternate version. I was particularly interested in the use of the word stay as my dissertation examines the poetics of suspension as it relates to doubt in early modern poetry, and the verb to stay, like the verb to stand, has many resonances with the religious stakes of suspension. Immediately I thought of the warning given to Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which is also discussed in my dissertation, to “stay thy desperate steps.”