Inside Dumbarton Oaks
WASHINGTON — Ask a scholar of the Maya to describe Dumbarton Oaks, and you will learn about a world-renowned center of pre-Columbian research. Ask a medievalist, and you will hear about the rare Byzantine collection, while a landscape architect might refer with admiration to the center’s historic terraced gardens. It used to be difficult to get the full picture of this Harvard outpost spread across 16 verdant acres in the Georgetown neighborhood of the nation’s capital, in part because it long functioned as something of a walled paradise for scholars looking to immerse themselves in one of its three very different areas of specialized research. But more people now are witnessing the treasures of Dumbarton Oaks, partly because of the opening of new library and museum facilities in recent years that were planned under former director Ned Keenan, and because of the efforts of current director Jan Ziolkowski to increase connections with the...