Lucas Mertehikian, Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Fellow
Lucas Mertehikian is a postdoctoral fellow in Plant Humanities at Dumbarton Oaks. He received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University, where he was also a graduate student associate at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. His dissertation, Fake Originals: Collecting Latin America, examines how ideas of Latin America were constructed between the 1850s and 1950s through US-based collections, including botanical specimens. He is also interested in researching the cultural history of plants and gardens in Latin America and their literary and artistic representation.
