Margaret Mullett is Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. She was previously Professor of Byzantine Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, Director of the Institute of Byzantine Studies there and of the AHRC Centre for Byzantine Cultural History (with the universities of Newcastle and Sussex). She began working on epistolography and literacy, friendship and patronage, turning to rhetoric, performance and gender before dealing more often of late with verse.  As well as her current work on tents, she is working on lament in Middle Byzantine poetry and drama, particularly brother-brother lament. The firstfruits of a guestprofessorship in Gender at the University of Vienna appeared in 2013 as Female Founders in Byzantium and Beyond, edited with Lioba Theis and Michael Grünbart as volumes 60-61 of the Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte.