2010-2011 Rome Prize Fellows
September 13, 2010
Congratulations to the 2010-2011 Rome Prize winners!
13 women and 18 men begin their fellowship year as the Academy opened its gates on September 6th. These 31 Rome Prize winners are joined by 2 returning Fellows from last year who will be completing their studies during a second fellowship year.
This year's prize winners are once again a diverse group representing a range of disciplines in the Arts and Humanities. They come from 16 different states, two of whom were born abroad (Albania and Cuba) and have multicultural upbringings. Their ages range from 26 to 58, representing the Academy’s mission to award the prize to emerging scholars and artists as well as those who are in the middle of their careers. The American Academy in Rome also extends its welcome to the spouses and children of the fellows and looks forward to their presence which will further enrich our community.
Rome Prize Fellows and Projects
Arts:Architecture
Ersela Kripa & Stephen Mueller
Founders Rome Prize
Partners, AGENCY architecture llc, New York, NYHackable Infrastructures: Inhabiting the Margins of Contemporary Rome
We will study the forced movement of the Romani in Rome, establishing an understanding of the contemporary city as a network of superimposed degrees of mobility, finding sites of convergence where the Romani and the Roman might benefit from co-habitation, and to propose infrastructural and architectural frameworks to enable the preservation and co-habitation of Roma and Roman culture. Drawing on a rich history of Roman infrastructural and civic typologies that have been re-purposed over the course of the city's legacy, and engaging the current objectives of the rapidly developing metropolis, we will investigate appropriate forms for such an intervention. Developing and testing our speculations of a "hackable" infrastructure for the contemporary city, we will benefit from direct contact with Roma and Sinti culture, its advocates, and the designers and planners of modern Rome to develop site-specific infrastructural interventions that address the intensifying Roma housing and sociological crisis.
Joshua G. Stein
Marion O. and Maximilian E. Hoffman Rome Prize
Principal, Radical Craft, Los AngelesAssociate Professor, Interior Architecture, Woodbury University
Cast Gallery: Inhabiting Ornament
The Cast Gallery is an invention of the late 19th Century which continues the tradition of reproducing classical antiquities for use as contemporary reference. I will assemble a Cast Gallery of ornament through the use of archeological documentation techniques invented to record antiquities. However, rather than recording idealized form from singular points in history, these casts will index the multiple layers of human habitation registered in their source objects and patterns. Through research into historical and emerging documentation techniques, I will assemble a material study of ornament and its active participation in the contemporary city. This proposal seeks to investigate the friction area between pure geometric formalism and the 'dirty' formlessness of human habitation. The resulting Cast Gallery will include the production of a series of archaeological/architectural objects which will project new possibilities for habitation.
Design
Thomas J. Campanella
Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize
Associate Professor, City & Regional Planning, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillFrom Rome to Robert Moses: Recovering the Legacy of Michael Rapuano
I will conduct field research to excavate the Italian sources of Michael Rapuano's unique aesthetic of park and parkway design. A Fellow and later a trustee and President of the American Academy of Rome, Rapuano was one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th century. Using primary-source archival material, including recently discovered family letters, drawings, and sketchbooks, I intend to retrace Rapuano's footsteps in Italy to better understand the designer's formative early years and, especially, to probe the origins of his signature "public-works baroque" design style that became a template for park planning in New York City for 50 years. The research is essential to understanding Rapuano's signal contributions to American design history, and will contribute to a major book on Rapuano and his collaborator of 42 years, Gilmore Clarke. The book, Designing the American Century, will be published by Yale University Press.
Jeremy Mende
Franklin D. Israel Rome Prize
Principal, MendeDesign, San Francisco, CAAdjunct Professor, California College of the Arts
Anxious Futurism - A Visual Poetics of Our Schizophrenic Lean Into Tomorrow
I will research the communicative techniques of classical Futurism in order to create a new visual language that will express our frenetic, ambivalent lean into our future. This body of work will engage the Futurists techniques of simultaneità, onomatopoeia, and synesthetic form, but will replace the original character of Futurism with that of our time. The final result will be a series of graphic prints and an animated film that 'enact' our contemporary atmosphere of anxiety toward connectivity, intimacy, speed, and power.
Adrian Van Allen
Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize
Multimedia Specialist/Exhibit Developer, Exploratorium Museum, San Francisco, CAMapping Science: Rome
Naturalis Historia Romana: An Interactive Map will utilize Google maps, GPS data tagging and embedded Flash modules to tell a series of interlocking narratives about the evolution of the natural sciences in Rome. Portable to a website or a handheld device, visitors will explore interactive maps laced with podcasts, articles, animations and videos allowing them to mine the history of specific locations throughout the city and its environs. The Naturalis Historia Romana will be a multi-layered interactive map that lets visitors explore the evolution of the natural sciences in the city of Rome from Pliny the Elder to current biotechnology.
Historic Preservation and Conservation
John Matteo
National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize
Associate, Robert Silman Associates, Washington, D.C.Written in Stone: Reading Strength in Architecture from Ancient to Modern
The image of Rome's Pantheon resonates and re-emerges throughout architectural history. In achieving this visual lineage, a parallel history of structural design and construction can be traced. Building from within this context, the infusion of contemporary technologies and methods creates both opportunity and risk in advancing the dialogue with architecture's past. The Pantheon as paradigm offers a framework of study that advocates for two over-arching goals: first, for the expanded study of engineering history in the training and education of design professionals; and second, for an emphasis on communication and shared literacies in an integrated design process. The Pantheon holds a revolutionary position in the history of concrete design and construction. Looking at selected works of Pier Luigi Nervi and others, the project updates the current structural understanding of this primary source, and focuses on the evolving design processes specific to architecturally exposed concrete.
Mark Rabinowitz
Mark Hampton Rome Prize
Fellow of the American Institute for ConservationVice President, Conservation Solutions, Inc, Washington, D.C.
The study of Italian marble quarrying and carving techniques from the turn of the 20th century used in the creation of American monuments.
While in Rome I will explore the use of new stone-working technologies at the turn of the 20th century by Italian marble quarries and carvers and their possible association with specific deterioration of American public monuments carved in Italy or from Italian stone during that period. Through research into historic documentation, contemporary Italian monuments and sculptures with similar conditions, and collaboration with Italian conservators on current practice in treatment, I hope to better understand the causes of this frequently seen condition and advance its treatment.
Laurie W. Rush
Booth Family Rome Prize
Cultural Resources Manager, United States Army, Department of Defense, Fort Drum, NYCultural Property Protection; International Military Education and Building Partnerships
My project is to develop and establish a curriculum for Cultural Property Protection in the Event of Armed Conflict at the Rome based NATO Defense College. The project would build on US Defense and international initiatives for teaching military personnel about considerations for cultural property. The proposed curriculum would include a series of modules covering multiple aspects of the complex relationship between military operations and cultural property stewardship, like legal drivers, mission considerations, sources of information, and informed responses. The Rome Prize enables partnership with the Italian Carabinieri and the NGO WATCH, as well as offer valuable on-site research and teaching opportunities. The project will contribute toward international progress for meaningful stewardship of cultural property in areas of conflict and disaster.
Landscape Architecture
Casey Lance Brown
Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize
Principal Researcher, P-REX Assistant Professor, Clemson University
Villas: Landscapes of Speculation
The rise and crash of the Roman villa system reads eerily like the modern story of American foreclosures-profit schemes of land speculation, securitized, and excessively mortgaged. Where did this process of suburbanizing the rural hinterlands begin? I propose to interrogate the rise of the villa, the first suburban experiment, to inform our understanding of modern landscapes of speculation. Poorly defined in common lore, Roman-era villas actually consumed large swaths of landscape, far more expansive than their well-studied architecture. As sprawling, army-supplying agricultural complexes, they colonized the empire from Palestine to Britain. By probing their origin in and near Rome, along with parallels to the current crisis, I hope to reveal some of modern civilization's latent tendencies to speculate on landscape futures. Perhaps peeling apart this synergy of leisure, speculation, and profit in Roman villas can reformat our current landscape speculative practices.
Fritz Haeg
Garden Club of America Rome Prize
Artist, Designer, Gardener, and Writer, Los Angeles, CARoman Wilderness MMX: Urban Agriculture, Animal Architecture, and Street Choreography
While living and studying in Italy in my early 20’s - first at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, and later in a Tuscan farmhouse - I was surprised to find myself more inspired by the Italian celebration of quotidian life than the spectacle of the architecture and art. These projects reflect this interest. What do Romans eat, and could some of that produce be grown on the streets where they live? What animals are native to the city of Rome, and which ones might be welcomed back? How do Romans occupy and move through their city, what is their particular street choreography?
Literature
Jay Hopler
Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust/American Academy of Arts and Letters
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of South FloridaThe Rooster King
Currently, I have about forty pages toward a second poetry collection. The collection is entitled The Rooster King and begins where my first collection, The Green Squall, ends: in the ruins of a once-flourishing garden. From the ruins of that garden, the poems in my second collection seem to be moving outward into the human world and, from there, into the ether and the nether-heavens where angels still bicker over the relative merits of humankind.
Heather McGowan
John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize, a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman
Writer, Brooklyn, NYThe Black Paintings
I will work on The Black Paintings, a novel about a family that takes place in New York and Berlin over a period of thirty years.
Musical Composition
Huck Hodge
Luciano Berio Rome Prize
Assistant Professor, Department of Music, University of WashingtonAugurios for ensemble, Scenes from Faust for symphonic wind ensemble
I plan to work on two projects. The first piece is to be a joint commission for the Paris-based Aleph Ensemble and the Holland-based Ensemble Insomnio, which will be premiered at the Gaudeamus Festival in Amsterdam with later performances scheduled for 2011 in Paris. The second project, a consortium commission for symphonic wind ensemble, will be a reflection on images from FW Murnauʼs 1926 silent film version of the Faust legend. In addition to the musical piece, I will be editing scenes from the film to screen during the performances. The piece will be premiered at the National Conference of the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA).
Paul Rudy
Elliott Carter Rome Prize
Professor, Conservatory of Music and Dance, University of Missouri at Kansas City2012 Stories Nos. 5-7 and Saxophone Concerto for Bobby Watson
In the past two years, I have composed four CD length works in a series called 2012 Stories, all supported by commissions and residencies. I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008) for In lake'ch, (Mayan for "I am another yourself") the first work in the series composed in Taos, New Mexico. The second, Kuxan suum ("Road to the sky"), was commissioned and composed in France and the third, Zuvuya ("Circle of life"), in Mexico and returned to Taos for the 4th this summer titled Sian ka'an. Currently I am working on No.5: Cannac ("there is no form without spirit"). This series, a multi-faceted single large work (eventually 9-11 hours long), is meeting with critical acclaim and is international in scope, and will be completed by 2012. I will be composing two CD length works Kinan (No.6, Mayan for "Solar force") and Chanes (No.7, "Family of Light") in Rome.
Visual Arts
Dike Blair
Chuck Close Rome Prize
Senior Critic, Department of Painting, Rhode Island School of DesignPainting and sculpture
I propose making a number of paintings and sculptures, the sense of which will certainly contain some kind of everyday Roman flavor.
Felipe Dulzaides
Jesse Howard, Jr./Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize
Visiting Faculty, The San Francisco Art InstituteFull Circle
My work is process oriented and research based. During my residency I plan to develop an interdisciplinary body of work that addresses a defining autobiographical incident that took place in Italy. In July of 1991 while touring with a Cuban experimental theater group I "defected". This body of work will evolve around a video about this escaping experience. I intend to shoot this video with the help of local citizens and some of the individuals who helped me at that time. I also plan to revisit and develop pieces at the sites that served as a backdrop for this "life changing experience": Rome, Sperlonga and Campagna. I see these pieces as interactions with those locations, its citizens and the individuals that played key rolls in that defining moment. The proposed project is a reflective journey since almost twenty years has already past.
Sarah Oppenheimer
Gilmore D. Clarke/Michael Rapuano Rome Prize
Critic, Department of Painting, Yale UniversityRoman Holes
The Keyhole of the Knights of Malta in Rome collapses the space of the city into a discrete vignette. The keyhole acts as a simple framing device. Visually isolating sections of urban space into a pictorial hierarchy, the hole coordinates the built and landscaped space of the city. Roman Holes is an intensive exploration into the use of holes as a visual framing device embedded within Roman architecture. I will explore how these openings impact the moving subject, and how the views through these openings are impacted both by the position of the viewer and changes in the scene beyond.
Karen Yasinsky
Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize
Adjunct Faculty, Department of Film and Media Studies, Johns Hopkins UniversityAdjunct Faculty, Maryland Institute College of Art
Life is an Opinion, Fire is a Fact
I propose to create an animated film that uses as a literal and conceptual starting point, one of the final scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky's film Nostalgia. Framed within the Piazza del Campidoglio, Domenico, a pathologically conflicted character, sets fire to himself, high upon the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. Beginning with this horrific yet cinematically beautiful spectacle, I want to move the character backwards and explore ideas of faith and the intentions behind dramatic and drastic actions. The images from Guilio Romano's Sala dei Giganti in the Palazzo del Te will play a part in Domenico's story, representative of an ambiguous, conflicted statement of virtuosity and anger. The animation will be 2-D and include hand drawn passages, cutout and collage animation. Images of gardens, paintings, statues and found photographs will come from research in Rome.
Humanities:
Ancient Studies
Seth G. Bernard
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
Department of Classical Studies, University of PennsylvaniaMen at Work: Public Construction, Labor, and Society in Middle Republican Rome
My project explores the social context of the building industry in Middle Republican Rome (c. 390-168 BCE). During this period, Rome was transformed from a modest Italian settlement into the capital city of a Mediterranean empire. The newly built circuit wall, aqueducts, roads, temples, and porticoes required unprecedented outlays of expense and manpower. Drawing from a variety of material such as archaeology, literary and documentary sources, and numismatics, I look at how the urban fabric was configured, and how the increasingly complex construction industry reshaped Roman society. Comparative history shows us that in any preindustrial city, monumental construction was a difficult and labor-intensive process. Rome was no exception. Technology, financial history, and labor history all converge to show the importance of the building process to Rome's residents in the Middle Republic.
M. Shane Bjornlie
Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Claremont McKenna CollegePolitics and Tradition in Sixth-Century Italy: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae
This project examines the political context for a collection of governmental letters written by Cassiodorus during Italy's transition from a late-classical to a post-classical society. The collection (the Variae) contains diplomatic, administrative and legal briefs to which scholarship has often turned for insights into the continuities/discontinuities that Cassiodorus' Italy had with earlier Roman society, positioning the text prominently in debates concerning 'decline and fall'. The present study argues that, rather than a passive witness to the early sixth century, Cassiodorus constructed in the Variae a rhetorical presentation of Italy as a political apologetic for the bureaucratic elite who had served under the Ostrogothic regime by deploying certain key themes (bureaucratic corporatism, legal traditionalism, natural conceptions of law). By examining this bureaucratic code in its relationship to external political and social pressures, this study provides a model for understanding the intersection of politics, philosophy and literature.
Lauren M. Kinnee
Frank Brown/Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Helen M. Woodruff Fellowship of the Archaeological Institute of America Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize (year one of a two-year fellowship)
New York University Institute of Fine ArtsThe Roman Trophy: From Battlefield Marker to Emblem of Power
The trophy phenomenon, an ancient Mediterranean mode of victory commemoration encompassing a variety of visual forms, is usually viewed as a wholly Greek convention due to its Greek origins. Scholarship has consequently neglected the Roman trophy. Nonetheless, close examination reveals that soon after the Romans adopted the trophy (ca. 211 BC) they began to make striking innovations by introducing a diverse repertoire of forms, meanings, and usages without Greek precedent. The Roman trophy is stark testimony to originality in the Roman visual arts, particularly with respect to expressions of military might. I propose a new, critical study of the ancient trophy illuminating the unique, Roman innovations to trophy design. I offer a series of well-documented case studies of the various types of Roman-period trophy monuments in order to analyze their historical development and to produce a new interpretive framework for understanding their meanings in their own time.
Andrew M. Riggsby
National Endowment for the Humanities/Roger A. Hornsby Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
Professor, Departments of Classics and Art and Art History, University of Texas at AustinThink Like a Roman: Essays in Cognitive History
The essays in this book address issues in Roman cognition by a combination of traditional philological methods and insights from modern cognitive science. The specific areas are (1) deliberate organizational devices; (2) the organization of time and space; and (3) the role of general cognitive factors in persuasion. The grouping of previously diverse inquiries under the head of cognition allows important new insights. The ensemble illustrates the interaction of cognitive and non-cognitive factors in the use and evolution of information (and other) technologies. It also illustrates the contingency of construals of particular situations/events/persons. This arises from different framings tied to different-use contexts, but that diversity can then be harnessed rhetorically to negotiate agents' desired outcomes. The value of these general claims is illustrated in novel readings of a variety of texts, objects, and features of classical Roman culture.
Elizabeth C. Robinson
Irene Rosenzweig/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize (year one of a two-year fellowship)
Department of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillLarinum: A Case Study for the Romanization of Southern Italy
I will continue dissertation research on the Romanization of southern Italy using Larinum as a case study. This site, a non-Roman capital in the fourth and third centuries BCE, was incorporated into the Roman state in the first century BCE. In order to create a comprehensive picture of cultural change at this site, I will assemble the ancient sources and extant remains pertaining to Larinum from the fourth century BCE to the first century CE. I will conduct library research in Rome, and I will examine the settlement patterns around Larinum, the monuments and inscriptions at the site, and the unpublished votive and funerary artifacts in storerooms at Larino, Isernia, and Campobasso. I will explore how these remains illustrate the continuity and change of cultural elements. My unique study will provide valuable new information about processes of cultural change at this site before and after Roman conquest.
Tyler T. Travillian
Arthur Ross Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
Department of Classical Studies, Boston UniversityThe Corpus Priapeorum: a Textual Edition with Introduction and Commentary
I will create a comprehensive introduction, textual edition, and scholarly commentary of the Priapea, a collection of eighty poems that scholars have generally avoided on account of their risqué contents. I will explore the arrangement of the Priapea as a poetry book, analyze the whole text from a literary standpoint, and consider its relationship to Roman sexual attitudes. I am therefore collating all of the extant manuscripts--some have never been consulted--thirty-five of which are in Italy and half of those in Rome. While in Rome, I will use the manuscripts and catalogues of the Vatican Archives; the sculptural and epigraphic collections of the Roman museums; the extensive libraries of the Academy and neighboring universities, especially their collections of early Renaissance editions of Virgil; and the differing perspectives of the other scholars on the Priapea and its themes, especially in Medieval and Renaissance art and literature.
Medieval Studies
Holly Flora
Millicent Mercer Johnsen Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
Assistant Professor, Newcomb Art Department, Tulane UniversityCimabue, the Franciscans, and Artistic Change in Late Medieval Italy
Since the age of Dante, Cenni di Pepo (c. 1240-1302), known as Cimabue, has been considered the founding father of Italian painting. My proposed project will be the first contextual study of Cimabue and the Franciscan order, his most frequent patron. Cimabue's art is primarily studied from the point of view of Florence, his native city, although he is first documented in Rome. A reconsideration of the works of Cimabue and his contemporaries in Rome and Assisi under the patronage of the Franciscan pope Nicholas IV will be at the heart of this study. I will examine Roman mosaics and frescoes by artists such as Jacopo Torriti and Pietro Cavallini as key influences on Cimabue's creation of a new artistic idiom in the service of Franciscan ideologies. An exploration of Franciscan literary sources will also offer a broader view of the religious and historical circumstances that shaped his art.
Carly Jane Steinborn
Phyllis G. Gordan/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize (year one of a two-year fellowship)
Department of Art History, Rutgers UniversityTransforming Sacred Space: Image and Materiality in the Orthodox Baptistery of Ravenna
My project focuses on the fifth-century Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna. Through consideration of the Baptistery's imagery and its exceptional variety of media, I investigate how images, inscriptions, materials, and liturgical performance acted in dialogue with one another and together helped enhanced the initiate's "rebirth" and new found union with a Christian God. The Baptistery's rich combination of imagery, lavish materials, and prominent inscriptions reveals the sophisticated and compelling ways in which ecclesiastical patrons generated new members for an increasingly powerful Church and heightened the moment of conversion. Through study of this important monument, therefore, I explore issues of materiality, text-and-image relationships, liturgical experience, and episcopal power in fifth-century Italy. In so doing, I hope to offer new and more nuanced insights into the dynamic interaction between images, materials, and viewers within the Baptistery itself and, by extension, the sacred spaces of early medieval Italy.
Modern Italian Studies
Stephanie Malia Hom
Lily Auchincloss Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics, University of OklahomaDestination Italy: Tourism, Nation, Place
My Rome Prize project explores the phenomenon of mass tourism and how it has shaped the modern Italian nation-state since the mid-nineteenth century. I trace the evolution of Italy-as-destination in my eponymous book manuscript-starting with rhetorical constructions of "Italy" in guidebooks, to their implementation in tourist practices, and finally, their physical incarnations as simulacra outside the peninsula, creating a globalized Italy without Italians separate from national territory. Indeed, Italy's identity as a modern nation has long been intimately bound up with its identity as a destination.
Jennifer Scappettone
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of ChicagoStanza as "Homicile": Environments of Exile in Italian Language Arts after World War II
This research charts the composition of a transnational consciousness in linguistic experimentation across literary, sonic, and visual arts in post-Fascist Rome. Exploration of the ouevres of authors Emilio Villa and Amelia Rosselli, emphasizing their work across languages and genres, aims to track a dual compulsion in Italian poetics poised between the formal heritage of futurism and the sociohistorical fallout of the conflict futurists glorified: a drive to express particular consequences of the violent dispersion of an imagined Italian "fatherland" and its "mother tongue," accompanied by a utopian effort to forge poetic environments that would house an objective, universal language. The projected archival work seeks to bring to light the collaboration between this poetry and contemporary trends toward ambience in the arts, and to situate its formal innovations within a broader postwar reckoning with the patria ideale of Italy as a plural, transient, and even diasporic cultural formation.
Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
Kathryn Blair Moore
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize (year one of a two-year fellowship)
New York University Institute of Fine ArtsItalian Copies of Holy Land Architecture: The Illustrated Versions of Niccolò da Poggibonsi’s Libro d’Oltramare
The Holy Land guidebook created by the Franciscan Niccolò da Poggibonsi during his four-year journey in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt (1346-50) has only been known through unillustrated manuscript copies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The woodcut illustrations of the printed version of the guidebook, published anonymously in Bologna in 1500 and reprinted over 60 times until the nineteenth century, have been dismissed as works of artistic fantasy. My project focuses on four previously unknown illustrated manuscript copies which were the basis of these woodcuts. These illustrate every major building and city of the Holy Land – including the Holy Sepulcher, the Dome of the Rock, and the cities of Damascus and Cairo. The oldest version could be the autograph copy, with drawings created by Niccolò da Poggibonsi himself. More generally, the manuscripts provide evidence for how the visualization of Holy Land architecture in Italy emerged from the textual culture of pilgrimage accounts.
Stephanie Nadalo
Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
Department of History, Northwestern UniversityConstructing Pluralism in Seventeenth Century Livorno
My project explores the social, cultural, administrative, and urban solutions employed to accommodate the religiously and ethnically diverse resident population in the Tuscan port of Livorno (1591-1714). In an act of economic and political desperation, the Medici duchy constructed Livorno nearly ex novo and initiated an aggressive policy to populate the insalubrious frontier city. The 1591 Livornina legislation offered comprehensive economic, social, legal, and religious protections to Jews, Armenians, Turks, and other religious minorities. As a result, Livorno became a laboratory for architects, engineers, and administrative officials to experiment with urban solutions to accomodate the socio-cultural requirements of pluralistic cohabitation and the economic-logistical demands of commerce. Drawing on methodologies from urban studies and social history, this project distinguishes the myths of state-mandated tolerance from the realities of early modern pluralism by investigating how social patterns were mediated by the port's residential, commercial, social, and religious spaces.
Barbara Naddeo
Paul Mellon/National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
Department of History, CUNY: The City College of New YorkBirth of a Metropolis: The Open City and the Social Sciences in Naples, 1650--1800
Birth of a Metropolis examines the transformation of Naples over the long eighteenth century and the consequences of that transformation for the sorts of knowledges produced by Neapolitans about their city. First, it documents the astonishing rate at which the capital city of Naples grew and the territorial expansion required to accommodate that growth. At the same time, this study shows that the capital not only outgrew its political confines, or città, but grappled to make sense of the moral order of a city that was larger than its political territory and more diverse than its citizenry. Thus, this study suggests that the demise of the city as both a bounded political entity and as a codified field of civic behavior made the development and application of the human sciences not only compelling but also instrumental within what was one of Europe's most dynamic and protean capital cities.
Michael J. Waters
Donald and Maria Cox Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
Institute of Fine Arts, New York UniversityMaterials, Materiality, and Spolia in Italian Renaissance Architecture: 1420-1540
This project revises our understanding of the character and development of Renaissance architecture in Italy from 1420 to 1540 through the critical lens of architectural materiality. It argues that the choice, manipulation, and placement of building materials were an essential vehicle through which builders expressed meaning and evoked antiquity. By focusing on the Renaissance column and wall, my project breaks down a series of examples syntactically into their component material parts to understand shifts in materiality over time in and across Tuscany, Lombardy, Venice, and Rome. It also specifically scrutinizes a series of central issues: the monolithic column, semi-monolithic construction, the materiality of the Orders, stone façades, rustication, marble revetment, fictive painting, spoliation, and materiality in the age of printing. By methodically addressing the question of how materials and concepts of materiality shaped Italian Renaissance architecture, my dissertation establishes a means of more fully understanding the Renaissance built environment.
Residents:
Robert Beaser, FAAR'78Paul Fromm Composer in Residence
Professor and Chairman
Composition Department, Juilliard School
Artistic Director, American Composers Orchestra
New York, NY May - June
Craig Gibson
Lucy Shoe Meritt Scholar in Residence (Ancient Studies)
Associate Professor of Classics
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA March - May
Hugh Hardy
William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence
Architect, H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture
New York, NY April - June
Rachel Jacoff
American Academy in Rome Scholar in Residence (Medieval Studies)
Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature
Professor of Italian, Wellesley College
Wellesley, MA September - November
William Kentridge
Roy Lichtenstein Visual Artist in Residence
Artist, Johannesburg, South Africa May - May
Rosamond McKitterick
Lester K. Little Scholar in Residence (Medieval Studies)
Professor of History
Fellow of Sidney Sussex College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom March - May
Richard Moe
James Marston Fitch Resident in Historic Preservation
President, National Trust for Historic Preservation
Washington, D.C. October - October
Douglas Reed
American Academy in Rome Resident in Landscape Architecture
Principal, Reed/Hilderbrand
Watertown, MA March - April
David Rosand
James S. Ackerman Scholar in Residence (Renaissance and Early Modern Studies)
Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History
Columbia University
New York, NY March - April
Ellen Rosand
American Academy in Rome Scholar in Residence (Renaissance and Early Modern Studies)
Professor of Music History, Yale University
New Haven, CT March - April
The American Academy in Rome occupies ten buildings and eleven acres of gardens atop the Janiculum, the highest hill within the walls of Rome. Among the buildings are the McKim, Mead & White building, known as the Academy building, the Villa Aurelia and the Casa Rustica. ... The Academy building was constructed above an aqueduct of Trajan, which can still be accessed through the building's basement. ...
The Academy building is one of the only structures outside North America designed by McKim, Mead & White. Charles Follen McKim was among the founders of the Academy and was President of the Academy when the building was first conceived. The building, which was constructed in two years, was inspired by Renaissance architecture and has a five-bay facade, a piano nobile or noble floor and an interior courtyard with a Paul Manship fountain in its center. Opened in 1914, it contains most of the living and working quarters for the Rome Prize Fellows, the Library, gallery and administrative offices. In addition, there are public rooms for many of the Academy's events.
