American Academy in Rome
2003-2004 Rome Prize Winners

Arts

ARCHITECTURE

Mercedes T. Bass Rome Prize Fellowship
J. Yolande Daniels
Partner, SUMO; Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University
New York, NY

The Aurelian wall serves as a datum to interrogate and map the relationship of security technologies to architecture and the extensions of the city within and beyond physical limits. In studying the wall, I will reflect on the contemporary social and political relations of multiple centers, global networks and interconnectivity beyond geographical and physical boundaries.

Founders Rome Prize Fellowship
Richard M. Olcott, FAIA
Partner, Polshek Partnership Architects; Commissioner, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission
New York, NY

The Hybrid Building and the Urban Continuum

Arnold W. Brunner Rome Prize Fellowship
Linda Pollak
Principal, Marpillero Pollak Architects, NYC; Design Critic, Harvard Graduate School of Design
New York, NY

Urban Topographies Between Architecture and Landscape

DESIGN

Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize Fellowship
Reed Kroloff
Associate Professor, Arizona State University
Washington, DC

This project will assess the conditions that have sustained a favorable climate for design publications in Italy, while at the same time evaluating the role of those publications in shaping a positive reception to modern architecture in that country.

Rolland Rome Prize Fellowship
Susan Yelavich
Design Historian
New York, NY

I plan to examine the relationship between decorative and architectural concepts of interior space by studying the domiciles of Pompeii and Renaissance palazzi. The influence that these and other historical precedents continue to exert on contemporary interiors will be explored in my forthcoming book "Contemporary World Interiors" (Phaidon 2005).

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HISTORIC PRESERVATION AND CONSERVATION

Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize Fellowship
Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA
Coordinator, Historic Landscape Initiative, National Park Service
Washington, DC

Early American Academy Fellows, studying the historic preservation and design decisions at iconic villas and gardens, developed a nature-culture stewardship ethos that yielded thoughtful and informed bodies of work. Contemporary landscape architecture and design professionals along with the general public, however, perceive a division between these disciplines. The design legacy of the villas and gardens as recorded by the early Fellows can serve as guideposts for developing a shared understanding and value for this lost language: a nature-culture stewardship ethos.

Booth Family Rome Prize Fellowship
T. K. McClintock
Director, Studio TKM
Cambridge, MA

The Vocabulary of Draftsmanship and Its Dissemination among the Fine and Applied Arts

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Kate L. Brewster Rome Prize Fellowship
Cheryl Barton, FASLA
Principal and Creative Director, Office of Cheryl Barton
San Francisco, CA

I will investigate the landscape stratigraphy of urban open space, the layered record of the natural forces and cultural interventions that transform a city over time. Of particular interest is the reading of physical form to determine what was invention and what was coincidence.

Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship
Alex S. MacLean
Aerial Photographer, Landslides Aerial Photography
Lincoln, MA

My project will involve photographing from the air in an illustrative manner the transitional space between the urban and rural areas, documenting contemporary growth patterns. Through this, I hope to compare Italian and American patterns that work for and against preserving sense of place and region, which could help initiate more effective development.

Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellowship
Joseph Ragsdale
Landscape Architecture Department, California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA

My project research is to investigate, record and reveal a pair of landscapes linked by production -- those excavated places hewn from the geologic record of the earth and the sensuous tectonic surfaces defining an additive geology of Rome's urban form. I will focus on an investigation of source and surface, of product and byproduct, of earth and building and from detail-scale to landscape-scale.

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LITERATURE

John Guare Writer's Fund Rome Prize Fellowship, a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman
Sarah Arvio
Poet
New York, NY

Italophile and Italianate Poems

Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust/American Academy of Arts and Letters
Joshua Weiner
Assistant Professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park
Washington, DC

I will be revising poems and writing new ones for my second book, with the working title "Trampoline."

MUSICAL COMPOSITION

Samuel Barber Rome Prize Fellowship
Mason Bates
Composer; University of California, Berkeley
Oakland, CA

The sounds of progressive electronica -- long a part of my world as a DJ in San Francisco -- have begun to appear in a variety of new works for the concert hall. An electro-acoustic work commissioned in honor of The Juilliard School's 100th anniversary will be my primary focus, and a torso of a work for orchestra and electronics will hopefully sprout some legs.

Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize Fellowship
Jefferson Friedman
Composer
New York, NY

To work on and complete a number of large-scale chamber music works, including a song cycle and a string quartet.

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VISUAL ARTS

Harold M.English/Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize Fellowship
Diana Cooper
Artist; Art Instructor, School of Visual Arts; Visiting Critic, Yale University
Brooklyn, NY

I create visual hybrids that combine aspects of painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture. In Rome, I plan to explore the architectural nature of my work. I will immerse myself in the rich architectural environment of the Italian Baroque and create work in response to my discoveries.

Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship
Maria Elena Gonzalez
Visual Artist
New York, NY

Using the markings left by visitors/attendees to architectural religious sites as a starting point, I will develop a new body of sculptural objects/installations. These impressions fuse Corporal Realities and Spiritual Fixions and are manifested as visually minimal summations, Economy of Aesthetics.

Jules Guerin Rome Prize Fellowship
Matvey Levenstein
Painter; Adjunct Professor, New York University
New York, NY

Italian painting in general and painters associated with Rome in particular are of great interest to me: color systems of Raphael and Michelangelo, the use and distortion of linear perpective in Raphael's Vatican frescos, Caravaggio and the politics of Anti-Mannerism. I intend to study these paintings and related issues of the classicist tradition.

John Armstrong Chaloner Rome Prize Fellowship
John Newman
Artist
New York, NY

Between Sculpture + Drawing: Researching and Making Reliefs in Rome

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Humanities

ANCIENT STUDIES

Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Catherine M. Chin
Graduate Program in Religion, Duke University
Durham, NC

While at the Academy, I will be working to finish my dissertation on the production of Christian and pagan cultural identities in the fourth and fifth centuries. Focusing on the uses of classical texts in the writings of Latin grammarians, the dissertation considers how specific practices of reading contributed to the polarization of "Christian" and "pagan" as cultural categories in late antiquity.

Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Frances Barker Tracy Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Elizabeth Marlowe
Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Hamilton, NY

I will be working on my dissertation, which examines the ideological content and context of the architectural monuments of Constantinian Rome. I will also begin writing up a related project, a study of the Grand Camee de France, in which I argue that the piece, traditionally dated to the Julio-Claudian period, is in fact Constantinian.

National Endowment for the Humanities/Jesse Benedict Carter Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Kristina Milnor
Assistant Professor of Classics, Barnard College
New York, NY

I will be working on a study of Roman Pompeii's "literary" graffiti, popularly-composed wall inscriptions which employ the language, style, or form of canonical Latin poetry. I hope to show that the graffiti are not simply distorted echoes of "high literature," but rather important documents of the complex relationship between class, culture, and the written word in Roman society.

Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Richard T. Neer
Assistant Professor, University of Chicago
Chicago, IL

I will be working on the development of naturalism in Greek art of the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. Concurrently, I will be studying the citation of ancient art in the work of the French painter Nicolas Poussin.

Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Irene Rosenzweig Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Emma Scioli
Department of Classics, University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA

While in Rome I will conduct research for my dissertation, which explores the narrative function of dreams, sleep and insomnia in the work of three Latin authors (Propertius, Statius, and Apuleius), and the artisitc representation of Somnus (sleep). My work focuses on the visual quality of literary dream episodes and the nexus between the experiences of dreaming and viewing art in Roman culture.

Arthur Ross Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship and Helen M. Woodruff Fellowship of the Archaeological Institute of America
Justin St. P. Walsh
McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

I will research and write a dissertation on the subject of the earliest domestic material from the Classical Sicilian city of Morgantina. By doing so I hope to answer important questions about trade, economy, demography, and daily life in a town located on the boundary of Greek colonization.

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MEDIEVAL STUDIES

Lily Auchincloss Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Mary Harvey Doyno
Department of History, Columbia University
Oakland, CA

While at the Academy, I shall complete my dissertation research on lay saints and their cults in late Medieval Italian cities. My project seeks to trace the processes by which contemporary city-dwellers became civic saints and patrons.

National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Victoria M. Morse
Assistant Professor of History, Carleton College
Northfield, MN

I intend to complete a monograph on the thought world and reform program of a fourteenth-century Italian priest, Opicino de Canistris.

MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES

American Academy in Rome Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Vivien Greene
Associate Curator, Guggenheim Museum; The Graduate Center, City University of New York
New York, NY

I will conduct research for my dissertation, "Italian Divisionism in the 1890s: The Forging of a Modern Identity." I examine the main decade of production by the Divisionists, painters who practiced a style distinguished by individuated brushstrokes of color, and who were inspired by scientific color theory and Socialist philosophy.

American Academy in Rome Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship and ACLS/Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship
Jonah Siegel
Associate Professor, Rutgers University
New York, NY

My aim is to complete work on "Haunted Museum," a study of the role of nineteenth-century narratives in the creation and propagation of the modern figure of the artist. My research goals include familiarizing myself with art collections of great influence in the period, as well as engaging recent European work on the Grand Tour and its afterlife.

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RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES

Marian and Andrew Heiskell/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Jill J. Deupi
McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia
Fredericksburg, VA

I shall spend my time in Rome researching my dissertation, "Between Naples and Rome: The Neapolitan Academy of Art, 1755-99." My work will focus not only on the foundation and development of this institution in Naples, but also Neapolitan pensioners in Rome and the cultural "rivalry" between these two cities.

Phyllis G. Gordan Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Roger Freitas
Assistant Professor of Musicology, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
Rochester, NY

The project will examine the genre of the Italian chamber cantata, focusing on the period of its first flowering, in the middle of the seventeenth-century. The poetic, musical, and social aspects of these works will be considered.

National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Professor, Princeton University
Princeton, NJ

I am investigating the contribution of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-93) to the invention of still-life painting. Arcimboldo's pictures of reversible heads are serious jokes, composite images that also are some of the first examples of the genre. My study engages art theory, nature painting, and natural history.

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Pamela O. Long
Independent Historian
Washington, DC

I will be doing the research for a book-length study of engineering, religious power, and knowledge production in Counter-Reformation Rome between about 1562 and 1612. I will investigate the moving of obelisks, the construction of aqueducts, the repair of the great columns, and the paving of streets, and will explore the relationships of political and religious power, engineering, and knowledge.

Donald and Maria Cox/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellowship
Jessica Maier
Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
New York, NY

I will spend my time at the Academy researching and writing my dissertation, "Imaging Rome: The Art and Science of Renaissance City Views." At the center of my examination are two works -- Leonardo Bufalini's "Roma" (1551) and Pirro Ligorio's "Roma Antica" (1561) --- that are often seen as pardigmatic of conflicting impulses in urban imagery: mapping and picturing. My study re-situates these works in the shared context of Roman Humanism, interpreting them as different but related expressions of the perceived relationship between ancient and contemporary Rome in the 16th-century.

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The American Academy in Rome is one of the leading centers for independent study and advanced research in the arts and humanities. Each year the Academy invites applications for its prestigious Rome Prize Competition. The annual deadline for the Rome Prize is November 1. For over one hundred years, the Academy has offered support, time and an inspiring environment to some of America's most gifted scholars and artists. For more information please visit www.aarome.org.


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