How can we be sure that in making space, we make space for an understanding that addresses social needs within our built environment? My goal is to map the programmatic complexities within the historic center of Rome in order to inform new building types in the outlying areas. The proposals, imbued with a spirit of reinventing, will be disseminated graphically to the public.

Through a complex series of cultural negotiations, people’s traveling and resettling across space and time instigates the generation of culturally distinct spaces inscribed within the urban fabric. By examining such spaces in Rome, I will reflect on architecture’s role in the negotiation of cultural difference and the transformation of cities grappling with incongruous cultures and displaced identities.

Three projects - tectonic, social / economic, and urban - that share a common structural and ethical approach. In each case smaller-scale decisions shape the larger-scale form. The process is open-ended and attuned to human needs, not prescriptive or formalistic.

I will research and site-visit public places in and around Rome that offer meaningful experiences with water in the built environment: Roman arches of stone that defy gravity and raise aqueducts into the sky; fountains, both grand and humble; Roman public baths, epic, ornate and formal. I will concurrently create a series of models for small buildings and sculptural installations, inspired by the Roman water system, as proposals for American public architecture and artworks.

As a conservator of modern and contemporary paintings, I have taken on the challenge of the often-neglected care of modern murals. Resources at Rome’s I.C.C.R.O.M. will help to bridge the gap between the conservation of traditional frescoes and the care of contemporary wall paintings.

I will be examining terracotta sculpture attributed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, along with works by his contemporaries, in Roman and other European collections. By looking for and documenting physical evidence such as clay handling, tool marks and fingerprints, I hope to determine how the sculptures were made and what constitutes Bernini’s personal sculptural ‘handwriting’ in clay. Such knowledge can help resolve broader art historical questions, including authorship, style, chronologies, and workshop organization.

I am interested in studying how war transforms land. I will focus on fortifications and how they affect freedom of movement, public space, and city form.

The focus of my study will be to examine the relationship between the associated rites and physical forms of archaic walls and boundary markers.

I will be working on a draft of my third book, most likely a novel, set at least partially in Europe during the Second World War.

I will be working on poems, and on essays, and studying the art and architecture in Italy. I will also begin learning Italian, so that I might study the poets Cesare Pavese, Eugenio Montale, and Giacomo Leopardi in their original language.

I will be composing a musical-drama dealing with sorcery (ESBAT). I will also complete a work for the Seattle Symphony, a Fromm Foundation commission for Sequitur and a concerto for horn and violin for the Camerata Orchestra of Rio de Janeiro.

I am interested in exploring empirically the relationship between my work and medieval sculpture, painting, and interiors. Utilitarian contemporary Italian design also interests me as a resource and visual index for future projects.

I plan to execute a group of paintings that reflect my interest in baroque painting and architecture. Being in Rome will provide, not only proximity to the works of Caravaggio and his contemporaries, but the opportunity to examine daily the theatrical play of light across the early baroque facades and how that may have influenced the painters of the time.

A series of site-specific installations and related projects colorfully juxtaposing the baroque with contemporary art practices. Through a vehicle of humor, beauty, visual display and collaboration, my project with the aid of Rome as a metaphorically loaded point of reference will address timely issues including cultural and class bias in perceptions of art and beauty, pleasure, social satire, historical absurdity, commerce and growing tensions due to immigration, race, globalization and disparity.

What stood out on a recent visit to Rome were the trappings of tourism and local citizens dressed as Roman soldiers for photos at the Coliseum; the tables of souvenirs outside the Pantheon and the Fountain of Trevi; the postcard carousels that are everywhere. I recognize and appreciate the treasures of the city and although classical, Renaissance, baroque, and even fascist art inform what I do, my work is a response to contemporary life. It is the present that I seek to explore.

I will be researching and writing my dissertation, which examines wall paintings of the Trojan mythical cycle in late Republican and early Imperial Rome, focusing on sites on the Italic peninsula. My project uses these images to explore the visual language created by the Romans to communicate their place in the history of the ancient Mediterranean world and the power of their newly created empire.

Empress of Languages will examine the culture of Latinitas in early medieval Europe. This project is a series of cases, each exploring an important moment in the slow process by which western Christians between the third and ninth centuries came to define themselves through their shared Latin culture, the changing functions (religious, political and cultural) that Latin fulfilled, and the different ideologies that it served.

I will be writing my dissertation on Roman floor mosaics as architectural embellishments, visible and tangible underfoot. Specific themes include the labyrinth and the unswept hall. My study is concerned with the play between image and medium, the experience of motion, the use of water to animate images, and the seduction of geometry.

The Tabulae Iliacae are a set of carved stone plaques produced in the late-Augustan / early-Tiberian period, several of which retell the story of the Trojan War with an intricate combination of illustration and text. I am exploring the confrontation between Greek poetic traditions and Roman ideology that plays out on the Tabulae. My work will reintegrate this neglected class of monuments into historical, visual and cultural discourses of the Augustan age.

My project is to complete a book-length project, Addressing the Gods: Women’s Religious Activity in The Roman Republic, which explores the religious opportunities available to women in Republican Rome (to 31 BCE). The primary conclusion drawn here is that Roman religion offered women more, and more important, opportunities than is commonly considered.

While in Rome I will continue writing my dissertation, which explores the narrative function of dreams, sleep, and insomnia in the work of two Latin authors (Propertius and Statius), and the literary and artistic depiction of Somnus (sleep) as an external force. My work focuses on the visual quality of literary dream episodes and the role of genre and medium in representations of the sleep experience.

I will study the fragmentary sources of Italian polyphony ca. 1330-1420, asking questions about scribal practice, manuscript transmission, and musical style which are best answered by connecting many different sources rather than through observation of a few large manuscripts.

My study examines how papal officials, monks, and bishops sought to define rules of lordship by experimenting and innovating in law, written administration, and the writing of history. The geographical and chronological boundaries of the study are central Italy in the 11th-12th centuries.

How was the concept of modernitá (modernity) informed by and constructed within the Italian colonial enterprise? My project addresses the emergence of a distinct architectural idiom in Eritrea, Italy’s longest-held and arguably most profitable colony, while expanding congruent design principles at Italian colonial expositions. I will explore the transformation of colonial architecture in Eritrea from 1890 to 1941 by analyzing how modernism functioned as an ideology and tool in the formation of its capitol city, Asmara.

My research in Rome will center on short and documentary Italian films from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. Through this “marginal” film production I wish to study the re-construction of cinematic modernism as intersecting with realist trends and the investment in the post-war everyday in Italian culture.

A study of “faith” as fundamental ethical, political, religious, legal, economic, and textual category in the early modern period. I will consider the function of “faith” in these multiple senses as a primary category for the organization and interrogation of communities, through the filter of literary representations.

My study examines the 1578 rediscovery of the Roman catacombs within the wider context of the cult of relics throughout the Spanish-dominated Mediterranean and the Atlantic worlds. Through the movements and exchanges of catacomb and other relics, I will trace the interplay between spiritual centers and peripheries, and examine the role of relics in the development of confessional and colonial identities.

I will use my time in Rome to complete my dissertation which investigates the patronage of the Observant Franciscans during the 15th and 16th centuries. By considering why a religious order which promoted a rigorous adherence to absolute poverty increasingly attracted the support and burial commitments of wealthy patrons, I explore how the Observants helped patrons define their spiritual and civil identities.

I will spend my time at the Academy working on my dissertation, tentatively titled “Imaging Rome and the Renaissance City: The Bufalini Plan of 1551.” As the first printed map of Rome, the Bufalini Plan was a landmark in urban representation, signaling a critical shift not only in the way people imaged cities, but imagined and understood them. As such, my examination helps to define what exactly constituted a city - and specifically the Eternal City - in the Renaissance imagination.