Plastitectura will develop an architecture that mirrors our bodies in all their complexities. This shift away from designing buildings that reflect an ideal body will allow us to examine not only the extent to which we subjectively make our surroundings but also the degree to which the objects in our built world construct us as subjects. This work will be based on a new Italian biodegradable plastic and research into buildings of ablution throughout Italy's history.

Distortions in perspective views of Rome by Giovanni Battista Falda encode refined techniques and specific knowledge on the perspective drawing. I intend to research and decode these embedded operations of distortion through studies in drawing.

My investigation focuses on the relationship between indexical marks (the traces of the maker) and their expression through digitally rendered processes. I will explore how a new 21st-century typographic language can better communicate individualism in this complex information-laden society.

Urban Measures is a research proposal to conceive, design and implement a series of architectural devices and installations which 'measure' and transform urban spaces. Re-engaging the body to measure the city, the interventions will mark, record, and display the city back to itself in unexpected ways.

I will create an archive of materials addressing the preservation and conservation challenges posed by non-traditional works of post World War II Italian artists, particularly the Arte Povera group.

I will undertake a comparative study of heritage site management practices, examining Italian approaches to stewardship, interpretation, and capacity-loading of historically-significant works of architecture which also house major cultural collections. Three realms of professional practice will be studied: a) establishment of optimal environmental balance between the often-conflicting need of collection, building fabric, and visitor/staff comfort; b) choices within the interpretative target period to multiple-period presentation; and c) management of optimal carrying capacity and visitor access-loading, considering impact on historic building fabric and collections.

My proposal for the fellowship in Rome is to continue photographic research for a monograph on my work which will be published next year. Having worked on archaeological excavations in the Middle East and the United States, I have long been interested in the removal of the artifact from its original site to the constructed landscape of the museum. I will explore new meanings conjured by objects taken out of context and relocated to the collecting institution. Rome, a city of excavations and museums, layered and dense with historical information, affords an ideal site to continue these investigations.

I will study the relationship between garden and territory as material practices, that is, how the materials and techniques of the surrounding agricultural landscape were appropriated, transformed and refined in the Italian garden, adding to existing ecological networks across the larger landscape.

I plan to spend most of my time working out a lyric biography of the Roman poet, Ovid, I Will Survive.

I plan to work on a novel set in the contemporary Jewish community of Berlin.

I will be composing several dramatic vocal works (chamber music settings) as well as setting various poetic texts. These works will include a cycle for soprano and string quartet and an operatic soliloquy for soprano Lauren Flanigan and mixed chamber ensemble.

I will be composing four works including: violin and piano for Karen Bentley Pollick and Ivan Sokolov, guitar quartet and chamber symphony for Corona Guitar Kvartet, and a work for E-cello and E-violin for Craig Hultgren and Karen Bentley Pollick.

I wish to examine the vast wealth of architecture and painterly riches that Rome has to offer, and apply those riches in a way that serves my contemporary motives.

A project based on 70s China collective farm

I will start to develop a new installation performance project as well as continue working on a series of new drawing/paintings based on my recent Timeline piece.

I would like to produce a new body of work at the cinecittà film studio using Rome and its architectural ruins as the social space to investigate the collapsing power of the state. Much of my work during the past 25 years has in one way or another focused on this issue. In this context, however, I am interested in the comic/tragic as a way of continuing this investigation, using elements of performance, theater, spectacle, and humor as the vehicle. Some might call this the circus

I will be completing a book on private religiosity in the Late Antique period, focusing on pagan and Christian domestic chapels and their social/historical context.

The Aurelian Wall is probably the most underappreciated monumental structure in the city of Rome. It is fundamentally implicated in shifting sacred topographies, pagan and Christian; in changes in urban infrastructure, and the evolving mechanisms of trade, communications, and settlement reflected therein; and in the political, military and ideological agendas of the city's ruling elite, to name several of the issues I am seeking to address.

Drawing mostly on epigraphic and material evidence, my project investigates a striking change in the burial pattern of servile groups in late first-century AD Rome. Preliminary analysis of the evidence reveals a shift from a "household" collective burial to a "non-household" one. The project seeks, first, to document and explain this phenomenon, and second, to explore its implications for our understanding of the social experience of slaves and ex-slaves in the capital. The shift not only suggests the formulation of new social strategies among these groups, but also the rise of a new sense of self and community.

This project will investigate Christian ritual processions, as a mechanism by which Christianity became the dominant civic institution, transforming the urban fabric and converting the symbolic identity of Rome. Participating in these processions, Christians forged a communal identity, united in ritual behind Christian symbols, and constructed a Christian cognitive map of Rome, highlighting churches in place of classical monuments. In these processions, Christianity deployed a very traditional ancient Mediterranean ritual to create something new.

I will spend the two years in Rome completing the research and writing on my dissertation on Greek baths of the Hellenistic period. After completing the dissertation I will work on preparing the study for publication.

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 research explores the material culture of fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italian vernacular religious literature. I focus on the formal elements of manuscript books - size, script, page layout, illustrations - to understand how authority was embodied in these manuscripts, and to address the interplay of models of authority across different social environments and literary genres. In particular, I am interested in what these books reveal about the relationship in late-medieval and early Renaissance Italy between conceptions and saintly authority and literary authorship.

I will study the transformation of the Majella Massif in Abruzzo from a predominantly pastoral, to a war-torn, to a protected natural landscape. I am particularly interested in how landscapes ruined by warfare manage to revive, and what can be learned from the Majella's recovery that might help us to better understand the healing processes of similarly devastated landscapes.

In the late 1960s, Italian artists grouped under the label Arte Povera participated in a radically stripped-down, yet complex approach to sculpture that combined an interest in unconventional, artificial materials with a highly self-conscious emphasis on human perception. By way of two interdependent case studies, my project will offer an extensive analysis of two Arte Povera artists whose archives are located in Rome: Alighiero Boetti and Pino Pascali. While elucidating Arte Povera's position within the international avant-garde, my project will also explore the tension between Boetti's contemplative, dead-pan sensibility as an artist and Pascali's outgoing, mimetic approach, and address larger ideological debates concerning consumerism and 1960s activism.

I will revise my doctoral dissertation on fascist modernism in Massimo Bontempelli's theatre, in addition to completing English translations of three plays by the author. The work represents a specialization in modernist politics and my interest in the theatre's role in forging national identities.

My research will consider how notions of pazzia (madness) underwent modernization with the advent of specialized mental institutions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through comparison of evidence from medical, religious, and legal discourses, I will explore the classification, treatment, and rhetoric of madness in Italian popular culture during the late Renaissance period.

I will use my time in Rome to complete my dissertation, an exploration of how Renaissance burial practices confronted the competing claims of social ambition and religious piety. Specifically, I am looking at how this tension informed burial monuments commissioned for the churches of the Observant Franciscans in Italy. 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 civic identities.

I will be examining a series of trials of judaizers, baptized Christians accused of practicing Jewish rituals, for information about both their religious practices and the goals and methods of the Roman Inquisition at a decisive moment in the history of the Catholic Church. My research in Rome will focus on the interaction between the Congregation of the Holy Office and other members of the Church: the Jesuits, the Theatines, and the Archbishop of Naples.

My project is a book on the changing meanings of the story of Socrates' death, from Plato and Zenophon to the present day. I am interested in how Socrates' death is recalled in the depiction of other deaths, martyrdoms and executions, and in how the idea of Socrates has informed later concepts of individuality and the self.