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American Academy in Rome
2007-2008 Rome Prize Winners
Arts |
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Humanities |
ARTS
ARCHITECTURE
Franklin D. Israel Rome Prize
FREDERICK FISHER
Principal-in-Charge, Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects
Art Space Collage
“Temporality and the aesthetics of collage are primary themes in my work. Ruins manifest both these themes. Ruins index the passage of time and often create urban collages of building fabric over many eras. Italian conversions of historic spaces into exhibition spaces in the 1950s, exemplified by Scarpa and Albini, created new canons of museology for the interrelation of historic art and architecture combined with contemporary interventions. I plan to explore museums in Rome and other parts of Italy with regard to the interrelationship of architecture, art and installation, documenting and visualizing primarily through drawing and watercolor. The end product is intended to be a portfolio of my graphic studies of collage effects and devices between buildings, artwork and art installation apparatus.”
Founders Rome Prize
DANIEL MIHALYO/ANNIE HAN
Lead Pencil Studio
SPATIAL INQUIRY: Looking at Nothing in Rome
“In Rome, we will work on the development of a new methodology for spatial perception, specifically how the liquidity of space is experienced as a solid and void simultaneously. We will employ the Nolli plan, an awareness of the Japanese sensibility of Ma and LIDAR (laser radar 3D scanning) to map the invisible quality of space in film, digitally altered photography and a proposal for a major site-specific installation at the architectural scale.”
DESIGN
Rolland Rome Prize
JOHN CARY
Executive Director, Public Architecture
Activist Architecture | Attivismo architettonico
“This project will carry forth the Italian tradition of social activism born in Rome during the 1960s, culminating in the design and construction of an installation that celebrates activist architecture and the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Valle Giulia. The undertaking will necessarily be a collaborative one, engaging students, faculty, practitioners, and Fellows of the Academy. The installation will open with a one-day symposium uniting the aforementioned parties with politicians, civic leaders, and other thinkers from Rome and elsewhere.”
Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize
MOLISSA FENLEY
Artistic Director, Molissa Fenley and Dancers
The Pattern of the Surface
“In Rome, Molissa will study Cosmati mosaics, found in many churches throughout the city, and use there particular patterns and rhythms as inspiration for the creation of new choreography.”
HISTORIC PRESERVATION AND CONSERVATION
Booth Family Rome Prize
JANA DAMBROGIO
Conservator, Document Conservation Laboratory, National Archives and Records Administration
A Technical Study of Northeastern Italian Monastic Legal and Accounting Documents and Bindings at the Vatican Secret Archives
“At the American Academy in Rome, I will refine, supplement, and build upon research I began on a collection of northeastern Italian medieval and early modern monastic legal and accounting documents and bindings at the Vatican Secret Archives. This project will contribute to an understudied area for comparison with non-archival structures that are well studied and documented. The information gathered from my research will contribute to conservators’ understanding of physical nuances of the unusual structures and provide a support for more historically informed treatment decisions.”
National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize
JOHN OCHSENDORF
Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Preservation of Masonry Vaulting in Rome
“My Rome project aims to quantify the safety of masonry vaulting. Which historic vaults are most at risk of collapse in Italy today? No one can say at present. In Rome, I will develop new online analysis tools for masonry vaulting and I will apply these tools to two detailed case studies: the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the Basilica of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. By working in the Vatican Library and in collaboration with Italian preservationists, I will identify pathologies, assessment methods, and repair strategies for masonry vaulting. This work will contribute to our historical understanding as well as the future preservation of masonry vaulted buildings in Italy and around the world.”
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize
ALAN BERGER
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Landscape Reclamation and the Pontine Marshes
“My work will critically analyze the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes landscape in relation to Rome’s urbanization over time. The research will pursue archival records to ask: How was reclamation of The Marshes regarded from the time of Pliny to the modern era? How was it represented? What is the relevance for reclamation today?”
Garden Club of America Rome Prize
LISA TZIONA SWITKIN
Senior Associate, Field Operations
Monument Landscapes: Constriction and Construction of the City
“Rome is advertised as a city of discrete monuments, but in actuality it is a city of layers with its history stretched over the entirety of the city. If we accept the city of Rome as an historical landscape in and of itself, in which the remains of distinctive monuments are embedded, then why not understand the zones around its monuments as unique spaces in their own right as well as recognize their potential to influence the growth and development of the city and to connect its seemingly disparate monuments? I am interested in studying ‘monument landscapes’: the effects and influences of monuments and their associated territory on planning initiatives and the growth and development of Rome, how the outlines of these monuments, both at the surface and below ground, have been identified, marked, and treated over time, how zones around the monuments have engaged and contributed to the life of the city, how the study and recognition of these zones could inform future representations of site, territory, and ground, and how as contemporary public urban spaces, landscapes, and frameworks they have organized the fabric of the city.”
LITERATURE
John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize, a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman
JUNOT DÍAZ
Writer and Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tokyo Rose: a novel
In Rome, Junot will be working on his first novel, Tokyo Rose.
Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust/American Academy of Arts and Letters
SARAH MANGUSO
Writer and Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Writing for Publication, Performance & Media, Pratt Institute
The Guardians (a collection of short prose)
Sarah will work on a collection of short stories entitled The Guardians.
MUSICAL COMPOSITION
Samuel Barber Rome Prize
ERIN GEE
Composer
Sleep Towards Sound: An Opera in Four Acts
“As culmination of the Mouthpiece series, this work for theater will focus on the dissolution of voice and language, both of the actor and the singers, based on the function of sleep to living beings. Building on years of professional collaboration with my brother, former principal clown for Cirque d’Soleil, Colin Gee, I will combine phonemic text with the Italian Commedia dell ‘Arte technique of vocal improvisation, Trammeled, and augment this vocal bifurcation through live electronic patches developed in 2006 with Thomas Musil (Institute for Electronic Music, Graz IEM). The story takes place during one day, on a large body of water called the Sound, and four acts correspond to the four divisions of sleep found in the Upanishads: A, U, M and silence. This is a joint production between the Graz Opera House and the University of Music and Dramatic Arts, Graz.”
Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize
YOTAM HABER
Composer
Music in the Jewish Community of Rome: Research and Composition of a New Work for Mezzo-Soprano and Chamber Orchestra
“As a fellow at the AmericanAcademy in Rome, I will carry out an extensive research and composition project at the Centro di Cultura Ebraica della Comunità di Roma on the music and history of the Jewish community in Rome. This will culminate in a large-scale work for chamber orchestra and voice, which will incorporate musical material and texts from the Roman Jewish tradition. I plan on composing the work for singer Cristina Zavalloni, a modern music specialist, and a rising star in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. She has sung several of my works since 2000, and her experience with singing both Hebrew and Italian texts will be invaluable.”
VISUAL ARTS
Chuck Close Rome Prize
DANIEL BOZHKOV
Artist
Eternity’s Ephemera: Frescoes of Rome’s Daily Histories
“I will work on a series of fresco paintings based on my daily encounters in Rome. They will be documentation of my performances – reenactment s of events that will happen around me. Fluxus, Dada, and Art Povera meet Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder. The frescoes will be their own kind of history paintings, inspired by the flow of street scenes, shop windows, soap operas. Parallel to the monumental history of the EternalCity, they will stand for the powers of the banal, the ridiculous, and the inconsequential.”
Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize
TIM DAVIS
Photographer
(Ill)illuminations
“I plan to photograph the ways lighting affects Rome’s ideas of its own history, addressing public monuments and spaces, works of art and architecture that are illuminated for public display.”
John Armstrong Chaloner/Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize
KATE GILMORE
Artist and Visiting Assistant Professor, Art and Design, State University of New York at Purchase
Untitled
“During the AmericanAcademy in Rome Fellowship, I would like to work on a series of ‘pile’ works inspired by Roman architecture, art, and ruins. Through working with the idea of mass pilings as historical remnant, I hope to create pieces that use large pile installations as settings for videos.”
Jesse Howard, Jr. Rome Prize
CAVEH ZAHEDI
Filmmaker
Ulysses
“I intend to write an eighteen-hour screenplay adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The book has been made into a film twice before, but both film adaptations attempted to compress the book’s 644 pages into the standard motion picture running time of two-hours. Because the book is divided into eighteen chapters, with each chapter representing a different hour of the same day, my intention is to adapt the book in real time, with each chapter taking up and hour of screen time.”
HUMANITIES
ANCIENT STUDIES
Arthur Ross Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
ROBERT R. CHENAULT
Interdepartmental Program in Greek and Roman History, University of Michigan
Rome and its Senators in the Fourth Century A.D.
“As Emperors ceased to live in Rome in the fourth century, Rome became once again a senatorial city. Senators used traditional sources of aristocratic status to fashion a leading role for themselves in the social and cultural life of the city. By the end of the fourth century, senators’ primacy in the city began to be challenged by the bishop of Rome.”
National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
JACKIE ELLIOTT
Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, University of Colorado at Boulder
Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales
“The project I propose is the completion of a book manuscript on the fragments of Ennius’ Annales. The distinctive feature of my study is that it focuses on how our accounts of the nature of this text and of its place in literary history are liable to distortion through the types of selection and ideological or stylistic manipulation consciously or unconsciously effected by our sources.”
Frances Barker Tracy/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)
JOHN N. N. HOPKINS
Department of Art and Art History, The University of Texas at Austin
The Topographical Transformation of Archaic Rome: A New Interpretation of Architecture and Geography in the Early City
“Between the mid-seventh and early-fifth centuries B.C. Romans created the vast central plan that would become the Forum Romanun; they founded the first roads, drainage systems and most enduring temples in their city’s history; they altered Rome’s very geography and began employing enduring tectonics, effectively setting the foundations and the standard for the city’s subsequent building programs. My project will be to complete my dissertation, in which I assemble archaeological and literary evidence for this topographical transformation and consider why at this time Romans wanted and were able to so transform their city.”
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
ELEANOR M. RUST
Department of Classics, University of Southern California
Ex Angulis Secretisque Librorum: Reading, Writing, and Using Miscellaneous Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae
“My dissertation examines collecting, deploying, and ordering knowledge in Aulus Gellius’ 2nd century Latin “miscellany,’ the Noctes Atticae. This project is divided into three parts which address questions of the use of knowledge within the Noctes Atticae, its relationship with alternative ancient systems of ordering knowledge, and its re-purposing by later readers. In the final part, I read MSS and early printed editions, many held in Rome, for alterations to the text which illustrate changing ideas about how miscellaneous knowledge should be accessed and used by readers in the after-life of the Noctes Atticae.
Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
DYLAN SAILOR
Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, University of California, Berkeley
Prestige, Ambition, and the Writing of History in the Early Principate
Dylan’s work is about the changing practice of history writing in early Roman times, particularly in its relationship with the development of Roman society’s notion of prestige. While it is a common view that much of Roman literature is explicitly obsessed with the repute of its author, Dylan here suggests that historiography and other scholarly non-fictional writing were not free of this overt ambition either.
Jesse Benedict Carter/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
RACHEL VAN DUSEN
Department of Classics, University at Buffalo
Central Apennines: A History of Cultural Change in the Highlands of Central Italy
“This research project will contribute to a dissertation about cultural change in the Central Apennines of Italy between the 8th and 1st centuries BC. It requires conducting library research at the American Academy as well as other institutions in Rome and the libraries at the University of Bologna. This information will shed light on any changes in the funerary practices, social organization, trade relationships, and economic situation of the people living in this area.”
MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
FLORENCE ELIZA GLAZE
Assistant Professor of History, and Co-Director, The Honors Program, Coastal Carolina University
Gariopontus and the Salernitans: Medical Texts and Medical Practice in Southern Italy c. 1050-1225
“My project explains the origins and influence of Gariopontus of Salerno’s seven-book medical text, the Passionarius, which was produced c. 1050 from late ancient sources, and which remained popular through the 16th century. My project offers the first critical edition of this text, which was published three times in the Renaissance. I include paleographical descriptions of all 59 surviving manuscripts, as well as indices of glosses, technical terminology, and material medica.”
Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
(year one of a two-year fellowship)
ERIK GUSTAFSON
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Tradition and Renewal in the Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Architecture of Tuscany
“My project deals with the ‘origins’ of 13th-century Franciscan architecture in Tuscany, looking to two 11th-century Gregorian Reform monastic orders – the Vallombrosans and the Camaldolese – as spiritual and architectural models. My hypothesis is that the Franciscan movement is a renewal of the earlier Gregorian monastic spiritual ideals, expanding and adjusting the spiritual aims of ‘caring for souls’ and service to the community to fit a new range of devotional and cultural needs. While previous scholarship has seen Franciscan architecture as simplistic, vernacular halls for preaching, I argue that the friars’ churches are better understood as spaces designed to both house and express the devotional practices of the friars and of the laity.”
MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES
National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
PAUL ARPAIA
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Luigi Federzoni, Standardbearer of italianità from Liberal to Post-Fascist Italy
“Drawing on collections in six Roman archives, I will research the political and cultural activities of Luigi Federzoni, a leading political and cultural figure under fascism and a political advisor to Umberto di Savoia in the early years of the Republic. My biography of Federzoni will contribute to our understanding of elite politics and culture from 1900 to the 1960s.”
Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
CHRISTINA FERANDO
Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Staging Neoclassicism
“My dissertation will rethink Neoclassicism by examining the way that neoclassical art deliberately and intentionally manifested itself as a staging of Classicism in the modern era. That is, artists, critics, and private patrons engaged in exhibition practices and ‘events’ in artists’ studios, museums and private venues. These exhibitions called attention to the antique models and sources being used, engaging viewers in comparisons that were deliberate, instructive, and often entertaining. As a result of these visual stagings, Neoclassicism contributed to and created modern notions of originality and authenticity by establishing the copy as a condition of originality. Rome was the primary locus for such events because of the complexity and vitality of the city’s artistic scene and also because the paradigmatic figure of this phenomenon was the preeminent sculptor of the period, Antonio Canova.”
RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES
Millicent Mercer Johnsen Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
THOMAS FREDERICK MAYER
Professor, Department of History, Augustana College
Trying Galileo
“Giorgio De Santillana’s The Crime of Galileo is the only book on Galileo’s trial. Published fifty years ago, it is badly out of date, especially on the law. The trial turns on a precept given to Galileo in 1616 to cease defending Copernicus. The Precept opened Galileo’s single trial, which abounded throughout in procedural oddities. The trial could have had another outcome had Galileo mounted the strong legal defense that a precept expired with the death of the authority who issued it. Instead Galileo turned to a political defense which failed.”
Donald and Maria Cox Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
DANIEL R. McREYNOLDS
Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University
Refiguring the Palladian Legacy: Architectural Reform in Eighteenth-Century Venice
“My dissertation examines the critical reception and interpretation of the architectural and literary works of the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio by 18th-century architects and theorists of the Veneto. Specifically, my dissertation addresses neo-Palladianism within its discursive context through an examination of the texts, manuscripts, designs, buildings, and polemics, which collectively forged and perpetuated a modern interpretation of Palladio’s legacy in the latter half of the 18th century.”
Phyllis G. Gordan/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
(year two of a two-year fellowship)
GREGORY WALDROP
History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley
Sight Unseen: Priests and Visual Representation in Early Quattrocento Siena
“Ubiquitous, indispensable, sometimes notorious – priests are ever before the eyes of the faithful in Quattrocento, as central figures of both quotidian spectacle and the Church’s sacramental system. Visual representations of their priestly mediation have been largely overlooked by art historians. My dissertation examines priests as depicted subjects and calculated objects of art production and focuses on Sassetta’s Arte della Lana altarpiece (1425) as the site of a remarkable, and hitherto unremarked, display of sacerdotal visual rhetoric.”
Paul Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
MARJORIE CURRY WOODS
Associate Professor, Department of English, The University of Texas at Austin
Weeping for Dido: Male Writers and Female Emotions in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom
“Boys and young men in medieval and Renaissance classrooms were often given rhetorical exercises in intense emotions, usually grief or anger, expressed by women – female characters taken from classical texts written by male authors. I want to examine glosses on 14th- and 15th-century manuscripts of these texts as part of a book project on the pedagogical, psychological, and literary implications of teaching female emotions in the all-male classroom.”
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