Calendar
February 2020
Shoptalks – Alexis Wang and Samiya Bashir
- Monday, 3 February 2020 - 6:00pm
Alexis Wang
The Fragmented Image in Twelfth-Century Naples
The twelfth-century apse fresco at Santa Restituta in Naples pictures the figure of Christ with a surprising device. Disrupting the continuous frescoed surface is a circular cavity in the plaster that holds an icon of Christ's nimbed face. Rendered in tempera and gold on a circular wooden panel, the inset icon is a seemingly anomalous object within a monumental mural image: its presence fragments the body of Christ into a mixed media, hybrid form. Starting with a discussion of the wider medieval practice of embedding icons, Alexis Wang will then turn to Santa Restituta to explore how the tension between icon and fresco, between fragment and whole, functioned within its devotional and liturgical contexts.
Wang is the Donald and Maria Cox/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies and PhD Candidate, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University.
Samiya Bashir
FIRST, BREATHE: CONSIDERING AND MAKING MULTIMEDIA POETRIES
Samiya Bashir is the recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust and Associate Professor, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Reed College.
The shoptalks will be held in English. You can watch them livestreamed at https://livestream.com/aarome.
Please note: valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than cm 40 x 35 x 15 (inches 16 x 14 x 6) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.
Shoptalks – Joel Pattison and Brian Davis
- Monday, 10 February 2020 - 6:00pm
Joel Pattison
Serving God and Mammon: Genoese merchants in the medieval Maghrib
In this talk, Joel Pattison will discuss his ongoing research into the importance of religious law—both Christian and Muslim—in structuring economic exchange between Genoa and the Maghrib during the 13th century.
Pattison is the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies and PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley.
Brian Davis
A More Common Ground
Mud stands alongside water itself as the most basic of landscape materials. If we have taken this material for granted in the past, it is only because it is so fundamental that we cannot imagine our favorite places without it. In this talk landscape architect Brian Davis proposes that sediment offers a way to create a new public good in response to contemporary social and environmental crises. He briefly situates this idea in the history of modern landscape architecture and a longer history of landscape-making, and discusses some of the practical and aesthetic implications of this possibility.
Davis is the Prince Charitable Trusts/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture and Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Virginia.
The shoptalks will be held in English. You can watch them livestreamed at https://livestream.com/aarome.
Please note: valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than cm 40 x 35 x 15 (inches 16 x 14 x 6) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.
Peter Campbell – The Anatomy of a Naval Encounter: The Battle of the Egadi Islands (241 BC)
- Tuesday, 11 February 2020 - 6:00pm
Peter Campbell will discuss the stages of the Battle of the Egadi Islands (241 BC) and the build up to it. Campbell is Assistant Director of Archaeology at the British School at Rome.
The lecture will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.
A valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than 40 x 35 x 15 cm (16 x 14 x 6 in.) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.
Shoptalks – Angelo Caglioti and Nicole Sealey
- Monday, 17 February 2020 - 6:00pm
Angelo Caglioti
(Re)covering the Empire. Environmental History and the Palimpsest of Italian Colonialism
The talk will use the approach of environmental history as a method to recover the memory of Italian colonialism in Africa. By drawing on the metaphor of the "palimpsest", it will examine Italy's colonial past as a set of moments and narratives that have been 'overwritten' by different regimes, thus covering the goals and strategies of Italian imperialism in the liberal, fascist, and republican period.
Angelo Caglioti is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies and Assistant Professor, Department of History, Barnard College, Columbia University.
Nicole Sealey
Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department: Lyric Erasures
Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department: Lyric Erasure is a revisionist project in that, while the Ferguson report details a familiar history of racial biases and police brutality, the erasure reimagines and repurposes that history. This talk will focus on Nicole Sealey's impulse to as well as the context and creative process of drafting these lyric erasures.
Sealey is the recipient of the John Guare Writers's Fund Rome Prize in Literature, a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B.Cullman and a 2019–2020 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
The shoptalks will be held in English. You can watch them livestreamed at https://livestream.com/aarome.
Please note: valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than cm 40 x 35 x 15 (inches 16 x 14 x 6) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.
Cinque Mostre 2020: Convergence
- Thursday, 20 February 2020 - 6:00pm to 9:00pm
CINQUE MOSTRE 2020: Convergence
An annual exhibition of projects by the Rome Prize and Italian Fellows and invited artists.
Curated by Elizabeth Rodini and Ilaria Gianni
Opening: February 20
Azza Abo Rebieh, Samiya Bashir, Garrett Bradley, David Brooks, Matthew Brennan + Eugenia Morpurgo, Dina Danish + Jean-Baptiste Maître, Rä di Martino, Corinna Gosmaro, John Jesurun, Pamela Z, Giovanna Silva
Convergence is the theme of the 2020 edition of Cinque Mostre, the annual collective exhibition at the American Academy in Rome featuring work by current Rome Prize Fellows, Italian and Affiliated Fellows, and invited artists. In honor of the Academy’s 125th anniversary and its year-long celebration of cultural and intellectual encounters in Rome, Convergence is a cross-disciplinary exploration of the visual and performing arts installed throughout the Academy building.
To converge is to come together, to mingle and intertwine, to coalesce into something new—as two eyes see two images that the brain fuses into a multidimensional whole. The concept of convergence transcends disciplines. It can be applied to the arts and sciences, to technology and the environment, to language, politics, and opinion. When ideas converge, fresh possibilities arise; when viewpoints converge, they reframe our perspectives. In moments of conflict and times of tension, convergence can be a framework for resolution.
Sociologists, psychologists, and cultural critics use this term when discussing a fusion of outlooks and modes of expression. Convergence is equally apparent in the natural world, describing how streams flow into one another and air currents merge into the winds overhead—but also, as revealed in the site-specific work of Matthew Brennan and Eugenia Morpurgo, how familiar landscapes are encountering and responding to environmental change. As our physical present meets our climatic future, the promise of convergence is overshadowed by the danger of collision. Indeed, convergence can be menacing, buffeting us against the unfamiliar, forcing us to adjust to new norms and threatening sameness as we seek to preserve our individuality.
The artists of Cinque Mostre 2020 explore these paradoxes, including the experiences we share and those that divide us. Working in words, sound, projection, photography, and a range of tactile media, they offer their own forms of transformative convergence. Languages strange and familiar mingle in the theatrical and sonic installations of John Jesurun and Pamela Z; Dina Danish and Jean-Baptiste Maître mash up classical emblems with everyday objects, much as Corinna Gosmaro explores the imprint of old on new within our collective memories. The stories of Rome, its monuments, residents, and visitors, become entangled in the works of Samiya Bashir, Garrett Bradley, and Giovanna Silva.
These spiralling interactions reflect the American Academy’s 125th anniversary theme of Encounters, which underscores the cultural intersections—intellectual, creative, and social—that have defined the institution since its founding. Appropriately, with the expanded aims and ambitions of the Academy, the artists of Cinque Mostre 2020 represent an international group of diverse origins, experiences, ages, and backgrounds, from Roman performance artist Rä di Martino to Syrian printmaker Azza Abo Rebieh to Brooklyn-based visual artist David Brooks. Convergence honors their distinctions as well as the ideas that bring them together.
Opening: February 20, 6pm – 9pm
Gallery hours: Saturday and Sunday from 4pm to 7pm
On show until 29 March 2020
Free entrance
The exhibition is made possible by the Adele Chatfield-Taylor and John Guare Fund for the Arts. Special thanks to the KNIR and to the Mondriaan Fonds for their support of the project by Dina Danish and Jean-Baptiste Maître.
Please note: valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than cm 40 x 35 x 15 (inches 16 x 14 x 6) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.
Incontri AIAC - Ricostruire la vita attraverso la morte
- Monday, 24 February 2020 - 4:00pm
The American Academy in Rome will host a panel presentation of the Associazione Internazionale di Archeologia Classica/International Association for Classical Archaeology (AIAC), in that organization’s longstanding Incontri series.
Founded in Rome in 1945, AIAC aims to facilitate international collaboration among classical archaeologists through coordinating conferences and congresses of classical archeology. It also serves in Rome as the principal clearinghouse for information on archaeology-related scholarly events. AIAC publishes Fasti Online, the premier international database for archaeological excavations in thirteen countries in the territory of the former Roman Empire (including, of course, Italy), which in turn continues its print Fasti Archaeologici (published 1948–87). Since 2000, AIAC also has organized a series of monthly Incontri in Rome, where young scholars from Italian universities and the many foreign institutes in the city can present their research.
The theme for this evening at the American Academy in Rome will be Ricostruire la vita attraverso la morte moderated by Antonio F. Ferrandes (Sapienza – Università di Roma). Presenting on the AIAC program will be:
Mattia Bischeri (Sapienza – Università di Roma), Contributo allo studio del territorio di Chiusi. La necropoli di Tolle: seriazione dei contesti, analisi tipologica dei materiali, rituali funerari tra età orientalizzante e età arcaica
Courtney Ward (Istituto di Norvegia in Roma), Unearthing buried identity: skeletal and jewllery finds from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis
Victoria Moses (American Academy in Rome), Diet and Economy in Early Latium: Zooachaeology at Gabii (8th-6th centuries BCE)
The presentations will be held in Italian and English. You can watch the event livestreamed at https://livestream.com/aarome.
Please note: valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than cm 40 x 35 x 15 (inches 16 x 14 x 6) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.
Jeffrey Schnapp – The Shifting Contours of the Codex (a secret history of the electric book)
- Wednesday, 26 February 2020 - 6:00pm
The lecture will explore the shapes and forms that the codex has assumed from the late 19th century to the present, with a focus on the transition from page to screen (and, back again, from screen to page). It tracks the lineage of the electric book from the aspirationally electrified avant-garde experiments of the 1910s and 1920s, through the electric information age paperbacks and Dynabooks of the 1960s and 1970s, and forward into today’s proliferation of reading devices and web-inspired forms and formats with special attention to the intertwining of pixels and pages. The discussion will raise the question of scholarly communication today with examples from the Harvard metaLABprojects series and include reflections on the shifting role of libraries as a key component of the knowledge economy.
Jeffrey Schnapp is the Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he is also on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and the director and founder of metaLAB and the faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Trained as a medievalist, Schnapp has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and has published widely about 12th-14th-century Romance literatures, 20th-century Italian architecture and design, and the future of the book, curatorial practice, knowledge design, and the Digital Humanities. Jeffrey Schnapp is a regular speaker on the organization of knowledge and the future of the Humanities in the information age and has spoken at TED, the United Nations, World Frontiers Forum, the Royal Academy of Sweden, the Global Leaders Forum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Volkswagenstiftung, SXSW, Fondazione Corriere della Sera, MEET, and the US National Archives.
The event is co-organized with the Embassy of the United States to Italy and the Koha Gruppo Italiano.
The lecture will be held in Italian. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.
Please note: valid photo ID is required for entry into the American Academy in Rome. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than cm 40 x 35 x 15 (inches 16 x 14 x 6) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.
