The American Academy is pleased to announce that Gretel Rodríguez will serve as the next Director of the Classical Summer School beginning in Summer 2027. We are deeply grateful to Evan Jewell, who will complete his final year as Director this summer, for his outstanding leadership and dedication to the program.
Rodríguez joins the Academy from Brown University, where she is an Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture. Her research focuses on the art, architecture, and archaeology of the Roman Empire, investigating the relationship between art and society and issues of viewership, identity, and acculturation in relation to ancient artistic production.
She has conducted research across Rome, the Bay of Naples, Southern France, and Chiapas, Mexico. Her scholarship has appeared in American Journal of Archaeology, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal. Most recently, she was a Spring 2026 Faculty Fellow at Brown's Cogut Institute for the Humanities, where she worked on a project titled Water Sanctuaries of the Roman World.
"I am deeply honored and excited to join the American Academy in Rome as Director of the Classical Summer School," said Rodríguez. "This long-standing program offers students the unique opportunity to learn about Roman art and architecture with the city itself as a living backdrop and, therefore, it will also be a special type of pedagogical experience for me."
"I look forward to incorporating some of my past research on Roman honorific arches and viewer experiences into the design of the course, but I am especially excited about sharing my new research on Mediterranean water cults with the participants. I see this program as a wonderful chance to test and develop new ideas, and I hope this will, in turn, make a meaningful contribution to the students' growth as future scholars and teachers."
The Classical Summer School, founded in 1923, is an intensive five-week program exploring the history, archaeology, art, and material culture of ancient Rome through seminars, site visits, discussions, and student presentations. It is designed for middle school, high school, and university educators, as well as qualified graduate students, who wish to study the development of Rome through its material remains and literary sources.
This summer will be the final year for Evan Jewell, who joined the Academy in 2024 from Rutgers University, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. In 2022, he was a Rome Prize Fellow at the Academy, where he worked on a project entitled Youth and Power: Acting Your Age in the Roman Empire (149 BCE–79 CE).
He is the co-editor of a new volume, Mobility in Antiquity: Rethinking the Ancient World through Movement, which will be published this fall by Routledge. An open-access volume he co-edited with Elena Isayev, Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present, was published in 2023.
"Leading the CSS for the past three years and working with people like Dr. Follo, my three Assistant Directors, Professor Goodson, Professor Emmerson, Director Wong, many guest speakers, and many other staff members has been a joy, an honor, and a privilege," said Jewell.
"Above all, I've had the chance to get to know, very well and in a short time, some brilliant scholars and educators, from PhD students to school teachers, museum educators, and fellow faculty. The participants and our time on site and in museums have also enriched my own knowledge of ancient Rome in ways I couldn't have imagined and allowed me to road-test many new and old ideas. While it's a non-stop experience in the thick of it all, I have come to appreciate ancient Rome and many other sites much more deeply."
Over the past three years, Jewell oversaw a reorientation of the program, shifting its focus toward more localized and topographical explorations of the city, a deeper understanding of subaltern life in ancient Rome, and an immersive study of Campanian art and archaeology, including a full week in the Bay of Naples.
"This program is a genuine investment in the future of classics,” said Caroline Goodson, Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor at the Academy. “It helps Latin teachers as well as graduate students to develop their knowledge of Rome and Roman Italy from the ground up, and to bring that knowledge to their teaching of the next generation.”
"I went into this program looking for more authentic resources for my classroom. It provided those things and also opened up a world of resources by connecting me with amazing teachers, philologists, archaeologists, art historians, and educators from many backgrounds," said Holly Fitterer, a Latin teacher and 2025 CSS graduate. "It has been one of the most valuable opportunities I have had in my career!"
For more information about the Classical Summer School, visit: https://www.aarome.org/apply/2026-classical-summer-school