Christina Huemer Lecture

Founded in 2011, the Christine Huemer Lecture is dedicated to the memory of Christina Huemer, Drue Heinz Librarian Emerita, who served as a spirited leader of the Arthur & Janet C. Ross Library for fifteen years (1993–2007), retiring just a few years before her untimely death in 2010. Those touched by Huemer’s learning, creativity, and curiosity will remember her forever.

“Someone other than oneself…”: Translation, Transubstantiation, and Talking through Text

Christina Huemer Lecture
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Color photograph of a street book stall in Milan, with dozens of books lining a wooden open topped shelf

Stalls of previously owned books at the market in the historical center of Naples (photograph © Yulia Grigoryeva and licensed through Dreamstime)

Join us for an intimate conversation between three friends—fellow writers, fellow travelers—about what it means to translate books, beings, and existences.

Born in Rome in 1975, Andrea Bajani (2017 Italian Fellow) is one of the most respected and award-winning novelists and poets of contemporary Italian literature. He is the author of four novels and three collections of poems. His novel Se consideri le colpe (If You Kept a Record of Sins), published in the United States by Archipelago and translated by Elizabeth Harris, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize, and the Lo Straniero Prize. Bajani’s latest novel, Il libro delle Case (The Book of Homes), was finalist for the Premio Strega and the Premio Campiello and is being translated in twenty countries. It will be published in the US by Deep Vellum. He is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Jhumpa Lahiri (2013 Resident), a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection. She is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland, which was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in fiction. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone and is the editor of The Penguin Classics Book of Italian Short Stories, which was published in Italy as Racconti italiani. Lahiri received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 she was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Roman Stories, partly translated by the author, will be published in fall 2023.

Michael F. Moore has recently completed a multiyear project of translating the great Italian novel, The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (New York: Modern Library, 2022), into American English. His published translations range across genres, from modern classics to contemporary fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently: The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi; Agostino by Alberto Moravia; Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi; and Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi. Moore is currently working on a new translation of Moravia’s short-story collection, Rome Tales. For many years he served as the chair of the PEN Translation Committee and, subsequently, as the chair of the advisory board of the PEN/Heim Translation Grant. He was also the staff interpreter and translator of the Italian Mission to the United Nations. Recognition of his work includes an NEA Translation Grant, the first translator in residence at Princeton University, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. Moore has conducted literary translation workshops at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and at Literature House Ireland, as well as courses in Italian language and literature at Bard College, Hunter College, and New York University. He received his PhD in Italian studies from New York University, with a thesis on Petrarch commentaries in the fifteenth century.

The conversation will be held in English.

This event, to be presented in person at the Academy as well as on Zoom, is free and open to the public. To watch on Zoom, please register in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

The event is produced with the collaboration of Maria Ida Gaeta.

Christina Huemer Lecture

Christina Huemer was the Academy’s first Drue Heinz Librarian (1992–2007) and deeply committed to the many Academy Fellows, Residents, and readers in the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library. The Christina Huemer Lecture Series was established by C. Brian Rose (1992 Fellow, 2012 Resident, and Trustee Emeritus) in celebration of her devotion to great scholarship and creativity.

Notice

For access to the Academy, guests will be asked to show a valid photo ID. 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.

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Mary Beard – The Classical Body: The Naked and the Nude

Christina Huemer Lecture
The Body
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Mary Beard – The Classical Body: The Naked and the Nude

Mary Beard

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: The Body.

The American Academy in Rome opens its 2018–19 programming season with a lecture by Mary Beard, a renowned scholar of antiquity and a writer and blogger on women in society today. She will explore the idea of the human body in classical sculpture: female and male, normative and conservative, subversive and transgressive. Beard’s lecture will aim to pull apart the image of the body in classical sculpture as a dead weight on our imagination, and to follow the edgy awkwardness that the work of the Greeks and Romans bravely faced. Her topics will range from Praxiteles to Jenny Saville, from Kenneth Clark to twenty-first-century feminism.

Beard’s lecture inaugurates a thematic series of events organized in 2018–19 on “The Body,” which will consider the body—by way of past artifact and present reality—as a site of subjectivity and meaning in the arts and humanities today.

Beard is professor of classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen books on society and culture in the ancient world, including The Parthenon (2002), The Roman Triumph (2007), and Women and Power: A Manifesto (2017). Since 1992 she has been the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, which also hosts her blog, A Don’s Life. Beard is the 2019 Lucy Shoe Meritt Resident in Classical Studies and Archaeology at the American Academy in Rome.

The event will be held in English. Watch it at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Christina Huemer Lecture

Christina Huemer was the Academy’s first Drue Heinz Librarian (1992–2007) and deeply committed to the many Academy Fellows, Residents, and readers in the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library. The Christina Huemer Lecture Series was established by Academy Trustee C. Brian Rose in celebration of her devotion to great scholarship and creativity.

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Judith P. Hallett & Stephen Rojcewicz – Thornton Wilder, Lauro de Bosis: Life and Letters at the American Academy in Rome, 1920–21 (with Tappan Wilder and Alessandro Cortese De Bosis)

Christina Huemer Lecture
AAR Zoom
Central European Time
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Black and white photos from the early 20th century of Thornton Wilder standing in a suit and Lauro de Bosis standing next to an airplane

Thornton Wilder (left) and Lauro de Bosis (right)

Thornton Wilder’s eight months at the American Academy in Rome during 1920 and 1921—where he studied Latin, Italian, and archaeology, interacted with distinguished faculty, and formed a long-lasting friendship with Lauro de Bosis and his family—imprinted classical literature, Italian culture, and archeological metaphors on his creativity. De Bosis’s example as a poet, dramatist, translator, and Hellenist, and his invitation to Thornton to participate in a Plato reading group, strengthened Wilder’s engagement with ancient Greek literature.

Wilder’s fellow students and professors—including Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Harry Leon, Ralph Van Deman Magoffin, and Walton Brooks McDaniel—bestowed on him a broad Greco-Roman perspective on the classical past, with detailed attention to the private life of the ancients and the role of women. His AAR experience resulted in novels and plays marked by multiple literary and cultural influences that are subtle, intricate, multilayered, often indirect, and integrated with multiple ancient Greek and Roman sources.

Judith P. Hallett is professor emerita of classics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Stephen Rojcewicz is an independent scholar. Tappan Wilder, nephew of Thornton Wilder, and Alessandro Cortese De Bosis, nephew of Lauro De Bosis, will speak at the end of the presentations.

This lecture, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

Christina Huemer Lecture

Christina Huemer was the Academy’s first Drue Heinz Librarian (1992–2007) and deeply committed to the many Academy Fellows, Residents, and readers in the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library. The Christina Huemer Lecture Series was established by Academy Trustee C. Brian Rose in celebration of her devotion to great scholarship and creativity.

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