Amy Franceschini

The San Francisco–based artist Amy Franceschini is the Mark Hampton Rome Prize Fellow in Design.

Austin Powell

Austin Powell is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the Catholic University of America.

John Romano
“Tolerance of Liturgical Diversity in Medieval Europe”

John Romano will speak about a particularly rich example that illustrates his thesis and approach. It involves the travels of the ambassador of the Mongols Rabban Sauma to Western Europe and the city of Rome in particular. His travelogue demonstrates the emphasis placed on correct belief and, simultaneously, on the tolerance shown to diverse forms of worship.

Romano is the Millicent Mercer Johnsen Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies and associate professor in the Department of History at Benedictine College.

Bennett Sims
“Pecking Order”

Bennett Sims will read a short story titled “Pecking Order,” about a man slaughtering a chicken. It originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Ploughshares.

Sims is the recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust, and visiting assistant professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

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

Joannie Bottkol
“Conserving Collections: Recognizing Layers of Narrative”

Conservation treatments, which are tied to a specific period of significance, are often limited in the narrative they tell. Sometimes, however, an object holds other important stories, which could or should be acknowledged. This talk presents three case studies in which a conservation intervention has broadened the narratives being told about a work or site, thereby expanding our knowledge and enriching our understanding of the piece.

Joannie Bottkol is the Booth Family Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation and Conservation and Conservator at the Historic Architecture, Conservation, and Engineering Center in the Northeast Region of the National Park Service.

Jim Carter
“Gender in Olivetti History”

The success of the Olivetti typewriter company owes a lot to the labor of women workers, as it does to the commercialization of gendered images. This talk asks why scholars of Olivetti have ignored such apparent details and looks to factory photographs and company advertisements in an attempt to recuperate some of this history.

Jim Carter is the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies and PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.

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

Carmen Belmonte
“Censorship, Iconoclasm, Preservation: The Multiple Lives of Fascist-Era Monuments and Works of Art”

Monuments and works of art realized under the regime still pervade the Italian public space. They raise crucial scholarly questions with regard to issues of agency, reception, preservation, and conservation strategies. Through several case studies, Carmen Belmonte will analyze the dynamics of postwar censorship and iconoclasm against images related to Fascist propaganda, as well as the subsequent preservation of Fascist-era cultural heritage. She will explore the ways in which the presence of such cases of controversial heritage might be negotiated within contemporary Italy.

Belmonte is the Italian Fellow in Modern Italian Studies and a postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut fur Kunstgeschichte in Rome.

Karyn Olivier
“Invisibility, Mutability, and the Reimagining of Spaces”

Karyn Olivier’s talk will focus on her public and interactive artworks. She will discuss her manipulation and rearticulation of everyday objects and spaces in various sites, including billboards, parks, grocery stores, and sidewalks.

Olivier is the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts and associate professor and program head for sculpture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art.

The event will be held in English. Watch Olivier’s shoptalk live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Erin Besler
What Seems to Be the Problem?

Erin Besler will introduce her project “The Problem with the Corner Problem” and situate it within broader architectural work on construction technologies, amateur production, prosaic materials, social media, and other platforms for producing and sharing content that rely less on expertise and more on ubiquity.

Besler is the Founders Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture, a lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a partner at Besler & Son.

Michelle Lou
New Performance System

Michelle Lou will be demo-ing a new analog/digital live performance system that she is creating at the Academy that involves taking signals from her modular synth into a custom software patch created on max/MSP that processes these signals. The audio is then routed back through the synth for further manipulation. There will also be an audio-reactive visual component to this presentation.

Lou is the Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow in Musical Composition and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Music at Dartmouth College.

The event will be held in English. Watch Besler’s shoptalk live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Zaneta Hong
Materiality of Disturbance

Architects and designers actively participate in the expansive reorganization of Earth’s matter and form. While the output of these spatial and material interventions tend to manifest as isolated artifacts, their formation is generated from an entanglement of complex ecologies, geologies, and technologies. This open studio presents how through the act of material specification, humans have transformed distant and remote landscapes, as decisively as their immediate surroundings.

Zaneta Hong is the Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture and assistant professor at the University of Virginia.

Sean Tandy
Poetry and the Policing of Elite Roman Identity in Ostrogothic Italy

During the Ostrogothic period the Roman civic elite attempted to solidify the often-permeable boundaries of ethnic and class identity in order to distinguish itself from both the Gothic military elite and nonelite Romans. This talk examines the important role that poetry played in the formation and regulation of elite Roman identity through an examination of two ubiquitous poetic forms: satiric epigrams and honorary epitaphs. The former polices elite Roman identity by castigating vices, dress, and mannerisms considered “un-Roman” while the later presents an idealized model of elite Roman identity.

Sean Tandy is the Arthur Ross Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University.

The event will be held in English.

Renato Leotta
Infinite poetic space

How can the space dedicated to artistic process be described? In a landscape photograph, the coastline that divides the earth from the sea is imagined as an infinite poetic space. In this place full of temporality the theme of the Garden and of Adventure alternate, a story described in images and experiments.

The Turnin-based artist Renato Leotta is the Fondazione Sviluppo e Crescita CRT Italian Fellow in Visual Arts.

Mark Letteney
How Is Truth? The Christianization of Roman Knowledge

The rise of Christianity in Rome changed what people think. But it also changed how people think. This talk reexamines what it means for Rome to become a “Christian” society by tracing the movement of a peculiarly Christian structure of knowledge into the secular domain during the late fourth century, in the generations after Christians first came to hold significant political power.

Mark Letteney is the Paul Mellon/Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey.

The shoptalks will be held in English. Watch Letteney’s presentation live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

In ancient Rome, death set off a series of ritual and corporeal transformations that prompted the removal of a body from the world of the living. But for modern funerary archaeologists, human remains have been an afterthought compared to the art and inscriptions that adorned their tombs. Bringing together funerary inscriptions from the American Academy in Rome with skeletal evidence from Roman burials, this talk explores the sensorial impact and embodied experiences of touching, handling, burying and digging up the dead in Roman cemeteries.

Liana Brent is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies (year one of a two-year fellowship) at the American Academy in Rome and a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics at Cornell University.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Liana Brent
“Step Back, You’re Digging Kind of Close”

So often explored from the perspective of monuments and memory, Roman funerary archaeology is in its infancy, insofar as it considers the role of the body in mortuary practices. In this shoptalk, Liana Brent argues for new ways of studying bodies, bones, and burials in Roman archaeology with select case studies from her archaeological fieldwork.

Brent is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics at Cornell University.

Jessie Marino
“Fluidity of Musical Materials”

Jessie Marino will discuss how to make music out of materials which extend beyond the sonic field.

Marino is the Luciano Berio Rome Prize Fellow in Musical Composition and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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

This talk will explore the interdisciplinary design partnership between a landscape architect and an architect through a series of recent projects and ongoing research. The approach to design problems is through exploring the work from the vantage points of the two disciplines, resulting in design solutions that strive to disintegrate the subject-object relationship conventionally established between Landscape + Building, the figure + ground. The work will be explored through three lenses of Unfamiliar Optics, Figural Operations, and Identity Oppositions.

Jennifer Birkeland and Jonathan A. Scelsa are the Mark Hampton Rome Prize Fellows in Design at the American Academy in Rome. Birkeland and Scelsa are partners of the New York–based architecture and landscape design practice of op.AL. Scelsa is assistant professor of architectural design and technology at Pratt Institute, and Birkeland is visiting assistant professor of landscape architecture at Pennsylvania State University.

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