This spring, the American Academy began a new chapter in its contribution to advanced studies in the humanities. For years, the Academy has helped train young scholars through its summer programs in archaeology, classical studies, paleography and the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars. Until now, these outreach activities were centered on the summer months. As part of an effort to expand the Academy’s contribution to advanced graduate training, this year the Academy hosted a major seminar initiative during term time, the Academy for Advanced Studies in the Renaissance (AASR), sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University and lead by professors Edward Muir and Regina Schwartz, both of Northwestern.
This was the first full session of the AASR, whose long-term goal is to help nurture a new generation of Renaissance scholars, sustaining the pivotal role played by the Renaissance in the humanities. The AASR granted 12 fellowships to graduate students from North America, UK, France and Italy writing interdisciplinary dissertations on Renaissance subjects. This innovative series of seminars was designed to broaden the scope of their work and to help them engage in current intellectual dialogues. Participants spent five weeks in England and Italy working with distinguished senior scholars representing a broad range of Renaissance scholarship.
During the AASR’s stay at the American Academy in Rome, the participants had seminars on Renaissance literature, architecture, painting, music, humanism, censorship, and book history. Some highlights of the seminar included Piero Boitani (Comparative Literature, Università di Rome “La Sapienza”) speaking on Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” and Giulio Romano, an on-site tour of the iconography in the Villa Farnesina and discussion of merchant culture by Ingrid Rowland (University of Notre Dame), an on-site lecture at the Titian exhibit at the Scuderia del Quirinale by Claudia Cieri-Via (La Sapienza) and a lecture on innovations in Renaissance music by musician Michael Leopold that included a demonstration of the viola da gamba. The seminar participants also attend a conference on the humanist, Pomponio Leto, held at the AAR. The seminar concluded its time at the Academy with a workshop on censorship, featuring two experts in the field: Giorgio Caravale (Università degli Studi Roma III), who spoke on index of prohibited books by the Catholic church, and Edoardo Tortarola (Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale), who addressed the wider question of external and internal modes of censorship in the period.
During their stay at the Academy, seminar participants were able to discuss their dissertations over meals with the Rome Prize Fellows and Residents and use the resources of the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library to further their own research. Their time at the Academy also launched a series of encounters with Italian Renaissance scholarship that shaped the rest of their European seminars. The AASR’s collaboration with the American Academy thus marked a new moment in the Academy’s century-long tradition of fostering innovative training in the humanities.