Features

Christia Mercer is an American Academy in Rome Scholar in Residence and the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.

Last Tuesday evening at the Villa Aurelia, American Academy in Rome Director Christopher S. Celenza, FAAR’94, sat down with Harvard University Professor Jill Lepore and an international audience to consider “Arms in America: Gun Violence in the United States in Global Perspective” for the seventh installment of the Academy’s series of Conversations That Matter.

An enthusiastic crowd gathered last Thursday in the cortile of the American Academy in Rome to hear Irish Nobel Laureate and William B. Hart Poet-in-Residence Seamus Heaney read a selection of poems illuminating the wide span of his distinguished career.

Last Thursday and Friday evenings saw the unfolding of a series of readings, conversations, and exchanges among scholars and writers of various disciplines who share a common interest in the Roman poet Ovid.

Wednesday evening saw the opening of AAR Gallery’s new exhibition, Stone From Delphi, which features thirty-five watercolors by the American artist and AAR Arts Advisor Wendy Artin and poems by the Irish Nobel Laureate and William B. Hart Poet-in-Residence Seamus Heaney.

Jessica Fisher is the winner of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust/American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Steven J. R. Ellis is the winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in Ancient Studies and an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati.

Michael J.B. Allen studied at Wadham College Oxford and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Nari Ward is the winner of the Chuck Close Rome Prize in Visual Arts and an Artist in New York.

Bruce Babbitt is the James Marston Fitch Historic Preservationist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and a planning consultant in Washington, DC.

Elizabeth Kaiser Schulte is the winner of the Booth Family Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation and the Owner/Chief Conservator of Elizabeth Kaiser Schulte Conservation of Art and Historic Artifacts on Paper in Atlanta, GA.

Camille S. Mathieu is the winner of the Donald and Maria Cox/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize (Year Two of a Two-Year Fellowship) in Modern Italian Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Wednesday evening’s lecture by Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell University (2013 Resident), took place in the elegant Palazzo Mattei di Giove, which is home to the Centro Studi Americani.

The American Academy in Rome’s Annual Tribute Dinner took place at The Plaza Hotel in New York City on Wednesday, 17 April 2013.

Beth Saunders is the winner of the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

A lecture by Stephen Greenblatt, RAAR’10, took place Wednesday evening under an auspicious full moon at the Villa Aurelia.  

Lucy Corin is the winner of the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize in Literature (a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman) and an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis.

This year the Trip’s aim was a deeper understanding of lesser-known parts of Italy and an appreciation of how culture and heritage fit – and clash – in a modern Italy.

Randall Mason is the winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation and an Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.