Academy Books

Women & Ruins tells a forgotten yet necessary story: that of courageous, scholarly, and visionary women who, in the early twentieth century, used the camera to create a new way of seeing antiquity and a transforming Italy.

The volume accompanies the exhibition at the American Academy in Rome (through November 9, 2025), bringing back to light the voices and gazes of figures such as Esther Van Deman, Gertrude Bell, the Bulwer sisters, and Maria Ponti Pasolini—pioneers who were not allowed to dig, but who could see. And it was precisely through the lens that they captured not only the great monuments of archaeology but also the invisible remains, the everyday lives, the marginal details: bricks, gestures, people, landscapes.

Between exploration and documentation, excavation and gaze, these photographs reveal an archive of extraordinary sensitivity, questioning the relationship between memory and modernity, between gender and knowledge. Women & Ruins is a tribute to a perspective at once lateral and radical, and an invitation to rewrite—also visually—the history of ruins and of those who told their stories.

In the past few decades, several major exhibitions and scholarly publications have revisited the distinguished career of American painter Philip Guston (1913–1980), a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1949 and a resident there in 1960 and again in 1971. Once known as “Abstract Expressionism’s odd-man out,” a respected, but often misunderstood, member of the New York School, Guston is now celebrated for his magisterial paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s. Combining painterly virtuosity and narrative power, they cast a long shadow over the current landscape of contemporary art.

In light of both a profusion of recent scholarship and the lasting currency of Guston’s vision among artists working today, the time appears right to take stock of his career. To that end, the American Academy in Rome organized a two-day conference with an international roster of critics and art historians to discuss the significance and critical fortunes of Guston’s work, paying special attention to his life-long attentiveness to Italian art and culture.

Emerging out of that symposium are the texts in Go Figure! They reflect a wide variety of perspectives, including reflections from leading specialists and several of Guston’s longtime friends and collaborators, as well as those by younger scholars, who have paved new ground in recent studies of Guston’s work. A conversation between Robert Storr and the artist Chuck Close, hosted by the Phillips Collection in 2011, yields further insights.

The American Academy in Rome launched its Rome Prize in Musical Composition in 1921, a time in the United States of rapidly changing ideas about national identity, musical values, and the significance of international artistic exchange. Music and Musical Composition at the American Academy in Rome tells the story of this prestigious fellowship. Combining cultural analysis with historical and personal accounts of a century of musical life at the American Academy in Rome, the book offers new perspectives on a wide range of critical topics: patronage and urban culture, institutions and professional networks, musical aesthetics, American cultural diplomacy, and the maturation of a concert-music repertory in the United States during the twentieth century.

The Variae of Cassiodorus have long been valued as an epistolary collection offering a window into political and cultural life in a so-called barbarian successor state in sixth-century Italy. However, this study is the first to treat them as more than an assemblage of individual case studies and to analyze the collection’s wider historical context. M. Shane Bjornlie highlights the insights the Variae provide into early medieval political, ecclesiastical, fiscal and legal affairs and the influence of the political and military turbulence of Justinian’s reconquest of Italy and of political and cultural exchanges between Italy and Constantinople. The book also explores how Cassiodorus revised, updated, and assembled the Variae for publication and what this reveals about his motives for publishing an epistolary record and for his own political life at a crucial period of transformation for the Roman world.

In his introduction Bjornlie wrote, “The American Academy in Rome provided funding and incomparable hospitality during the last year in which I worked on the manuscript; the Arthur and Janet Ross Library at the Academy, and the many denizens of that library were particularly indispensable.”

Thanks to the efforts of Trustee Rea Hederman and the enthusiastic support of the Publications Committee, The American Academy 1947–54, Reopening and Reorientation: A Personal Reminiscence covers Lawrence Richardson’s experiences as a Fellow in classical studies. The book also chronicles the launch and early seasons of the Academy’s excavations at Cosa; life in Rome and at the Academy itself; the Fellows, Residents, and staff in those years; and his own work on Roman painting and architecture at Pompeii. Photographs from the Academy Archives and Richardson’s personal collection are also included.

Richardson was a Fellow in 1950 and a Resident in 1979. He was also an Academy Trustee from 1969 to 1992. The book was edited by Harry B. Evans, a 1973 Fellow and 1992 Resident.

Gilbert Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places where they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet brings them life, setting them in their historical context and locating them in the physical world, while also offering crisp modern translations of the poets’ finest work. The result is an entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry—altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.

The book contains a preface by Michael C. J. Putnam, a 1964 Fellow and 1970 Resident.

This slender volume serves as both a guide to an event, our spring Open Studios, and a document of the artistic life at the American Academy in Rome during the 2007–8 Fellowship year.

Ever since the American Academy in Rome reopened its doors after World War II in 1946/1947, fellows and visitors have been greeted by a large tapestry with a battle scene on the south wall of the common room, better known as the salone. That this piece never seems to have commanded the interest of art historians in residence at the Academy was probably due to the Gobelin’s faded colors and poor state of conservation. A recent cleaning and expert repair, however, have revealed the superior quality of hanging and encouraged its investigation.

This catalogue is a record of part of the work produced by the Fellows in the School of Fine Arts. Some of this work will be presented during the Open Studios at the end of May, on the occasion of the visit of our Board of Trustees. This volume serves as a guide for visitors to the Open Studios, and also as a record of that event for the future.

The Alchemy of Extremes publishes the proceedings of an international conference held in Rome in 2003 and promoted by the European Intellectual Lexicon of the National Research Council, in collaboration with the American Academy in Rome.

Those who come to the American Academy in Rome on the Janiculum should know about the history of the grounds on which the Academy buildings and their neighbors are located and about the origin of the names of the streets surrounding the area. This book is intended to do just that.

This publications is the annual record of work by Fellows and Residents at the American Academy in Rome during 2004–5.

With a preface from AAR director Lester K. Little and an introduction by Linda Blumberg, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, this book serves as a record of work accomplished by Academy Fellows and Residents during 2001–2.

With a preface from AAR director Lester K. Little and an introduction by Linda Blumberg, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, this book serves as a record of work accomplished by Academy Fellows and Residents in the School of Fine Arts during 2000–1 fellowship year.

There are many ways of reflecting on an institution that has lived through a hundred years. Much can be said about McKim’s vision for an American Academy in Rome where “carefully selected Americans” could go “for contact and research,” afterward returning “to become a true leaven in America.” We have held to this steady course, and although the mode of operating has evolved over the years, we remain dedicated to fostering excellent people whose destiny it is to establish a relationship with Rome.

The book that follows summarizes the past, but mostly makes known the Academy’s present, which is to say, it makes known our worlds, our community and our support. Certain people and, in many cases, their descendants have seen us through our formative years, and we now depend on them as we enter our second century. Each generation has brought a new group of Fellows and Residents, committed supporters and subscribers, and the Academy is, finally, these individuals.

This mammoth hardcover publication lists the names, professional affiliations, and short biographies of the men and women who spent time at the American Academy in Rome as a Fellow, Resident, Affiliated Fellow, staff member, or Trustee. It was published to accompany the one hundredth anniversary of the Academy, in 1994.

This anthology of writing by men and women who have held literary fellowships at the American Academy in Rome over the last twenty-five years is of interest because of its subject. We see a variety of responses to a subject that proves as universally stimulating to writers as love, money, and death—Italy, and especially the Eternal City.

The publication of this book marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the American Academy in Rome and records its history since its founding in 1894 as a school of architecture. It has survived two depressions, two world wars, and various drastic uncertainties to emerge with a record in the creative arts comparable with that of the French Academy founded in Rome two centuries earlier.