The Academy offers its sincere thanks to Caroline Goodson, who is completing her final year as Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor. After her two-year appointment at the American Academy in Rome, she will return to the University of Cambridge, where she has taught since 2017.
The Mellon Professor at the American Academy plays a vital role in the Academy's intellectual community by supporting and advising Rome Prize Fellows, collaborating on public programs, and fostering dialogue between the Academy, its Fellows, and the wider world.
"My time as Mellon Professor has been a privilege in the truest sense: sharing what I know about Rome on the ground, while learning far more in return from Fellows and the many others who have been at the Academy," said Goodson.
Goodson is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and King's College, Cambridge. Her scholarship bridges the disciplines of medieval history and archeology, focusing on the rise of early medieval polities in the Western Mediterranean and how different groups positioned themselves as successors to the Roman Empire.
She is the author of several books and articles, including The Rome of Pope Paschal I: Papal Power, Urban Renovation, Church Rebuilding, and Relic Translation, 817–824 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Cultivating the City in Early Medieval Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Goodson was the co-editor, alongside Prof. Julia Hillner of the University of Bonn, of the two-volume Companion to Rome c. 400–c. 1050, published by Brill earlier this year. This book presents a new approach that focuses on the urban context of Rome, its geography and topography as well as spatial and material life, in the first millennium.
"Caroline came to us from Cambridge, but for two years she has been of this city, of walks through streets where the ground itself is an archive, where a wall, a church, a half-buried brick becomes, in her company, a question worth following into its depths," said American Academy in Rome Director Aliza Wong.
"She built her seminars the way Rome was built, in layers, inviting each scholar to add a stratum to a complex conversation," Wong added. "She did not lecture so much as walk beside the Fellows, changing the shape of what they were looking for, before they had even finished the question. Caroline's brilliance makes room, in this light, on these streets, for everyone else's."
This fall, we will welcome Chris van den Berg, Professor of Classical Studies at Amherst College, who will serve as Interim Mellon Professor. Van den Berg was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2019, where he worked on a project titled Critical Matter: Performance, Identity, and Object in Greco-Roman Criticism.
Berg is the author of two books: The World of Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Please join us in congratulating Caroline on this next chapter and in extending a warm welcome to Chris.