Federica Nicolardi
Reading, Reconstructing, and Interpreting Greek Papyri from Herculaneum: The Scroll of the Life of Philonides as a Case Study

The extraordinary eighteenth-century find of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum revealed a unique library from the Graeco-Roman world. The scrolls, which mostly contain Greek texts related to Epicurean philosophy, however, are charred and extremely fragile. Federica Nicolardi will give an overview of the most difficult tasks of Herculaneum papyrology and present her work of reconstruction and edition of some texts belonging to the collection.

Nicolardi is the Franco Zeffirelli Italian Fellow in Ancient Studies and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Naples Federico II.

Michael Young
The Aesthetics of the Attention: Four Projects from Young & Ayata

One of the issues that architecture is responsible for is the aesthetics of our everyday surroundings, the environments we experience habitually as the background of reality. In this presentation, Michael Young will discuss four projects from Young & Ayata in terms of fluctuations between attention and distraction regarding the aesthetics of the background.

Young is the Arnold W. Brunner/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture, an assistant professor in the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union, and a partner at Young & Ayata, based in New York.

The shoptalks will be held in English.