Zaneta Hong
Materiality of Disturbance

Architects and designers actively participate in the expansive reorganization of Earth’s matter and form. While the output of these spatial and material interventions tend to manifest as isolated artifacts, their formation is generated from an entanglement of complex ecologies, geologies, and technologies. This open studio presents how through the act of material specification, humans have transformed distant and remote landscapes, as decisively as their immediate surroundings.

Zaneta Hong is the Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture and assistant professor at the University of Virginia.

Sean Tandy
Poetry and the Policing of Elite Roman Identity in Ostrogothic Italy

During the Ostrogothic period the Roman civic elite attempted to solidify the often-permeable boundaries of ethnic and class identity in order to distinguish itself from both the Gothic military elite and nonelite Romans. This talk examines the important role that poetry played in the formation and regulation of elite Roman identity through an examination of two ubiquitous poetic forms: satiric epigrams and honorary epitaphs. The former polices elite Roman identity by castigating vices, dress, and mannerisms considered “un-Roman” while the later presents an idealized model of elite Roman identity.

Sean Tandy is the Arthur Ross Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University.

The event will be held in English.