Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture

La Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture è così chiamata in onore di Patricia H. Labalme (1924–2002), illustre studiosa di storia del Rinascimento e specialista di Venezia, che ha fatto parte del Board of Trustees dell’Accademia dal 1979 al 1999. The Friends of the Library sostiene la Biblioteca dell’AAR attraverso quote annuali e iniziative speciali, contribuendo anche a farne conoscere le risorse grazie a programmi regolari.

Peter Brown – Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea, and the Future of Christianity

New Work on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Roma, Italia
Conferenza/Conversazione
Peter Brown - Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea and the Future of Christianity

The lecture is part of the New Work in the Humanities Series 2013–14: New Work on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The lecture will delineate the notion of the future expansion of Christianity as this is expressed in the works of Eusebius of Caesarea and as it is implied in the statements and actions of Constantine. It will attempt to conjure up what Christians of the age of Constantine thought about the future prospects of Christianity. By this means, the lecture will define what was considered by Christians to be the limits of the possible in the age of Constantine, and, hence, what they could accept as the measure of their success. In so doing, it hopes to rescue discussion of the age of Constantine from many anachronisms that project onto this period ambitions and expectations of success for the Christian church that belong to later generations.

Peter Brown is Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. He previously taught at London University and the University of California, Berkeley. Brown has written on the rise of Christianity and the end of the Roman Empire. His works include: Augustine of Hippo (1967); The World of Late Antiquity (1972); The Cult of the Saints (1981); Body and Society (1988); The Rise of Western Christendom (1995 and 2002); Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2002); and Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West (350–550 AD) (2012). He is the winner of an Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, a Klug Prize, and numerous honorary degrees and book prizes.

The lecture will be held in English. Simultaneous translation will be available. Seating on a first-come, first-served basis. The Friends of the Library Annual Book Sale will be held in the Academy's salone from 10am to 5pm on the same day.

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Event does not include video

Stephen Greenblatt – Lucretius and the Toleration of Intolerable Ideas

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Metropolitan Club
1 East 60th Street
New York, NY
Stati Uniti
Conferenza/Conversazione
Lucretius and the Toleration of Intolerable Ideas

Join us for the annual Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library lecture in New York, featuring the Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Greenblatt (2010 Resident). Greenblatt will discuss how freedom of expression is a recent idea, by no means universal even now and hedged about, in those societies that value it, with restrictions. Through most of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and extending well into the seventeenth-century, there were strict limits on what could legitimately be said or written. To call into question divine providence or to deny the existence of the afterlife were among the positions regarded as particularly intolerable. This lecture centers on why and how the utterly unacceptable ideas reintroduced by the recovery of De rerum natura in 1417 managed to survive and be transmitted during pre-Enlightenment centuries that had no concept of toleration.

Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Shakespeare's Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding editor of the journal Representations. His honors include the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve, the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize (twice), Harvard University’s Cabot Fellowship, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. Among his named lecture series are the Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt, the University Lectures at Princeton, and the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, and he has held visiting professorships at universities in Beijing, Kyoto, London, Paris, Florence, Torino, Trieste, and Bologna, as well as the Renaissance residency at the American Academy in Rome. Greenblatt was president of the Modern Language Association and is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society.

A reception will follow the lecture.

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Event does not include video

Mary Roberts – A oriente dell’occidente: Edward Said, il tempo della malinconia e l’interno orientalista

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Est e ovest
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Roma, Italia
Conferenza/Conversazione
Mary Roberts - East of West: Edward Said, Melancholy Time, and the Orientalist Interior

George Aitchison, west elevation of the Arab Hall, Leighton House, ca. 1877. RIBA Library, Drawings, and Archives Collection (artwork in the public domain)

L’evento è parte della serie Nuove ricerche sulle arti e sulle discipline umanistiche: oriente e occidente.

Le invenzioni di articoli di orologeria come il cronometro marino (la conquista tecnologica che ha permesso una più accurata navigazione del globo) e il trasferimento delle modalità di misurazione del tempo tipiche delle metropoli agli avamposti coloniali hanno costituito il fulcro dell’imperialismo degli stati-nazione europei nel XIX secolo. Il progresso dell’Occidente, così come il suo contrario, il non-Occidente inteso come depositario della pre-modernità, sono stati parte del telos del colonialismo e dell’orientalismo moderni. Come afferma Edward Said nel paragrafo iniziale dell’influente Orientalism (Orientalismo), l’Oriente di invenzione europea è sconfitto dal tempo: “come se tutto fosse finito.”

La recente svolta globale della nostra disciplina risitua l’orientalismo europeo all’interno di una geografia culturale più ampia e più politicamente contesa. Si tratta di un passaggio da oriente a occidente. In che modo la logica temporale della modernità viene articolata in maniera diversa in questa ampliata geografia culturale del visivo? L’analisi degli arredamenti interni di due artisti-collezionisti e orientalisti britannici del XIX secolo, situate nelle capitali imperiali di Istanbul e Londra, e dell’arte islamica ed europea che esse mettono in mostra svela il loro coinvolgimento con l’orientalismo britannico, ottomano e siciliano. In questo modo, la conferenza rivela il modo in cui l’estetica di questi spazi fosse coniugata dall’eterocronicità della modernità ottomana ed europea. Concentrarci sulla logica temporale di questi siti ci permette di approfondire le complessità transculturali e trans-storiche del tempo dell’arte.

Mary Roberts è professore di storia dell’arte alla University of Sydney in Australia.

L’evento si terrà in lingua inglese. Sarà possibile seguirlo in diretta streaming https://livestream.com/aarome.

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John R. Clarke – The Story of the Villa “of Poppaea” at Oplontis (50 BC–AD 79) and Its Archives: Daybooks, Photographs, and Plaster Fragments

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Roma, Italia
Conferenza/Conversazione
Friends of the Library Annual Lecture

One of the undisputed highlights of the Academy’s year in Rome is the 

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library (FOL) Lecture. This year the lecture is dedicated to the memory of Christina Huemer, Drue Heinz Librarian Emerita, who served as a spirited leader of the AAR’s Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library for fifteen years (1993-2007), retiring just a few years before her untimely death on 12 November 2010. The thousands of artists and scholars touched by Chris Huemer’s learning, creativity and curiosity will remember her forever; a memorial service was held in in New York City on 3 February 2011.

The date of this year’s FOL lecture is Christina Huemer’s birthday, 24 May. Honoring Chris’s memory will be John R. Clarke, 1995 Resident, AAR Trustee, and Annie Laurie Howard Regents Professor in the University of Texas at Austin. His topic is “The Story of the Villa ‘of Poppaea’ at Oplontis (50 BC–AD 79) and Its Archives: Daybooks, Photographs, and Plaster Fragments.”

Clarke has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1980. His teaching, research, and publications have focused especially on the visual culture of ancient Rome, on art historical methodology, and on contemporary art and criticism. He has published seven books. Two of these appeared in 2007 alone: Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250 (University of California Press) and Roman Life: 100 BC–AD 200 (Abrams).

In all, Clarke has published also about 80 articles, chapters, and reviews, including several deriving from the Oplontis Project, for which he is co-director. The Oplontis Project is a collaboration with the Archaeological Superintendency of Pompeii and the King’s Visualisation Lab, King’s College, London. You can read about the Oplontis Project here.

Clarke’s lecture takes place Tuesday 24 May 2011 at 6pm 
at the Academy’s Villa Aurelia (Largo di Porta San Pancrazio, 1). 

Reservations are necessary by Friday 20 May; you can register here. On the evening of the event, please present your email confirmation and a document of identification at the entrance of the Villa Aurelia.

The Villa “of Poppaea” at Oplontis, interior

Clarke served on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association (1991-2001), and was its President from 1998-2000. Since 2000 he has been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies, serving, since 2004, as Vice-Chair of the Board.

John R. Clarke. Photo credit: Kirk Tuck

The current Drue Heinz Librarian of the American Academy in Rome is Rebecka Lindau; the President of the Friends of the Library is Michael C. J. Putnam, FAAR’64, RAAR’70, AAR Life Trustee, and Emeritus Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Department of Classics, Brown University.

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Hal Foster – Who’s Afraid of Banality? On the Superficial and the Serial in Postwar Art

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
AAR Lecture Room
McKim, Mead & White Building
Via Angelo Masina, 5
Roma, Italia
Conferenza/Conversazione
Color photograph of a woman snapping a smartphone picture of a square, framed, silkscreen painting by Andy Warhol; to her left of more framed silkscreen paintings on the wall

A Whitney Museum visitor snaps a photo of a work by Andy Warhol from the 2018–19 exhibition From A to B and Back Again (photograph © Laurence Agron and licensed through Dreamstime)

The art critic and historian Hal Foster (2023 Resident) writes, “This talk is prompted by two coincidences that have troubled me for many years. The first coincidence involves the use of the same word, banality, in two controversies in the early 1960s. One controversy was political, provoked by Hannah Arendt with her analysis of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. The other controversy was aesthetic, sparked by the rise of Pop art. Arendt intended her notorious phrase ‘the banality of evil’ as a neutral description, not a moral judgment, and this enraged her critics all the more. Why? What did ‘banality’ signify to them? Meanwhile, the opponents of Pop condemned the new art as ‘banal’; it was not at all neutral for them. Yet why this term in particular? What did it evoke? Why did these two controversies, otherwise separate, converge on this one word?”

A prolific author and a historian of modern and contemporary art, design, architecture, and postmodern theory, Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the 2023 Rea S. Hederman Critic in Residence at the Academy.

The lecture will be held in English.

The Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture, to be presented in person at the Academy as well as on Zoom, is free and open to the public.

The Friends of the Library supports the Academy’s Arthur & Janet C. Ross Library through annual dues and special initiatives. The group also helps to raise awareness of the Library’s resources through regular programs. Join online today!

Notice

For access to the Academy, guests will be asked to show a valid photo ID. Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than 40 x 35 x 15 cm (16 x 14 x 6 in.) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.

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Thomas J. Campanella – From Rome to Robert Moses

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Metropolitan Club
1 East 60th Street
New York, NY
Stati Uniti
Conferenza/Conversazione
"From Rome to Robert Moses" by Thomas J. Campanella, FAAR’11

Though virtually unknown today, no landscape architects played a greater role in shaping American space in the twentieth century than Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano (1930 Fellow), whose forty-year partnership Laurie Olin has called “one of the most fruitful collaborations in American design history.”

Clarke and Rapuano were educated in the Beaux-Arts style but practiced at the edge of modernity, designing the first modern highways in the world and using them to create the first park system of the motor age. This work was emulated from Germany to China and became the model that Robert Moses used to modernize metropolitan New York during the New Deal. Clarke and Rapuano themselves provided much of the design genius that enabled Moses to build, by the 1950s, a legacy of parks and public works unmatched since Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. Among their works are Riverside, Orchard Beach, Battery, Cadman Plaza, Astoria, Marine, and Jacob Riis Parks, the Brooklyn War Memorial, the Central Park Conservatory Gardens, the Belt, the Henry Hudson and Grand Central Parkways, and the master plan for the 1939 World’s Fair.

This lecture by Thomas J. Campanella (2011 Fellow) will survey the forgotten legacy of Clarke and Rapuano, showing how Rapuano’s studies at the American Academy in Rome in the late 1920s enabled him to develop a lean and economical “public-works Baroque” spatial aesthetic that complemented well the Anglo-Romantic heritage of the Olmsted era and became a signature of both the Moses era and the city itself.

A reception will follow the lecture. Seating is limited, and reservations are required.

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Thomas Carpenter – In Pursuit of the God Dionysos in Ancient Apulia

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Roma, Italia
Conferenza/Conversazione
Friends of the Library Lecture - Thomas Carpenter

Traditional views in the past have assumed that Apulian figure-decorated pottery was made primarily by and for the colonial Greeks in Taranto, but recent research has shown that the local Italic (non-Greek) people of Apulia provided principal markets. In this lecture, Thomas Carpenter will demonstrate how those local people adopted and modified Greek imagery of Dionysos, the god of wine and theater, for their own purposes and viewed him as a guide to the underworld and a blessed afterlife.

Carpenter is Charles J. Ping Professor of Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Classics Emeritus at Ohio University. Trained as a classical archaeologist and an expert in ancient Greek religion and iconography, he holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and Oxford University. Carpenter has published numerous books and articles, one of which, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (1991), has been translated into six languages. His recent work has focused on the Italic people of the fourth century BCE, and he recently coedited the first book in English to focus on these people, The Italic People of Ancient Apulia: New Evidence from Pottery for Workshops, Markets, and Customs (2014).

The event will be held in English.

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David Kertzer – The Pope at War

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Roma, Italia
Conferenza/Conversazione
Detail of the cover of David Kertzer's book The Pope at War, showing a yellow and orange tinted photograph of a Roman avenue, with a car and men on motorcycles driving toward the photographer; to the right and left sides of the road are soldiers on horseback

Detail of the cover of David Kertzer’s new book, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler

A Friends of the Library Lecture on the topic of a new book, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by the historian David Kertzer (2000 Resident), will take place at the Academy with the author. Also speaking are Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2022 Resident), Lutz Klinkhammer (German Historical Institute in Rome), Simon Levis Sullam (University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari), and Marla Stone, Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor (1996 Fellow).

Based on newly opened Vatican archives, The Pope at War is a riveting book about Pope Pius XII and his actions during World War II, including how he responded to the Holocaust. Kertzer is the Paul Dupee Jr. University Professor of Social Science and a professor of anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University, where he served as provost from 2006 to 2011. He is the author of twelve books, including The Pope and Mussolini (2014), winner of a Pulitzer Prize.

The Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture, to be presented in person at the Academy as well as on Zoom, is free and open to the public. To watch on Zoom, please register in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

The Friends of the Library supports the Academy’s Arthur & Janet C. Ross Library through annual dues and special initiatives. The group also helps to raise awareness of the Library’s resources through regular programs. Join online today!

Notice

Space in the Sala Aurelia is limited, and seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. If you plan to attend an event with a group of over six guests or students, please inform events [at] aarome.org (events[at]aarome[dot]org) with at least 48 hours prior notice so that special arrangements can be made.

Guests will be asked to comply with Covid-19 safety protocols for events:

  • Access to the Academy requires the presentation of a valid photo ID and a Super Green Pass
  • FFP2 masks are required when indoors, and temperature will be checked before entry
  • Visitor contact information may be shared for contact tracing

Please contact events [at] aarome.org (events[at]aarome[dot]org) with any questions.

Backpacks and luggage with dimensions larger than 40 x 35 x 15 cm (16 x 14 x 6 in.) are not permitted on the property. There are no locker facilities available.

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Mary Beard, Linda Douglass, Sabina Ciuffini & Kashetu Kyenge – Women, Books, and Blogs: Public Speech in the Age of Social Media

Conversations/Conversazioni
Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Roma, Italia
Conferenza/Conversazione
Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture - Women, Books and Blogs: Public Speech in the Age of Social Media

For the Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture, a group of academics, journalists, and politicians will discuss the status of women as public intellectuals and how the advent of new media has changed the nature and tenor of feminist discourse. The historical role of women’s voices—as authors and advocates—will be laid against the new terrain presented by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the democratized internet.

Participants include: Mary Beard, a professor of classics and a blogger for the Times; Linda Douglass, the former White House communications director for health care; Sabina Ciuffini, an entrepreneur and a blogger for Il Fatto Quotidiano; and Kashetu Kyenge, an Italian politician and ophthalmologist.

Simultaneous translation will be available. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

The Friends of the Library Annual Book Sale will be held in the Academy’s Salone from 2:00 to 5:00pm on the same day.

This event is made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Embassy of the United States of America.

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Colm Tóibín & Sara Antonelli – On Henry James

American Classics
Conversations/Conversazioni
Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Roma, Italia
Colm Tóibín with Sara Antonelli - On Henry James

This event is the Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture and is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

This year marks the centenary of the death of Henry James, the literary titan and cosmopolitan figure whose classic novels explore the culture clash between brash Americans and jaded European society. In this event, Colm Tóibín, the author of the award-winning novel The Master (2004), which unpacks James’s complex character towards the end of the writer’s life, will discuss James’s legacy with Sara Antonelli, who teaches Anglo American literature at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre.

From early novels such as The Europeans or The Portrait of a Lady, which pitted the innocence of the new world against the corruption of the old, to later works, including The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, James crafted increasingly nuanced portraits of American identities thrown into relief by their experiences abroad. Many of his stories are set against the backdrop of Rome, drawing upon James’s thorough knowledge of the inner workings of its patrician palaces and artists’ studios. James himself, however, despite his prolific output, copious letters, notebooks, novels, and plays, as well as the many portraits of him by friends, remains an enigmatic figure. This has made him and his work an alluring subject for contemporary scholars and writers, including Tóibín, who have speculated about many aspects of his personal life, including his sexual proclivities, his friendships with men and women, his relationships with his siblings, and his ill-fated interest in the theater.

The event will be held in English.

The 2016–17 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Embassy of Ireland in Italy.

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