Far Afield

City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages by 2014 Fellow Maya Maskarinec has won the Hagiography Society’s 2019 Book Prize.

Marlon Blackwell (2019 Resident) has been awarded the 2020 Gold Medal by the American Institute of Architects.

Lei Liang (2012 Fellow) has received the University of Louisville’s 2020 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition for A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, a work for orchestra that premiered in 2018.

Sharrona Pearl has reviewed Face: A Visual Odyssey, a new MIT Press book by 2010 Resident Jessica Helfand, for Public Books.

The composer and pianist Yehudi Wyner (1956 Fellow, 1991 Resident) describes his Rome Prize experience to the Boston Musical Intelligencer: “It changed the path of my thinking.”

Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in the Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (2018) by Pamela O. Long (2004 Fellow) has won the American Catholic Historical Association’s 2019 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize.

Stephanie Frampton, associate professor of literature and a 2014 Fellow in ancient studies, has earned tenure in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress has awarded commissions for new musical works to four composers, including Erin Gee (2008 Fellow), George E. Lewis (2010 Resident), and David Sanford (2003 Fellow).

Two Rome Prize Fellows, Walter Hood (1997) and Emily Wilson (2006), have won 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships.

Katie Larson, a 2016 Fellow in modern Italian studies, has recently joined Baylor University’s Art and Art History Department as assistant professor.

Rustin Levenson (2015 Resident) led the conservation of Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Coronation of the Virgin (ca. 1492), in the collection of the Bass Museum of Art in Florida.

John Kelly (2007 Fellow) will be premiering a new work, Underneath the Skin, at the Skirball Center at New York University on October 11 and 12, 2019. Underneath the Skin is a new solo work of dance and theater drawn from the life of the societal and sexual maverick Samuel Steward (1909–1993).

Research conducted at the Academy by Milena Belloni (2017 Italian Fellow) will appear in his new book, The Big Gamble: The Migration of Eritreans to Europe, to be published by the University of California Press later this year.

Sanford Biggers, a 2018 Rome Prize Fellow in visual arts, organized Tricknology, featuring the work of Allison Janae Hamilton and ektor garcia, for the Apsen location of Marianne Boesky Gallery. The show is on view until September 9.

The Venice Biennale commissioned a new musical composition from Filippo Perocco (2009 Italian Fellow). The piece—titled Come foglia opaca and created for soprano, saxophone, accordion, electric guitar, prepared piano, synthesizer, and resonator—will have its world premiere on September 28 at the Teatro alle Tese.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will present an evening with the artist Wangechi Mutu (2019 Resident) on September 9. Mutu will be in conversation with curators Kelly Baum and Alisa LaGamma for this free event.

Damocle Edizione in Venice published In Search of Aldus Pius Manutius a campo Sant’Agostin by Johannes M. P. Knoops (2000 Fellow, 1991 Affiliated Fellow) in late 2018.

The Rome Prize project of Sheramy D. Bundrick (2014 Fellow) has been published as Athens, Etruria, and the Many Lives of Greek Figured Pottery by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Toni Morrison (2013 Resident), an African American novelist who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature and a Pulitzer Prize in 1988, has died. She was 88 years old. Morrison was a special guest speaker at the 2012 Rome Prize Ceremony.

Architectural Digest reports that Christopher Counts, a 2009 Rome Prize Fellow in landscape architecture, is combatting climate change in Miami as a design principal for the firm Perkins+Will.