The second installment of the AAR’s new partnership in the environmental humanities with the New Institute Center for Humanities and Environment (NICHE) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice took place this week at a conference jointly hosted by the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Warwick Venice Centre. Anthony Acciavatti, the 2025 Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize Fellow in landscape architecture, and AAR President Peter N. Miller were two of the sixteen speakers at the two-day event.
The conference assembled scholars from different disciplines who were asked to speak about a single painting in the Accademia’s collection from some point within the horizon of environmental humanities. Acciavatti jumped off from Canaletto’s Perspective with Portico (1765) to discuss groundwater. Venice, surrounded by its salty lagoon, was dependent on cisterns. In his own research area, South Asia, the absence of rain made tube wells essential. Miller, addressing Giorgione’s Tempest, spoke about George Stewart’s work on storms and weather as a historical process.
The Academy’s work in environmental humanities builds off its long commitment to gardens and regenerative agriculture (through, for example, the Rome Sustainable Food Project). The first installment in this formalized collaboration took place at the end of September when Jacob Shores-Argüello, the 2025 John Guare Writers Fund Rome Prize Fellow (a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman) in literature, spoke about his current project, The River, in Prof. Marco Fazzini’s class on poetry and ecocriticism.
The third and final representation of AAR in NICHE’s Venetian space this year will be built around an appearance by Selby Wynn Schwartz, the 2025 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow (a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust) in literature, at the Incroci di civiltà International Literature Festival in April 2025.