Since 1923, the American Academy in Rome has hosted both aspiring and preeminent scholars at its Classical Summer School. The program was established to provide qualified graduate students, mature undergraduates, and middle school, high school, and two-year college teachers with a well-founded understanding of the growth and development of the city of Rome.
The 2012 Classical Summer School runs from June 18 to July 27 and has twenty-three participants: ten secondary school teachers (six of whom hold American Council/Fulbright Educational Seminar grants), eleven graduate students (in classics, archaeology, art history), and two undergraduate classics majors.
Susann S. Lusnia (1996 Fellow) is this year’s program director. An associate professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Tulane University, she teaches courses in Roman art and archaeology and is charged with guiding participants through a careful study of material remains and literary sources over the course of their three-week immersion. Lusnia’s ambitious agenda includes lectures on topics such as Roman wall painting, topography, and colonization and construction, and at least a dozen field trips to historic sites within the city and outside Rome—including to monuments of the Roman Forum and imperial villas along the Via Appia as well as to Minturnae, Praeneste, Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, and two outings to Ostia. It then culminates with a final autoptic examination at a “mystery location.”
“The program is an intense survey of the history and material culture of the ancient Romans, which is taught almost entirely on-site and in museums,” says Lusnia. “I was fortunate to have been a graduate student on the program in 1989 and then program assistant in 1994. I find this one of the most rewarding teaching experiences because our students are eager and well prepared. This is the best outreach program offered by the American Academy because what our students learn here will enhance their research and enliven their classroom teaching for many years to come.”
Margaret M. Andrews (2012 Fellow), who holds the Paul Mellon/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize and the Helen M. Woodruff-Archaeological Institute of America Fellowship, is acting as program assistant and is a member of the Graduate Group in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World at the University of Pennsylvania. “As a graduate student, any teaching experience is really vital, but it’s one thing to teach Rome’s monuments in the classroom with images and an entirely different thing to teach them in the city itself,” she adds. “There’s no better way to bring the fabric of the ancient city to life than by standing in front of the actual buildings and their remains—all while observing the modern city go by around you. The opportunity to help with the program is an invaluable and completely unique experience that AAR offers to one of its Fellows each year, and I feel privileged to be able to grow as an educator with such an interested group of participants this summer.”
In June and July 2012, AAR is hosting, in addition to its Classical Summer School, also two other of its regular summer programs: the Academy’s Summer Program in Archaeology (founded 1991), and the Howard Comfort, FAAR’29, Summer School in Roman Pottery (founded 2006). In addition, a NEH Summer Seminar is meeting at the Academy in this period, a regular feature of the AAR’s summer offerings since 1977.