Having served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge of the School of Classical Studies for the past two years, Kimberly Bowes (2006 Fellow) now becomes the twenty-second Director of the American Academy in Rome. She succeeds Christopher S. Celenza (1994 Fellow), whose dynamic leadership left the Academy in a strong position to fulfill its mission of supporting innovative artists, writers, and scholars who live and work in a dynamic international community.
As President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow) stated when announcing the appointment last February, “Kim brings a remarkable mix of intellectual rigor and enthusiasm to the Director’s position. I’m very much looking forward to working with her in this new capacity.”
In the past two years, Bowes has earned the admiration of her colleagues as an insightful and original thinker—capable of promoting cooperative initiatives to broaden the impact of the Academy’s efforts. By orchestrating the New Work in the Humanities series around the theme “New Work on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” she has brought important new voices to the Academy, including archaeologists from the Sovrintendenza Capitolina, a Getty Connecting Art History seminar, and major scholars like Peter Brown and Christopher Wickham.
Before receiving her PhD from Princeton University in 2002, Bowes earned a BA from Williams College (1992) and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art (1993), and served as a visiting fellow at Harvard University (2001). She has been excavating in Sicily and Tuscany for many years and currently codirects the Roman Peasant Project in southern Tuscany. An associate professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Bowes previously held positions at Fordham and Cornell universities. Her books include Private Worship, Public Values and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (2008) and Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire (2010).
Regarding her appointment as Director, Bowes stated, “The American Academy in Rome is without peer as a laboratory for cutting-edge work in the arts and humanities. Now more than ever, its alchemical mixture of scholars and artists provides a blueprint for trailblazing intellectual activity. I am hugely honored to be a part of it, and look forward to making its community and activities ever more energetic, diverse and pioneering.”
The Academy community is very honored to have Bowes as Director, and looks forward to working under her very capable and inspiring direction.