Dear Friends of the Academy,
As we begin this January—a month named after Janus, the Roman god who looks to both the past and the future, and on whose sacred mountaintop the Academy sits, and thus an apt time for reflection—it feels appropriate to look back on the accomplishments of the past year and ahead to the promise of the coming one.
In 2023–24 the American Academy in Rome welcomed 36 Rome Prize winners, 3 Italian Fellows, 15 Residents, 27 Affiliated Fellows, and 97 Visiting Artists and Scholars. We served over 38,000 meals and 34,000 coffees. We welcomed more than 9000 different individuals into our Library and Archives and nearly 15,000 people to our events, including over 8000 at our concerts, exhibitions, and Open Studios.
The numbers confirm what we already know: people are the heart of our work. For 131 years the Academy has been driving forward the creative culture of the United States one conversation at a time. The work of our alumni is widely recognized outside of our walls, and this year’s examples include: President Biden honored photographer Carrie Mae Weems (Fellow 2006) and Alex Katz (Resident 1984) with National Medals of Arts, and 2023 Carla Fendi Rome Prize Fellow Tony Cokes was named a MacArthur Fellow. Cécile Fromont (2018 Fellow) was awarded a Dan David Prize and Sanchita Balachandran (2023 Resident) was appointed Director of the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute. Amidst many other book publications and exhibition openings, I’d just like to signal that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition, “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now” not only contains work by Jennifer Newsom (Fellow 2023) and Tom Carruthers (Fellow 2023) but was curated by Akili Tommasino (2023 Cynthia Hazen Polsky/Metropolitan Museum of Art Visiting Curator).
Our Fellows, Residents, and Visitors are, without question, our greatest strength. The section of our website containing notices of their accomplishments is always full to bursting. I wish we could give even more space to their achievements and find more ways to express our appreciation. I would love, for instance, to interview every living alum about their experience at the Academy and its post-Rome meaningfulness for them. This would be a huge project—there are, we think, about 1,263 living fellows—but a crucial one to demonstrate how the Academy has helped individual people. But already one thing we are doing to express our sense of an ongoing relationship between the Academy and its fellows is to create a new alumni residency in Venice that launches in summer 2025. It’s designed to offer a version of time and space to work and think, in a different but related place.
Why Venice? Aside from the fact that it is another Italian city that is a world center for both scholarship and art, it’s also the place that is most tuned in to the environmental future, whether we’re talking about rising sea levels or mass tourism. Far from being a place left behind by time, it’s more accurately an observatory on our common future. For that reason, we’ve also created a new collaboration with the institute at the University of Venice devoted to environmental humanities which will each year bring to Venice fellows working in this area. This is an opportunity for us to strengthen our ties with Italian academia and to create new opportunities for fundraising in another large American tourist community.
The environmental arts and humanities have been a commitment of ours ever since Mercedes Bass endowed the Academy’s garden and Alice Waters re-imagined our food production and service. At the end of 2023 we published a mission statement for our gardens, explaining their institutional importance. The work allows us, as we did in Venice, to link up to other cultural institutions and political ones committed to the same goals, like the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. This was always part of Alice’s vision, but it’s deeply linked to new discoveries in academia, too, like the role of kitchens as places of knowledge production in early modern Europe, very much like laboratories at the time, though we’ve up until now lost that connection. This gives the Academy a platform and an opportunity to engage with one of the world’s most important issues, and that engagement is going to be critical if the Academy seeks to maintain, let alone expand its importance in the twenty-first century.
To this end, we have added Mark Bittman and Kathleen Finlay to Alice Waters in the RSFP leadership team. We are also launching a sequence of conferences devoted to climate issues in Rome, in 2025 focusing on ancient Rome and in 2026 on medieval Rome. Both of these speak directly to the interests of the current Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Caroline Goodson. And, perhaps most significantly of all, in 2024 we launched a new, experimental Rome Prize that is structured as a collaboration between an artist of any sort and a scholar from any field working on the topic of the environmental, from any angle.
In 2024 we inaugurated a lecture on the anniversary of the night in 1611 when Galileo first demonstrated his telescope in Rome from the building whose ruins lie buried beneath the current Casa Rustica, at the back of Bass Garden. I often describe Galileo, only half-jokingly, as our first fellow. A mathematician, a brilliant writer, a student of contemporary poetry (he wrote a book comparing Ariosto and Tasso) and deeply knowledgeable about music (if anyone can lay claim to inventing the modern genre of opera, it is his father, Vincenzo), his work as a scientist is in dialogue with the arts and humanities of his time. Our Galileo Night (and, eventually, Week) events in April emphasize the implicit connections across the spectrum of inquiry. Last year David Spergel spoke about cosmology as history; this year, Naomi E. Leonard will talk about how watching schools of fish and flocks of birds make decisions can help us train robots and understand humans better. In 2026, Daphna Shohamy will explore the brain as a conservation machine.
Also in 2026, with support from the Arete Foundation, we will launch in the spirit of Galileo a project I call “the Roman Telescope.” For telescopes only seemingly make things bigger. What they really do is allow us to stand in the present and look deep into the past (seeing light which began its journey a long time ago) as well as into the future (seeing things coming toward us from far away). This is a way of conceiving of intellectual projects, as well: looking from the present into the past and the present into the future. The work of “the Roman Telescope” will bring together teams of artists, humanists, and scientists to study, in Rome, important contemporary questions, using the long lens that is Rome to help focus the question. The Academy, of the United States but not in it, in Italy but not of it, could be a place to host the kind of discussions that are hard to manage in either the one or the other. I believe that the world needs places like the American Academy in Rome to have those conversations. The first of these will be devoted to “material intelligence”—the way in which humans use matter and our own embodiedness as a way of knowing—in the light, especially, of our moment’s hurtling rush towards “artificial general intelligence.” This is another way of talking about the future of archaeology.
The Academy has always invested heavily in programming because, as important and central as the fellowship experience is, an intense institutional intellectual life is the best way to promote an intense individual intellectual life. 2024 saw the usual thick schedule of conferences—on traditions of inter-disciplinarity (March 2024), the history of the Roman Senate (October 2024), on late antique cities in the Jerome Lectures (December 2024)—and this continues into 2025, with conferences on fascism in 20th and 21st century Europe (January 2025), ancient Roman numismatics (April 2025) and the ancient Roman economy (June 2025). We are also planning to continue the reinvestment in our scholarly resources begun by the expansion of the library into the Villa Chiaraviglio basement by creating a new “Archaeology Center” in 5b, concentrating our resources so as to better serve the American archaeological community in Italy. I hope to have more details on this in my next January letter.
Finally, all of these activities, from fellows talking with one another at lunch to visitors talking with one another at conferences, are for us not luxuries, but the lifeblood of an institution dedicated to discovery—whether we call it research or artistic creativity. At the heart of our Roman experience is asking questions, and then better questions. Inspired by my first encounter with this magnificent ecosystem, I approached the MacArthur Foundation, along with co-PI, Stanford University physicist Hideo Mabuchi, for help with making a movie about the role of questions in creativity. Questions as Tools in Art, Science, and the Humanities, an interview-based documentary with 12 MacArthur Fellows, 8 of whom were Rome Prize winners or Residents (there have been 54 Fellows or Residents who have won MacArthurs). We’ve screened it already in front of live audiences in Palo Alto and New York and built a webpage to house both the short and long versions of the project. A final public screening will take place in Rome at the end of January. In a way, undertaking this project in my first year as president was about sending a message: that creativity is at the heart of what we do; that question-asking, not answer-giving, is where we make the future; and that what we do in the arts and humanities is part of an ongoing conversation with the work of our scientist colleagues.
Everything about the Academy, from its happy choice of a site, to that honorary first fellow of ours with his telescope, is about bridging past and future. As we step forward into this new year, may we continue to draw inspiration from this, our local genius. I cannot thank every trustee, fellow, resident, staff member, friend and supporter enough for their contributions to the Academy this past year. Perhaps the greatest strength of the Academy in this current moment, is its staff. I would not want to end this letter without saluting the work of the Director, Aliza S. Wong and her management team: Sara Argentieri, Marco Barone, Gianpaolo Battaglia, Anne Coulson, Fausto Ferraresi, Caroline Goodson, Sebastian Hierl, Ilaria Puri Purini, and Alessandra Vinciguerra.
Through a commitment to its vision, the Academy will continue to bring new work, new thought, and new relationships into the world. It is a venerable old institution that is full of potential. I’m enthusiastic about what we can accomplish together in 2025 and beyond.
Peter N. Miller
President and CEO
