The Academy is pleased to welcome Chris van den Berg, the Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank ’55 Professor of Classical Studies at Amherst College and 2020 Fellow in Ancient Studies, as the Interim Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor.
As Humanities Professor, van den Berg will be supporting and advising the new class of Rome Prize Fellows, assisting in the development of public programs, and more broadly, playing a vital role in fostering dialogue between the Academy, the Fellows and the broader community.
He is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus: The Invention of Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and The World of Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus: Aesthetics and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2014), as well as dozens of articles and book reviews.
Van den Berg’s scholarship lies at the intersections of literature, rhetoric, and material culture, studying how Greco-Roman authors used their natural and built material environment to understand the affective and persuasive appeal of artistic language. In addition, van den Berg studies modern rhetoric with a particular focus on the histories of civic debates and political conflict.
“The Mellon Professor has a storied role at the American Academy in Rome. Chris van den Berg brings his prodigious intellectual and human skills to this position and is sure to write a new chapter in the history of the Academy," said AAR President Peter N. Miller.
“Few people carry that many vantage points on the Academy— as a Fellow, Returning Fellow post-COVID, and now Humanities Professor— and fewer still would let it shape them the way it has shaped him,” said AAR Director Aliza Wong. “What I see in him is a kind of patience earned by loss, an understanding of how fragile this experience can be, and how much it matters to protect it. He is a formidable scholar and a generous teacher, and he holds both with a lightness that never diminishes their seriousness.”
In addition to being a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where he worked on a project called “Critical Matter: Performance, Identity, and Object in Greco-Roman Criticism,” he has held fellowships at the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Basel Fellowship in Latin Literature.
“The success of the Fellows, and the success of each of us, depends on thoughtfully and meticulously tending to this community. Not just as an idea, but in a hundred little ways that have real effects on the creative life of the mind,” van den Berg said. “I look forward to being one part of the answer to the questions and support that help Fellows thrive.”
“It is an absolute delight to be back here, and one crucial part of that joy is the chance to view things from the other side of the staff/fellow perspective,” said van den Berg. “Seeing it firsthand has reconfirmed for me what a remarkable place this is for sustaining the work of the fellows and demonstrating the broader place of the AAR at the forefront of scholarship and artistic creativity.”
Van den Berg is currently working on two book projects: Critical Matter, about the relationship between physical objects such as bodies, statues, paintings and architecture, and literary criticism broadly; and Fightin’ Words: Why We Can’t Resist Rhetoric (and Should Stop Trying), which speaks broadly to activists, politicians, academics, and other readers, asking them to reconsider the civic value of rhetoric and persuasion.
Van den Berg is succeeding former Humanities Professor Caroline Goodson (2003 Fellow), who completed her two-year term this summer and returned to Cambridge University, where she is a Professor of Early Medieval History. Please join us in welcoming him to the Academy.