Nastasya Kosygina

Anthony M. Clark | Jesse Howard Jr. Rome Prize
September 1, 2025–June 26, 2026
Profession
PhD Candidate, Program in Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
Project title
Old Rome’s Floods and New Rome’s Earthquakes
Project description

From water circulation as a public health issue to the labor involved in aqueduct and drain maintenance, the lives of the Rome’s enslaved, impoverished, and unhoused inhabitants are embedded in the city’s monumental infrastructural archaeology. As the final chapter of my dissertation, this project examines the infrastructural and civic changes in Rome’s urban fabric during the city’s Byzantine occupation in the mid-sixth century CE through the prism of clashing water cultures, environmental catastrophes, and urban replanning. It represents the final stage of a dissertation project which investigates how Rome’s body politic, redolent with the everyday petty power plays, anxieties, and worldviews of the city’s inhabitants, depended upon the services of intergenerationally enslaved urban maintenance workers (servi publici) alongside charioteers, slumdwellers, and migrant laborers toiling within its civic infrastructures.