This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

A conversation with the world-renown archaeologist Ian Hodder, Dunlevie Family Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, and the Italian archeologist and FAI president Andrea Carandini, about the present and future of archaeology in the US and Europe. The two will consider archaeology in theory and practice, heritage and politics, and the place of the past in a world of change.

The event will be held in English.

The 2016–17 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

Please join us for a discussion between the artist Sarah Oppenheimer (2011 Fellow) and the historian and Baroque art specialist Vernon Hyde Minor (2000 Fellow, 2012 Resident), at the MIT List Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In a talk moderated by AAR President Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow), Oppenheimer and Minor will discuss the play of form in light, from Baroque architecture to contemporary art.

Sarah Oppenheimer’s work blurs the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, exploring how space is animated and experienced in order to provide a deeper understanding of architecture as a constructed social environment. Her investigations are particularly relevant within museums, where architecture is used to frame and guide how visitors see and interact both with space and, importantly, the people and objects inhabiting that space. Her work never appears as transient installations but as instead as permanent challenges to our perception of our environment. Oppenheimer received a BA from Brown University in 1995 and an MFA in painting from Yale University in 1999. Upcoming solo projects include exhibitions at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and MASS MoCA. Recent projects include 33-D, at Kunsthaus Baselland; W-12302, an architecturally embedded permanent commission at the Baltimore Museum of Art; and D-33, at P.P.O.W., in New York. In addition to the Rome Prize, she is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2009), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2007), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art (2007), and a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship (2003). Ms. Oppenheimer joined the Yale faculty in 2003 and was appointed critic in painting/printmaking in 2005.

Vernon Hyde Minor is a specialist in 17th- and 18th-century Italian art. He received his BA ('68) from Kent State University in English Literature and his MA ('72) and PhD ('76) in Art History from University of Kansas. Dr. Hyde Minor is currently a Research Professor/Research Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana -- Champaign. In 2007 he was named Professor Emeritus, Department of Art and Art History/Department of Comparative Literature and Humanities, University of Colorado at Boulder, where he taught for 30-years. His publications include four books: The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Baroque & Rococo: Art & Culture (London: Calmann & King 1999); Passive Tranquility: The Sculpture of Filippo della Valle (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997); and Art History's History (Prentice Hall, 1994 and 2000). Dr. Hyde Minor is an AAR Fellow and was a Resident in 2012. He has also served as the editor of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome and served as the Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar in 2008 at AAR.

This event is part of the New Work in the Arts & Humanities: Bodies of Knowledge series.

Italy has gone through a variety of phases over the past seventy years in trying to come to terms with its Fascist past. Yet this history still remains a painful one. All too often myth and wishful thinking take the place of dispassionate analysis and the facing of uncomfortable truths. In trying to reconstruct this history, deep archival research is essential. Two of the scholars who have published influential archivally based recent work that casts new light on the Fascist period engage in a conversation about how their findings from the archives have brought dominant narratives about this history into question. They discuss what they have found to be the most valuable sources in both the civil and ecclesiastical archives for shedding new light on this history, and they discuss the question of whether all relevant documents have been made available to scholars.

David Kertzer is professor of social science, anthropology, and Italian studies at Brown University (2000 Resident), and Mauro Canali is professor of contemporary history at the University of Camerino.

The event will be held in English and Italian with simultaneous translation available.

With the support of the United States of America Embassy to Italy.

Each year the Rome Prize is awarded to emerging artists and scholars who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities. Please join us as we announce the 2015–16 Rome Prize Winners at the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony.

The evening will feature a conversation between Carrie Mae Weems (2006 Fellow) and Mark Robbins (1997 Fellow).

This event is free, but reservations are required.