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

In the first half of the twentieth century, excavations by G. Boni and F. Brown at the site of the Regia in Rome, between the Forum and the Palatine, revealed an archaeological sequence of extraordinary complexity and importance. Continuously built and rebuilt in lavish monumental style from the Archaic period to the Imperial one, this small building clearly had a great significance in the sacred and political topography of Rome. Since recent discoveries at Gabii have offered a unique opportunity to contextualize and better understand the remains in Rome, a new phase in the study of Regias has clearly begun. Thanks to a collaboration between the American Academy in Rome, the Università della Calabria, and the University of Michigan, a full reconsideration of the site, based on the creation of a digital model and a stratigraphic archive, has been under way since 2014. The Regias Revisited conference will offer an opportunity to present the state of the work in Rome and at Gabii and will stimulate a broad debate on the crucial evidence these sites have produced.

Speakers include Paolo Brocato, Elizabetta Carnabuci, Marco Fabbri, Darby Scott, Nicola Terrenato, and Mauro Torelli. Presentations will be given in Italian and English.

The conference organizers are Nicola Terrenato and Paolo Brocato.

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

To mark the beginning of his residency at the American Academy in Rome, the artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien presents his recent works from Ten Thousand Waves (2010), a response to the Morecambe Bay tragedy in 2004, and PLAYTIME: KAPITAL in 2014, to his contributions to this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale and his current project on the life and work of the Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. The talk will be followed by a conversation with the curator and writer Mark Nash.

Julien has been working on a range of critically acclaimed projects whose collective objective is to break down the barriers that exist between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theater, painting, and sculpture, and uniting these to construct powerful visual narratives. Concerned with the experiential and the complex layering of ideas, Julien reveals his artistic and research processes to the audience; the ways in which these works very much lead on from one another and form a certain conceptual trajectory.

Julien’s upcoming work on the seminal figure Lina Bo Bardi builds on and extrapolates from his concerns about individuals deeply affected by the crisis and the global flow of capital. A three-part project, Stones Against Diamonds, the first of which premiered during this year’s Venice Biennale and Art Basel as unique site-specific installations, Julien gives a platform to the breadth of Bo Bardi’s creative impulse and egalitarian beauty of her work.

Julien is the Mary Miss Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall 2015. The event will be held in English.

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

David Stone, a leading authority on Guercino and Caravaggio, discusses problems of function, technique, mode, narrative and spirituality in the preparatory drawings of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino (1591–1666). How does Guercino’s open-ended design process compare with the rigid pricing system he used for selling his painted works? In conversation with Patrizia Cavazzini, an expert on the economics of baroque art, Stone will try to assess Guercino’s artistic personality, comparing his values and marketing strategies to those of contemporaries such as Guido Reni.

Stone is the James S. Ackerman Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in spring 2016 and professor of art history at the University of Delaware.

The lecture will be held in English.

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.