2008-09 Rome Prize Winners

This year’s winners of the Rome Prize, for Architecture, include MATTHEW HURAL (Arnold W. Brunner Rome Prize) and URSULA EMERY McCLURE & MICHAEL A. McCLURE (Gorham P. Stevens Rome Prize)...

Arnold W. Brunner Rome Prize
MATTHEW HURAL
Lecturer, Department of Architecture, University of Virginia
Designer, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects
Between Inside and Out. Aurelian Gates

Using the circumlocution of the walk, the axial view of the perspective, the interconnected meanings of the fragment, and the techniques of hybrid drawing and the collage, this project seeks to define a construction that builds upon the cleared spaces and extant constructions at the former locations of the Aurelian gates. By understanding the wall as a circumambulatory founding of a city through drawing, and the gates as the pivot points for a series of topographical transects, I will investigate the contingent place wherein both external and internal begin. At the end of my stay, interventions within the city, viewing apparatuses that celebrate the conditional awareness of both nomad and urban dweller, will be designed and implemented as an exhibit.

Gorham P. Stevens Rome Prize
URSULA EMERY McCLURE & MICHAEL A. McCLURE
Principals, emerymcclure architecture
Terra Viscus: Hybrid Tectonic Precedent.
For 8 years we have been research practicing in Southern Louisiana, an environment we define as the terra viscus. The terra viscus is a super-saturated condition, never completely solid or liquid. It consists of geological, economical, cultural, and ecological conditions that interweave and overlap. This physical description of our present site also serves as our analytical methodology. The terra viscus condition allows us to vivify, to analyze, and to create relevant building strategies in the phenomenal identity that is Southern Louisiana. Ancient Rome’s ability to focus on communicative tectonics over pragmatic safety offers unique counter-lessons to the Gulf Coast’s current fixation of solely pragmatic solutions.We propose to apply the analytical methodology of terra viscus to Rome focusing on its hydro-tectonic development. The end product will be a pamphlet of graphic, written, and design proposal studies: a continuation and (post) precedent study for our existing research, terra viscus.

http://www.aarome.org/

—-

Other winners include…

DESIGN

Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize
      ROBERT   HAMMOND
      Co-Founder & President, Friends of the Highline
      Designing   the TiberI propose to address the rehabilitation of the Tiber riverfront by instigating a dynamic urban design process. In many ways this will be a continuation of and companion piece to my work on the High Line in New York City over the past decade. I propose to foster the same multi-disciplinary involvement by the Roman community as I did in New York. The goal of this project is not to produce a final plan for the riverfront, but to achieve a heightened sense of creative activity, awareness and enthusiasm and provide realistic options for the transformation of forgotten spaces through design.
   
Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize
CATHY LANG HO
      Independent Writer   and Editor
      Broadband Architecture: A study of how new media outlets are   challenging the authority of print publicationsDesign websites are proliferating, challenging the authority of print publications and diversifying the coverage of the design fields.  Like the independent little magazines of the 1960s and 1970s that so enlivened architectural discourse, many of today’s web ‘zines and blogs offer immediate and impassioned perspectives that are engaging new categories of readers.  But while the Internet is expanding the conversation about architecture and design, the questions remains, is it improving it?  I propose to study how new media architecture “channels” are shaping the way the design fields are communicated and understood.
   
    HISTORIC PRESERVATION AND CONSERVATION

    National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize
ANDREW J. KRANIS
      Decor   Project Manager, Whole Foods Market
      Green Piazza: Community Ecology in   the CityWhat if the piazze and civic spaces of Rome– the “white space” of Nolli’s Pianta Grande – were also the very source of the community’s fresh water, the sites where its waste was turned to nourishment for plants and trees, and the silent generator of its electrical power? Sharing resources for water, energy, and even food production at the local level was the basis upon which pre-imperial Rome was formed; it may also be the most intelligent means of developing and preserving the city without placing undue strain on its centuries-old infrastructure. I will re-imagine the Roman piazza and water fountain as the poetic and functional heart of an “off-the-grid” neighborhood, using green design to express a sense of community, both local and global. Rome’s open spaces have always celebrated the complex, unpredictable choreography of urban life – they may attain still deeper meaning as the loci of sustainable, decentralized community ecosystems.
   
Booth Family Rome Prize
ROSA LOWINGER
      Conservator of Sculpture and   Architecture, Los Angeles, CA
      Art Vandalism: A Comprehensive Study of its   Causes and Effects, With an Emphasis on Conservation of Contemporary Public   ArtMy proposal for the Rome Prize is to examine the causes and effects of art vandalism from a number of different perspectives—historical, sociological, political, and technical— in order to create a theoretical model that would inform the conservation of contemporary public art.
   
    LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
   
Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize
CHRIS COUNTS
      Senior Associate,  Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., Landscape Architects
      Painting   and Drawing as a Means to Study the Spatial Registration, Appropriated Use, and   Movement of Masterpieces of the Italian Urban LandscapeI propose to study Italian urban landscape masterpieces through drawing and painting. These studies will explore basic principles of composition, scale, and proportion with a particular emphasis on the spatiality of landscape, movement, and experience.  As ordinary as this might seem to some, it remains the essence of what landscape architects do, whether in the year 2010 or 1650. Despite my own accomplishments with digital representation, I remain fundamentally interested in timeless questions, such as: What are the effects of movement and use on landscape spatiality and how does the form and material of interstitial space influence experience and social behavior?  My work would focus on traditional en plein aire drawings that would be expanded within studio and would include works on paper and canvas created through various media.
   
Garden Club of America Rome Prize
      HOPE H. HASBROUCK
      Assistant   Professor, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at   Austin

      Interpreting Cultural Territories Through Prospect and   PassageThis study seeks to inventory the devices of interpretation for the reading of cultural sites and territories. In making this inventory I intend to reveal the form making and management criteria that determine the assembly of prospect and passage in archeological sites and their cultural landscapes, as that assembly relates to the fostering of historical imagination and the experience of place. My interpretative inventory will focus on about four large cultural-archeological sites within the urban, middle, and rural landscapes surrounding Rome. It is Rome’s enumerable historic strata in which multiple periods of occupation are revealed and interpreted through scholarship that make Rome ideal for this investigation. It is through the lens of design practice that the inventory—and all the prospects and passages in the sites—at a range of scales from site-based material to urban design and regional planning, will target the devices of design that affect the individual or private spatial experience.
   
    LITERATURE

    John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize, a gift of Dorothy and Lewis B.  Cullman
      BRAD  KESSLER
Writer
      Editing The Goat Diaries and   starting a new novelOne of the themes in this new book is the ancient tradition of the transhumance—walking animals to high pasture in the summer and back to low lands in winter. As it happens, transhumance—transumanza—is still widely practiced in the Apennines and the Italian Alps. Being in Rome would offer me the wonderful possibility of reseaching Italy’s transhumance and its attendant “shepherd’s roads.” My Goat Diaries draws inspiration from the pastoral poem, which also happens to have its birth in Italy: first with Theocrititus’ Sicilian shepherds and later with Virgil’s Eclogues. All these confluences greatly excite me. This year in Rome will give me time to complete The Goat Diaries and possibly start work on a series of novellas.
   
Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, a gift of the Drue Heinz Trust/American Academy of   Arts and Letters
      DANA SPIOTTA
Writer
      Unnamed NovelI don’t work at a university, so i don’t interact much with people from other disciplines. This year at the Academy in Rome will be an exciting opportunity to broaden my interests and writerly obsessions. I am a research-intensive fiction writer; the resources of the Academy will not be lost on me. I will be a full participant in the life of the Academy. Leaving the United States for a time will be great for my writing at this point in my life. I am well into my third novel. I know how to work. i need to keep pushing hard against the familiar and the easy. Every writer needs what James Joyce described as “silence, exile, and cunning”. As a writer with (so far) distinctly American subjects, exile will serve me well, allowing me some distance at which to contemplate the culture that has preoccupied my work. My writing will also benefit from the personal distance the Academy would offer. I will be able to concentrate more deeply on my novel. This year in Rome will give me both community and exile—a unique and wonderful situation for me.
   
    MUSICAL COMPOSITION
   
Luciano Berio Rome Prize
      KEERIL MAKAN        
Assistant Professor of   Music, Music and Theater Arts Section, Massachusetts Institute of   Technology
      Three new works: Hover for electric guitar and   orchestra; a trio for flute, viola, and harp; and Tracker, a chamber   operaThe work that I propose to create while at the American Academy in Rome will be a large-scale chamber opera. This work questions the assumption that if systems of nature can be technologically replicated the result will be positive universal progress, independent of the cultural and political climate in which the technology was conceived. The unexpected impact (both positive and negative) of technology’s actual relationship to contemporary society is the focus of this work.

    Elliott Carter Rome Prize
      KURT ROHDE
      Assistant Professor,  Composition/Theory, Department of Music, University of California,  Davis
Co-director, The Empyrean Ensemble
      Artistic Director, The Left Coast   Chamber Ensemble
      Composition of Two New Works: A Violin Concertino for   violinist Axel Strauss, and a puppet opera entitled “A Shadow   Opera”
    During my time at the American Academy in Rome, I plan to compose two new works:
    1. A Violin Concertino for violinist Axel Strauss.
2. A puppet opera entitled A Shadow Opera for Adorno Ensemble, with librettist Robert Glick, choreographer Alison Salzinger, bass clarinetist Laura Carmichael, and percussionist Chris Froh.
   
    VISUAL ARTS
   
John Armstrong Chaloner/Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome   Prize
HISHAM M. BIZRI
      Filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film,  Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of   Minnesota
      Screenplay: The Last Day of Summer
    Cairo Psalm is the story of one man’s obsessive pursuit of his alienated wife and his equally passionate search for a son he once, but only briefly, knew. On another level, Cairo Psalm dramatizes, in a single day, the contemporary Cairene experience of exile within Cairo itself. The drama unfolds when Yusuf, a young Muslim actor, leaves his lodgings after a confrontation with his two roommates. Yusuf dreams of ancient Egypt as his ships sinks leaving him alone. Yacoub, the main protagonist, a former Roman Jew, now a Copt who has seen his riches decline, is like Yusuf, forced to leave his house, having learned that his wife Hélène, a famous opera singer, plans to bring another man into their bed later that day.
   
Yacoub and Yusuf undergo many trails and tribulations on that day before they return home together to their own actively re-interpreted reality, most triumphant in a climatic scene in which the wife accepts and affirms who she is as a woman. The lost and captive city is allegorically redeemed through the power of her love.

    Harold M. English Rome Prize
      DAVID HUMPHREY
Artist and Instructor,  School of Art, Yale University
      Blind HandshakeI am interested in the way modes of depiction bear the idiosyncratic marks of historic circumstance and individual sensibility while performing their picture labors. My enthusiasms range from Roman and early Christian mosaics to Renaissance painting and Italian art of the nineteen twenties and thirties. My paintings and sculpture usually respond to what I call the rhetorical solicitations of a source, whereby my work acts out a skewed response to what I imagine the work “wants”. I plan to make new artworks developed from observational drawings of selected historic artworks in Rome. I will also be finishing a book I’m doing with Periscope Publishing called

Blind Handshake

, which is an attempt to flush out, from both sides of the artist/critic relation, a variety of rhetorical strategies while celebrating those idiosyncratic personal and historic traces.
   
Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize
      MARIE LORENZ
      Artist, Brooklyn,  NY
      Tiber River NavigationI want to make a series of artworks and interventions that focus on the Tiber River in Rome. Throughout the year, I will make drawings and woodblock carvings that explore the history of the river and its relationship to the city. More specifically; how it has transformed the city as a conduit of information, how it endured as a site of ritual and myth, and how it exists now as an ‘edge zone’. I will conclude the project by making a boat and traveling from Rome to the sea.
   
Abigail Cohen Rome Prize
MATTHEW MONTEITH
      Artist/Photographer,  Brooklyn, NY
      Living City, Living ArtMy interest in the American Academy of Rome derives from the premise that all artists benefit from an awareness of history.  Making work at the American Academy would give me a unique opportunity to study art across the disciplines in a manner that would immediately impact my work.  My year at the American Academy would be spent making photographs informed by the wealth of art surrounding me in Rome using the backdrop of the American Academy to investigate how institutions have influenced art making over time and how perceptions of art and history shift.  I intend to make images of scholars, artists, conservators, institutions and street scenes of daily Roman life alongside tourists coming in direct contact with many of the most influential works of art ever created.
   
    HUMANITIES
    ANCIENT STUDIES

Emeline Hill Richardson/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome   Prize
  (year one of a two-year fellowship)
  SCOTT CRAVER
  McIntire   Department of Art, University of Virginia
  Patterns of Complexity: An   Index and Analysis of Urban Property Investment at PompeiiUsing evidence from the physical remains of the city as well as from excavation archives, scholarly publications, and ancient legal texts, the project, which comprises my doctoral dissertation, is the first to index, quantify, and analyze urban property investment at Pompeii on a city-wide scale.  It is simultaneously investigating the related phenomenon of complexity, a term here used to characterize the increasing regularization and interrelatedness in the built environment of Pompeii.  The central question under investigation is: Was urban property investment at Pompeii a side-lined, opportunistic endeavor bound-up with subordinate social relationships, or was it a primary, strategic economic concern, and if so, to whom?

    Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
SUSAN A.  CURRY
      Department of Classical Studies, Indiana University
      Human   Identities and Animal Others in the Second Century C.E.Latin and Greek texts, relief sculptures, and mosaics from the 2nd c. CE are rich in images of animals that are both reflections of actual human encounters with non-human animals and projections of what humans thought about animals. My dissertation explores the variety of ways in which human animals in the 2nd c. CE conceptualized non-human animals. When one begins to explore this discourse about animals, questions concerning what it means to be human inevitably emerge. The animal is often the “other” against which human identity is posited. When one assigns another human being to the category of “animal,” s/he often places that individual outside the scope of ethical consideration. Ultimately, I hope this dissertation will show that the field of Classical Studies has much to contribute to the history of human/animal relationships and to on-going investigations into how and why we construct boundaries between humans and other animals.
   
Frances Barker Tracy/Samuel H. Kress Foundation/ Helen M. Woodruff Fellowship   of the Archaeological Institute of America Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
      (year two   of a two-year fellowship)
      JOHN N. N. HOPKINS
Department of Art and Art   History, The University of Texas at Austin
      The Topographical   Transformation of Archaic Rome: A New Interpretation of Architecture and   Geography in the Early CityBetween the mid-seventh and early-fifth centuries B.C. Romans created the vast central plain that would become the Forum Romanum; they founded the first roads, drainage systems and most enduring temples in their city’s history; they altered Rome’s very geography and began employing enduring tectonics, effectively setting the foundations and the standard for the city’s subsequent building programs.  My project will be to complete my dissertation, in which I assemble archeological and literary evidence for this topographical transformation and consider why at this time Romans wanted and were able to so transform their city.
   
Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
      PATRICIA LARASH
      Assistant   Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Boston University
      Martial’s   Readers, Rome’s AudiencesMy monograph, Martial’s Readers, Rome’s Audiences, examines Martial’s use of figures for audiences in the epigrams. Martial’s abstract concept of the general reader is shaped by concrete topographical and social functions of the city of Rome.  While at the Academy, I plan to finish existing chapters on public entertainment, epigrams “in the wild” (e.g., graffiti), Saturnalia, and women readers, especially with a view to topographical context.  I also plan to complete a chapter on Martial’s use of epitaphs as a model for his reading and the ways in which they suggest strategies to Martial for the challenges facing an author who wants to address an anonymous general public.  To do this, I would like to be able to walk among extant monuments, both in situ and in museums, and emulate the experience of the average, anonymous Roman passer-by confronted by tombstones competing for his or her attention.
   
Arthur Ross Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
MATTHEW NOTARIAN
      Department of   Classics, University at Buffalo
      Civic Transformation in Early Imperial   Latium: An Archaeological and Social History of Praeneste, Tibur and   TusculumThis project is a comprehensive account of the development of three urban communities in Latium Vetus, Praeneste (modern Palestrina), Tibur (Tivoli) and Tusculum, between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd century AD. Using a combination of archaeological, historical and epigraphical evidence, I will investigate the continuity and adaptation of communities at the fringe of the Roman suburbium. Examinations of these outer towns have been neglected in consideration of the social and economic system of Rome’s hinterland. This study is innovative because it approaches them collectively as functional communities, considering their social, economic and political qualities, as well as their association with the city of Rome and its suburbium. By examining the relationship between material culture in the towns and their territories and the social history of these communities, this study will demonstrate how suburban civic life survived and adapted to the political and economic system of the imperial era.
   
National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome   Prize
HÉRICA VALLADARES
      Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, Johns   Hopkins University
      On Tenderness: The Semantics of Love in Roman   Painting and PoetryMy book analyzes representations of tender love in Roman wall painting and Latin poetry between the late first century B.C.E. (ca. 30s B.C.E.) and the mid-first century C.E. (ca. 60s C.E.).  More specifically, it investigates depictions of lovers that evoke affection and desire, yet stop short of representing the sexual act.  A close study of Latin elegiac poetry of the early Augustan age is central to my analysis of these painted love scenes.  Through close consideration of the dialogue between media, I delineate a symbolic vocabulary, or semantics of love, through which Romans imagined, visualized and communicated amorous feeling.  In Roman amatory representations, tenderness is both a subject and a mode that inflects images and texts, turning sex into romance.  By situating the development of a Roman semantics of love in a broader historical context, I offer new insights into individual works of art and literature and on a much-overlooked facet of early imperial culture.
   
    MEDIEVAL STUDIES

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
  CARRIE BENEŠ
  Assistant Professor of Medieval and Renaissance History, New College of   Florida
  SPQR Transformed: Post-Classical Fortunes of a Classical   AcronymCompletion of a book manuscript exploring the diverse uses and interpretations of the SPQR acronym in the politics, ideology, and iconography of medieval and early modern Italy (c. 600-1600). In the classical period, SPQR was a conventional abbreviation for the formulaic senatus populusque Romanus, referring to the Roman state; by contrast, its contemporary incarnation as Rome’s municipal coat of arms—gold lettering on scarlet—is chiefly a visual, civic symbol. This shift of both form and meaning took place in the Middle Ages, during which the acronym in various forms was used in turn to support imperial, populist, oligarchic, and papal sovereignties over the city. My project on the post-classical afterlife of one of the world’s most famous acronyms will reveal not only the important role played by Roman history in medieval and early modern culture, but also the dense semiotic webs within which that exchange took place.

Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
      (year two of a two-year   fellowship)
ERIK GUSTAFSON
      Institute of Fine Arts, New York   University
      Tradition and Renewal in the Thirteenth-Century Franciscan   Architecture of TuscanyMy project deals with the “origins” of 13th-century Franciscan architecture in Tuscany, looking to two 11th-century Gregorian Reform monastic orders – the Vallombrosans and Camldolese – as spiritual and architectural models.  My hypothesis is that the Franciscan movement is a renewal of the earlier Gregorian monastic spiritual ideals, expanding and adjusting the spiritual aims of ‘caring for souls’ and service to the community to fit a new range of devotional and cultural needs.  While previous scholarship has seen Franciscan architecture as simplistic, vernacular halls for preaching, I argue that the friars’ churches are better understood as spaces designed to both house and express the devotional practices of the friars and of the laity.
   
Phyllis G. Gordan/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
      (year   one of a two-year fellowship)
      ANNIE MONTGOMERY LABATT
History of Art, Yale   University
      In Search of the “Eastern” Image:  Sacred Painting in Eighth   and Ninth Century RomeSpecific images and types in medieval Roman imagery express meanings that do not fit into the traditional academic divide between East and West.  Some types—such as the Transfiguration, the Deesis, and the Anastasis—appear to stand out amidst Roman imagery as belonging to the so-called “Byzantine” tradition because these forms became notable parts of a canonized Eastern tradition at a later date.  But in the eighth and ninth century these forms did not necessarily connote division or difference.  Rather, these medieval images reveal inventiveness, experimentation, and hybridity.  Some images in Rome called attention to “Greeks” as different, and some images belonged to a more generalizing Roman idiom.  By studying the way specific examples of iconographical types functioned in specific Roman churches, this project will be an attempt to clarify what role the East did or did not play in the imagery of early medieval Rome.
   
National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation   Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
      JOHN PARKER
      Associate Professor, Department of   English, Macalester College
Drama and the Death of God, or The Gospel of   SenecaThis project crosses two related boundaries in the history of theater: the one between classical and Christian culture, the other between late medieval and Renaissance drama. I want to ease both divisions by stressing the common ground between Christianity and Seneca. When Renaissance dramatists claimed to revive antiquity by way of his drama, they did not return to that drama as something opposed or alterior to Christian revelation. The gospels, the liturgy, and the acts of the martyrs (the project’s first half will show) had been as much a product of, and meditation on, pagan violence as was his drama. Seneca thus served (the second half will argue) as an ironic preservative of drama’s medieval heritage at a moment in England when Protestant forces worked hard to extirpate Catholic “paganism” by suppressing the Latin liturgy and the vernacular plays that took the gospels and saints lives as their chief models.
   
MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES

Paul Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
  MARGARET FISHER
  Video Director and   Publisher, Second Evening Art / BMI
Through the eyes of children: a   re-assessment of the role of futurism in the development of early Italian Radio   under FascismItalian futurists who broadcast and theorized about radio from 1929 to 1941 are often credited with an historic role in shaping the style and character of early Italian Radio. Children’s programs offer a stunning view of the progressive agenda of early Italian Radio before futurist involvement with broadcasting, and an excellent vantage point from which to open new lines of inquiry into futurist radio activity and writing. To establish the condition of Italian Radio before the futurists, I will examine Italian Radio’s pioneering phase (1925-1928) which partnered children with technology. I will compile a data base of broadcast activities and texts related to both groups, children and futurists, and publish a bi-lingual sourcebook of previously unavailable texts and scripts. With this foundation in place, I will continue with a critical overview and essays on special topics: child protagonists in futurist radio dramas; government policy and futurism; the global vision of early Italian Radio as one prototype for the Internet; and a survey of the embrace of futurism by early Italian Radio to the present day.

    Donald and Maria Cox Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
      GREGORY TENTLER
      History of   Art, University of Pennsylvania
      Made in Italy: Piero Manzoni and the   Birth of the International Avant-Garde 1954-1963In the nearly half century since his death, the Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) has become a key figure in the postwar revival of Marcel Duchamp and one of the principle antecedents of the international movements of Body Art and Conceptual Art. This characterization, however, examines Manzoni’s art only through the concerns of wider tendencies of postwar art and ignores the cultural genesis of his work in Milan and Rome.  As a consequence, Manzoni is presented as a fragmented and often contradictory figure. My dissertation seeks to correct this portrayal and situate Manzoni’s work in the context of postwar Italy, rather than solely in a European milieu. Doing so reveals that the artist’s immense contributions to postwar art were equally indebted to his dialog with an Italian tradition of Modernism, which has been neglected in broader surveys of the avant-garde.
   
RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES
   
Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize
      ERIC   BIANCHI
      Department of Music, Yale University
      Center of the World:   Athanasius Kircher at the Jesuit Colleges of RomeAthanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650) was the largest, most influential music treatise of the seventeenth century.  Kircher was a Jesuit polymath who spent nearly 50 years as a professor at the Collegio Romano.  This project examines Musurgia as a document of intellectual history, and reconstructs the larger scholarly context from which it arose.  In Rome, I will consult the principal holdings of Jesuit materials: the Archivio della Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, and Fondo Gesuitico of the Bibliotheca Nazionale, where Kircher’s manuscripts and correspondence are preserved, as well as the Archivium Romanum Societatis Iesu, which holds censors’ files and other important administrative materials.  In addition to Jesuit archives, I will also consult the papers and published writings of Kircher’s colleagues and adversaries, such as Leone Allacci and Melchior Inchofer, in smaller archives throughout the city.
   
Millicent Mercer Johnsen Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
ELIZABETH   McCAHILL
      Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of the   South
      Reinventing Rome: 1400-1450My project is a study of the papal Curia and the impoverished city to which it returned in 1420. It will begin by exploring some of the internal dynamics of the Curia with special attention to the efforts of classicizing scholars, or humanists, to carve out a distinctive niche for themselves in the agonistic atmosphere of the papal court. Drawing on archival documents and humanist social commentary, it will then offer a précis of the social and economic concerns of Rome’s unruly populace. Finally, the various players will be brought together, if not in harmony then in creative cacophony, as they sought to turn the city into something more than her dingy early Quattrocento self. The book will thus illuminate an urban environment in transition and parse the ways in which curialists and Roman citizens collaborated and competed to develop the city’s ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.