The Rome Global Gateway announces a consortium with Stanford University and Princeton University’s Humanities Council to support the Rome Seminar, a one-month funded summer course for graduate students held in the city. The Seminar introduces students to working with primary sources in Rome. Taught on-site in archives and libraries, graduate students from diverse disciplines learn hands-on how to find primary sources.
The consortium will allow the seminar to be team-taught, pairing faculty from the University of Notre Dame, Stanford University, and Princeton University in rotation, increasing the pool of expertise and range of what the seminar offers, while also further enhancing its visibility on an international level. It will also provide financial support for the seminar for three years.
“This consortium will enrich the seminar tremendously and serve to launch future intellectual collaborations between and among our institutions, faculty, and students,” says Heather Hyde Minor, academic director at the Rome Global Gateway. “I am extremely grateful to our colleagues at Princeton and Stanford, along with our Notre Dame campus partners, for making this possible.”
“This approach expands the team of faculty who can shape and direct the summer seminar,” says Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti professor of Italian history and co-director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University. “It increases its international visibility and impact on a wide variety of fields – history of art and architecture, history literature, religious studies, music, and the historical dimensions of the social sciences – that make use of Rome’s impressive, varied, and complex archival resources to study subjects from antiquity to present.”
Rome’s libraries and archives contain manuscripts and documents invaluable to many different disciplines, documenting over more than two thousand years of human history. The holdings contain extraordinary and understudied materials for archaeologists and classicists, art historians and historians, musicologists and students of theatre and performance, historians of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the world, and specialists in the Near East and East Asia.
Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University professor of history at Princeton University, says he is delighted that Princeton will partner with Notre Dame and Stanford to carry on this wonderful enterprise.
“The Notre Dame Rome seminar has been a life-changing experience for early career scholars in many disciplines,” says Grafton.
“Students who have participated in the seminar uniformly praise the program for its impact on their research skills and knowledge of resources for their fields, its role in advancing their dissertations including time to degree, and the opportunities for intellectual discovery that have led to publishable research early in their careers,” adds Findlen.
Generous support for the seminar is provided by the College of Arts and Letters, the Cushwa Center, the Center for Italian Studies, and the Medieval Institute.
Notre Dame International’s Rome Global Gateway has been offering the Rome Seminar since 2011, reformulating it in 2018 to focus on training graduate students to use primary sources in the city. The program is open to doctoral students in all disciplines and all universities, designed to expose them to the full complexity of library and archival resources in Rome and an intensive summer seminar.
Learn more about the Rome Seminar. The deadline to apply is December 15, 2019.
Originally published by at rome.nd.edu on December 04, 2019.