The University of Notre Dame's annual Rome Seminar has once again yielded fascinating discoveries from the Italian capital's vast and rich archival sources. This year, a cohort of 10 exceptional graduate students, selected from a wide range of disciplines and North American universities, arrived in Rome, ready to advance their research on diverse subjects, from the history of mathematics in the Renaissance to medieval Christian communities in Muslim Al-Andalus, to early modern Paraguay, to the history of medicine in twentieth-century Italy. The program featured tutorials in seven libraries and archives, giving the graduate students the opportunity to work hands-on with primary sources.
Professor Hyde Minor, who established the Rome Seminar in 2018 in collaboration with the Center for Italian Studies, attributed this year's research successes to her colleagues at the Accademia dei Lincei e Corsiniana, the American Academy in Rome, the Apostolic Vatican Library, the Archivio di Stato, Archivio Storico della Congregazione per l'Evangelizzazione dei Popoli, the Biblioteca Casanatense, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale. During the course of the Seminar participants learned to use each of these institutes' collections and developed their knowledge of key questions to ask when approaching research in any archive or library.
The Seminar, which takes place over the course of four weeks during the summer, featured talks by Kathleen Cummings (Notre Dame), Anthony Grafton (Princeton), Ingrid Rowland (Notre Dame), Marla Stone (Occidental), and Stefania Tutino (UCLA), who each highlighted a discovery they had made in an archive or library in Rome. Each then discussed how they transformed their finds into evidence providing the learned foundations for an article or book. The Rome Seminar's alumni panel also brought together four prior participants via Zoom. This forum provided an opportunity for this year’s students to ask about how the Seminar experience shaped their future research, led to success with fellowship applications, and more.
Finally, and most importantly, the students put into practice what they learned. All of them made excellent finds in the archives. Highlights this year range from the discovery of a murderous mathematician in the 1500s to a medieval Arabic manuscript that sought to align the Judaic, Christian, and Muslim calendars to information about the 1961 US visit of the first African cardinal of the modern Roman Catholic Church.
This year's Seminar was made possible thanks to the generous support of Stanford University, the Princeton University Humanities Council, and from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, the Charles and Margaret Hall Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and the Center for Italian Studies.
Participants in this year's Rome Archive Seminar included:
- Francisco Cintron Mattei (Medieval Institute, Notre Dame)
- Marven Corrielus (History, Notre Dame)
- Andrei Dumitrescu (Art & Art History, Stanford)
- Lea Eisenstein (History, Princeton)
- Elijah Ferrante (History, Columbia)
- Sofia Hernandez (Art & Archeology, Princeton)
- E. A. Hunter (CHSS, Chicago)
- Hannah McClain (History, Texas)
- Mateo Montoya (History of Science, Harvard)
- Will O' Brien (History & Peace Studies, Notre Dame)
Originally published by at italianstudies.nd.edu on August 18, 2024.