Rome Seminar 2023, June 5–30, 2023

The Rome Seminar is designed to introduce Ph.D. students from across the humanities to the unique primary sources available in Rome. Working hands-on with materials in the city’s archives and libraries, students will be exposed to the rich potential of a wide range of sources produced from 1100 to 2020. Seminar meetings will be held at the Vatican Apostolic Library, the Biblioteca Nazionale, and the Archivio di Stato, and elsewhere. The seminar will also include a series of presentations by senior scholars who will discuss how they have collected and interpreted Roman primary sources in their own research.

The dates for the 2023 Seminar are June 5 to June 30.

There are extraordinary and understudied materials in libraries and archives in the city for archeologists and classicists, art historians and historians, musicologists and students of theater and performance, historians of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the world, specialists in the Near East and East Asia. The holdings of the Vatican Library alone include priceless manuscripts and documents from East Asia, the near East, and North Africa – as well as a vast collection of ancient, medieval and early modern texts in Greek and Latin, a unique resource for the history and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, of Christianity from its origins until recent times, of relations between Christians and Jews from antiquity onwards, and other subjects without number.  

Previous seminar participants include students of art history, history, literature, political science, medieval studies, film studies, and musicology. Their areas of intellectual interest ranged from Byzantine art, papal humanism, hospitals, charity and pilgrimage, Persian embassies and the Chinese missions to art and science, fascist textile production, the history of sexuality, and politics and church in the postwar era. They have taken up primary sources like Anglo-Latin manuscripts, a Hebrew Arthurian legend, socioeconomic records of daily life, institutional records of church and state, art and material culture, films, and twentieth-century letters. Participants have come from Catholic University, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, Syracuse, University of Chicago, University of Melbourne, University of Minnesota, University of Notre Dame, University of Toronto, and others.

The professors in charge of the seminar this year are Paula Findlen (Stanford) and Heather Minor (Notre Dame).

We welcome applications from students from any discipline at any stage in their graduate education who have not done extensive research in Rome prior to the seminar. To be eligible to apply, you must be enrolled full-time in a Ph.D. program. The focus of your research need not be Rome but you should have an interest in developing that research through the use of primary sources located in the city.

This seminar is made possible by generous support from 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.