Annual Report 2007-8 - The British School at Rome

H U M A N I T I E S A C T I V I T I E STaught CoursesThe School’s City of Rome postgraduate course, which runsannually through April and May, is now in its thirteenth yearand is offered at twelve British universities. The courseprovides students of classics, ancient history and archaeologywith a full immersion in the topography, art and architectureof the city, from its origins to the end of the Empire(although later periods are by no means neglected). In 2008twelve students attended, from the universities of Cardiff,Exeter, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Reading, RoyalHolloway and St Andrews. The course was directed byRobert Coates-Stephens and administered by Elly Murkett,with ex-student Chris Siwicki providing welcome logisticalsupport. Permits for access to restricted monuments werearranged with great efficiency and diplomacy by Maria PiaMalvezzi, and Geraldine Wellington saw to the hostelarrangements with characteristic brio.Site visits form the key element of the teaching.Highlights in 2008 included the ongoing excavations of thedomus beneath the Palazzo Valentini (with the site director,Paola Baldassari), the archaic houses of the Via Sacra (withDunia Filippi), the new German project in the Palatine’sFlavian Palace (with Ulrike Wulf-Rheidt) and a bravura tourof the Via Annibaldi Nymphaeum by Frank Sear. Guestlecturers included John Clarke, Filippo Coarelli, PenelopeDavies and Lynne Lancaster.The Library staff dealt generously with the annual invasion,and by the course’s end a fine series of essays had beenproduced on such topics as the narrow procession friezes onRome’s honorific arches, Ovid’s subversion of the city’sAugustan ‘moral landscape’ and a density analysis ofcommercial structures in the fourteen regions. Past studentsof the course are now teaching and working at places as farafield as the universities of Santiago de Chile, São Paulo,Sydney, Reading and Oxford, as well as the British Museum,and, since half of this year’s intake is going on to doctoralstudy, we may hope that this trend continues. As in previousyears, we are grateful for the support of the Roman Society,Robert Coates-Stephens with City of Rome students at the Pantheonwhich has allowed us to offer this rare opportunity topromising young scholars and future generations of academics.Twenty-six students from the universities of Bristol,Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, King’s CollegeLondon, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Reading, RoyalHolloway, Southampton, St Andrews and Warwick attendedthe undergraduate Summer School in September 2007, whichwas directed by Matthew Nicholls (University of Reading)and Robert Coates-Stephens. The Gladstone Memorial Prizewas awarded to Emma Wright of Brasenose College, Oxford.The course, which serves as an introduction to the city forstudents with varying backgrounds and interests within thebroad study of the ancient world (archaeology, ancient andmedieval history, classics and art history), focuses on thesocial, economic, political and religious activities thatconstituted life and death in the ancient city. ‘Themed’ daysincluded: the Tiber and provisioning Rome, politics and theForum, war and the triumph, the city and the urban plebs,roads and cemeteries, and the transformations of lateantiquity. Visits out of Rome included Ostia, the Isola Sacraand Tivoli. The course directors provided a series of ninesupplementary lectures to introduce each itinerary. Onceagain, we would like to express our thanks for the generoussupport of the Roman Society, the Faculty of Classics atCambridge, the Craven Committee at Oxford and theGladstone Memorial Trust.Robert Coates-StephensCary Fellow18