Annual Report 2007-8 - The British School at Rome

Above: Professor Peter Wiseman gives a lecture at the BSRBelow: Visitors to the estate of the Sforza Cesarini family at Portuscommittee responsible for these grants, chaired byProfessor Michael Fulford, has long shown itself to beresponsive to our needs, and under its President, BaronessO’Neill, and its new CEO, Dr Robin Jackson, theAcademy has embraced a welcome policy of raising thepublic profile of the work of the institutes it supports.Last November, thanks to the hard work of the dynamicMargot Jackson, responsible for Academy-sponsoredInstitutes and Societies, it arranged a major event at theBarbican Centre in London, under the title EvolvingSocieties to showcase the work of the institutes, at whichno less than three BSR representatives spoke — DavidForgacs on ‘Migration to contemporary Rome: work,settlement and social exclusion’ , Simon Keay on ‘Thepast at risk: the contribution of British archaeology tosafeguarding Italian heritage’, and Cristiana Perrellascreening a sample of videos on the theme ‘Viva Roma!’.We are delighted that the Academy is taking this upbeatline, and share the enthusiasm of BASIS for a widening ofthe disciplinary and geographical range of its institutes,which has enabled us to make a first, tentative, move intothe Western Mediterranean at large and into Punic studies(see above). The irony is that as the spending power ofsterling has dropped, we have been attempting to broadenour coverage, and hard thinking will be needed in futureon what can be sustained on limited resources withoutreducing quality.The Academy’s core grant only supports about half ourspending (this year, excluding the Herculaneum project,48%), and it is in the added value made possible byadditional funding sources, on the back, so to speak, ofthe Academy grant, that our range and quality depends.Arts scholarships are almost entirely supported by outsidebodies, in addition to the income of the F.W. Sargantfund: we reiterate our gratitude to the many bodies thatfinance these residencies, the Abbey Council, theAustralia Council for the Arts, the Linbury Trust (for theSainsbury Scholarships), the Harold Hyam Wingate8