The BSR Podcast

Content Warning: This recording contains mentions of racial trauma, violence against Black and Brown people and racial slurs that can be disturbing or triggering.The second event of the BSR Fine Arts Talks | Talk Justice series will be a conversation between artist Phoebe Boswell (Bridget Riley Fellow 2019) and Dr Angelica Pesarini (NYU Florence). Pesarini, whose research is dedicated to the analysis of the intersections of race, gender and citizenship in colonial and postcolonial Italy responds to Phoebe's visual essay 'Stranger In The Village', which documents her experience of both an artist residency and a growing consciousness within an increasingly hostile Europe. Combining draftswomanship and digital technology, Boswell creates immersive installations and bodies of work that layer drawing, animation, sound, video and interactivity in an effort to find new languages robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house, centre and amplify voices and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised or sidelined as ‘other'.Phoebe Boswell explores the sense of ‘belonging' and is anchored to a restless state of diasporic consciousness, combining traditional drawing with digital technology. Her practice draws on her own experiences of belonging, having been born in Kenya and brought up in the Arabian Gulf; she now lives and works in London. Her works are created in an effort to find new languages robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house, centre and amplify voices and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised or sidelined as ‘other'. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Kristin Hjellegjerde, Carroll / Fletcher, and Tiwani Contemporary; and has screened at the Sundance, BFI London, BlackStar, Underwire and LA Film Festivals, British Animation Awards, and CinemAfrica amongst others. She participated in the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2015, the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2016 at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva and received the Future Generation Art Prize's Special Prize in 2017, consequently exhibiting as part of the Collateral Events programme at the 57th Venice Biennale. Boswell will unveil a new largescale public moving image work in Geneva in December 2019, and a solo exhibition at New Art Exchange, Nottingham in 2020.Angelica Pesarini was awarded a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2015 from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds. She is currently a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU Florence where she teaches Black Italia, a course entirely dedicated to the intersectional analysis of racial identity in Italy. Angelica previously worked at Lancaster University as a Lecturer in Gender, Race and Sexuality. Her current work investigates dynamics of race performativity with a focus on colonial and postcolonial Italy and she also works on the racialization of the Italian political discourse on immigration. She has previously conducted research on gender roles and the development of economic activities within some Roma communities in Italy and she has analysed strategies of survival, risks and opportunities associated with male prostitution in Rome. She has been published in a number of journals and edited volumes and she is currently writing a monograph of her first book.

A lecture by Nikolaos Karydis (Kent; BSR). This lecture explores the development of the Ripa Grande, the main river port of Rome during the Early Modern period. This port was destroyed in the 19th century. The lecture, offers an opportunity to visualise its lost phases on the basis of vedutte drawn from the 15th to the 18th century. Comparative analysis of an unprecedented number of engravings, drawings and paintings and their interpretation by reference to coeval maps will help us to retrace the transformations of the port through time. Reconstructed plans and axonometric drawings make it possible to investigate the spatial organisation of the port and the design principles that informed its remodelling. Reconstruction also provides a closer look to key port buildings, such as the Ospizio di San Michele. The latter will be analyzed within the context of institutional architecture in European river ports. This methodology sheds new light on a highly significant if highly neglected aspect of the urban development of Rome in the Early Modern period.

Keynote by Edward Corp (Toulouse) for the conference Alla Corte della Cancelleria: Pietro Ottoboni e la politica delle arti nella Roma del Settecento

Molly Cotton Lecture by Francesco Sirano (Herculaneum)

A lecture by Spencer de Grey (Foster + Partners).

A lecture by Gabriele Cifani (École normale supérieure, Paris). Part of the City of Rome Lecture Series. L'economia romana tra l'VIII e il IV secolo a.C. è generalmente ricostruita in termini marcatamente primitivisti, con un ruolo preponderante attribuito all'agricoltura e con ridotte attività di produzione e di scambi commerciali. Tale vulgata, tuttora presente in particolare nella manualistica anglosassone, mal si concilia con le scoperte archeologiche avvenute a Roma e nel Lazio negli ultimi quaranta anni che obbligano a riconsiderare il ruolo della città nell'ambito delle interazioni commerciali mediterranee. Oggetto della conferenza saranno pertanto le produzioni ed importazioni a Roma tra l'Età del Ferro e la prima età repubblicana e le loro possibili implicazioni storiche e sociali.

A lecture by Ginette Vagenheim (Rouen-Normandie) as part of the City of Rome lecture series. After the catastrophic Tiber flood of 1557, control over the river and repairs to the aqueducts represented the major urban issues that needed to be resolved in the context of Rome's renovation. Massive public works were commissioned, namely around Castel Sant'Angelo and for the reconstruction of the aqueduct named “Acqua Vergine”. These projects produced numerous discussions and writings by a series of individuals of varied backgrounds, like the physician Andrea Bacco (1524-1600), the engineer Antonio Trevisi (d.1564), the jurist and Roman magistrate Luca Peto (1512-1581), and the antiquarian Pirro Ligorio (1512c.-1581), all of them being eager to attract the prestigious patronage of the Papacy. In his antiquarian works called “Roman antiquities”, Ligorio produced the only extant illustrated treatise on the renovation of the Acqua Vergine. In my talk I will focus on this treatise to try to describe how Ligorio faced problems of urbanisation and hydrology which were linked to the most impressive ruins of Roman civilisation.

A lecture by Ania Kotarba-Morley. The Red Sea region is hostile to long-shore nautical activity as it lacks natural topographic features that could be used as harbours; only a few suitable bays for landing, where the wadi mouths allow the break in the reef, are located on its coasts. However, experiencing seasonally variable winds and currents parts of the Red Sea constituted favourable ground for maritime voyaging, contact and trade for millennia. Berenike Troglodytica was one of the most important harbours on the Egyptian Red Sea during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods – a major hub connecting trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Its geographical position was chosen due to its extraordinarily propitious characteristics owing partly to its natural harbour, protected against the prevailing northern winds, as well as its location in the vicinity of an ancient viewshed – the large peninsula of Ras Benas. This seminar will collate different strands of evidence and compare the seafaring traditions in the region and the recent findings from the port area of Berenike with other key ports of trade on the Red Sea and around the Indian Ocean rims.

A lecture by Nicholas Purcell (Oxford). Partof the City of Rome Lecture Series

A lecture by Paolo Liverani (Firenze). Part of the City of Rome lecture series. Il progetto di ricerca sul Laterano antico fino alle soglie del medioevo vede insieme le università di Newcastle e Firenze con il determinante sostegno della British School di Roma, dei Musei Vaticani e la collaborazione dell'Istituto per le Tecnologie Applicate ai Beni Culturali del CNR italiano. I rilievi dell'area lateranense strettamente intesa sono terminati e sono molto avanzati gli studi per la ricostruzione delle varie fasi edilizie, storiche e urbanistiche. Qui alle domus di I e II secolo d.C. si sovrappone prima la caserma dei cavalieri scelti di Settimio Severo (Castra Nova Equitum Singularium) con le adiacenti terme, quindi la basilica costantiniana con il suo battistero. Il rilievo sta proseguendo nell'area adiacente dell'ospedale di Giovanni in Laterano con le domus di personaggi chiave del II secolo dell'impero: i consoli Quintilii e Domizia Lucilla, la madre di Marco Aurelio. Su di esse sorgeranno fondazioni tardoantiche legate alla chiesa dei primi secoli.

A lecture by Stefano Camporeale (Siena) part of the City of Rome Lecture Series. With the co-ordination of the Soprintendenza of Rome, a research team carried out in 2013-17 an archaeological study and restoration programme of the northern substructures of the Domus Tiberiana. Through stratigraphic, technical and structural analyses of this complex, new data has emerged on the function and different phases of the various rooms and buildings, on the construction processes, and on the urban organization of the Palatine's northern slope. Dal 2013 al 2017 un gruppo di lavoro coordinato dalla Soprintendenza di Roma si è occupato dello studio archeologico e del restauro delle sostruzioni settentrionali della Domus Tiberiana. A partire dall'analisi stratigrafica, tecnica e strutturale di questo complesso sono emerse nuove informazioni sulla funzione e fasi cronologiche dei vari ambienti ed edifici, sui processi costruttivi e sull'urbanistica delle pendici nord del Palatino.

A lecture by Eloisa Dodero (Musei Capitolini) as part of the City of Rome lecture series. L'istituzione del Museo Capitolino con i due chirografi di papa Clemente XII del dicembre 1733 rappresenta un episodio di grande importanza nel panorama culturale dell'Europa del Settecento. Prototipo del museo moderno, per la razionalizzazione degli spazi espositivi, l'apertura al pubblico dei giovani artisti, la creazione di nuove figure professionali e la pubblicazione di cataloghi illustrati e guide per i visitatori, negli anni centrali del Settecento il Museo Capitolino costituisce una tappa immancabile nella Roma del Grand Tour e come assoluta novità viene percepito, tra gli altri, da Jean-Jacques Barthélemy e Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Questa presentazione intende ripercorrere i momenti fondamentali della storia più antica del Museo Capitolino, dall'atto fondativo del 1733, maturato nella necessità di salvare la collezione del cardinale Alessandro Albani dal rischio di una rovinosa dispersione, al trauma della partenza per Parigi dei capolavori capitolini all'indomani del Trattato di Tolentino del 1797.

Tomaso Binga in conversation with Raffaella Perna (Sapienza) followed by a performance. Part of the BSR Fine Arts Talk Gender Series

A talk by John Walter as part of the BSR Fine Arts Talk Gender Series

BSR-Institute of Classical Studies Rome-London Lecture by Catharine Edwards (Birkbeck). Volney's hugely influential work Les Ruines (1791) had a profound effect on responses to ruins, not just those of exotic Palmyra (with which Volney's treatise opens) but also the more familiar ruins of Rome. Les Ruines plays a small but crucial role in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Her later writing, especially works composed in or about Rome (her fragmentary story ‘Valerius: the reanimated Roman' and her novel The last man), deploys the remains of ancient Rome to explore complex temporalities, alert to the politics of ruins and inflected by a distinctively Volneyan aesthetic.

Round table with Alan Williams (National Collection of Aerial Photography), Elizabeth J. Shepherd (Aerofototeca Nazionale-ICCD) and Alessandra Giovenco (BSR).

A lecture by Ian Campbell (QUB)

Society for Renaissance Studies Lecture by Jane Grogan (UCD). This paper introduces a long-forgotten Tudor figure, William Barker, and argues for his significance to our understanding of post-Reformation English Renaissance culture. Sometime Cambridge scholar, traveller to Italy, and accomplished translator from ancient Greek, Barker became a key figure in the ill-fated Ridolfi plot (which sought to put Mary Queen of Scots on Elizabeth's English throne). But quite apart from the interest of his own story, his life and works cast light on unnoticed intellectual networks operating in Renaissance England, and point to the need to rethink our understanding of its social and political world, as well as its literary history.

A lecture by Andrew Hopkins (Università degli Studi Dell'Aquila)

A lecture by Robin Lane Fox (Oxford), co-organised with the American Academy in Rome as part of the 2018 Jerome Lecture Series. The Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures Series is among the most prestigious international platforms for the presentation of new work on Roman history and culture. They are presented at both the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan. In 2018, the forty-fifth year of the lecture series, Robin Lane Fox, a noted scholar of ancient history, will discuss the natural world in pagan and Christian Rome. The lectures will explore the differing approaches to the natural world by pagans and the early Christians, from Paul and the Gospels to circa 500 CE. They will bring out differing emphases in their respective writings and art and will ask what practical effects such different ways of seeing had on contemporary life.

W.T.C. Walker Lecture in Architectural History by Wendy Pullan (Cambridge). Can we speak of spaces of justice? If so, how and where might this happen in contemporary cities? The abstract nature of legal systems makes it difficult to apply them to everyday life in cities, resulting in disjunctures between urban spatial practice and justice. This becomes more complicated when political situations begin to unravel in conditions of heavy conflict. Nonetheless, cities are often more robust that we initially expect and the order and processes of everyday life often contribute and sustain when more formal procedures become feeble. I shall consider these problems and possibilities in the physical space of cities, particularly focusing on two prominent and problematic sites: Damascus Gate in Jerusalem and Martyrs Square in Beirut. Wendy Pullan is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies and Director of the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on European and Middle Eastern architecture and cities, examining the processes of urban heritage, conflict and change, both historical and contemporary. Her recent publications include: Locating Urban Conflicts (2013), The Struggle for Jerusalem's Holy Places (2013), ‘Violent infrastructures, places of conflict' (Sage 2018) and she is presently writing Urban Agonistes: On the nature of urban conflict. She is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.

A lecture by Dinah Birch (Liverpool)

A lecture by John Osborne (BSR; Carleton) as part of the City of Rome lecture series.

A lecture by Barbara Borg (Exeter) as part of the City of Rome Lecture Series.

A lecture by Filippo Coarelli (Perugia) as part of the City of Rome lecture series

A lecture by Hannah Cornwell (Birmingham) as part of the City of Rome lecture series.

A lecture by Krešimir Vuković (BSR; Oxford) as part of the City of Rome lecture series.

A lecture by Ursula Rothe (BSR; Open)

A lecture by Renée Tobe (BSR; East London). British filmmaker Peter Greenaway came to Rome on a visit, suffered from indigestion and devised his plot for Belly of an Architect (1987) in which an American (in the style of Henry James) visits Rome in order to prepare an exhibition of the works of neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799) in the Monument Vittorio Emanuele II. Rome in film manifests itself according to the specific filmmaker's perspective and there are different kinds of Roman films. While Italian neorealist films strove to cultivate the opposite of the monumentality of Rome, the ‘English abroad' celebrates the place and position of temples, monuments and civic buildings. The monuments in the film are deliberately framed like postcards. Central to a discussion of imperialist politics lies a nostalgia for Rome's glorious past.

A lecture by Maurizio Ricci (Sapienza) and Tom True (BSR)

A lecture by Lara Pucci (BSR; Nottingham).

G.E. Rickman Lecture by Christer Bruun (Toronto). An Ostian inscription from the reign of the emperor Hadrian honors the emperor because the colonia had been conservata et aucta. This lecture explores ways in which the emperors' concern with the economy of the empire and the provisioning of Rome impacted on the town of Ostia and its inhabitants. It is normally taken for granted that the expansion of the harbour zone took place in general harmony: imperial investments flowed to Ostia-Portus, the town and its population grew steadily, and its business and trading community flourished. But were there no conflicts, no diverging voices and views on what kind of development was needed? It seems implausible that there were no worries in Ostia, and this lecture looks at neglected signs of local opinions and how the interaction between the imperial centre and Ostia may have played out.

A lecture by Peter Burke (Cambridge). A cultural history of polymaths from the Renaissance to the present (from Leonardo to Umberto Eco), investigating how the species has managed to survive despite increasing specialization

BSR-Corning Museum of Glass David Whitehouse Memorial Lecture by Susan Walker (Oxford). Archival research in Rome and Naples has shed light upon the formation of the third largest surviving collection of late Roman gold-glass. Charles Wilshere (1814-1906), a landowner with a passion for early Christianity, built his remarkable collection through a network of Italian scholars and dealers, notably the great Vatican archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi, the Jesuit scholar Raffaele Garrucci, and the painter and dealer Vincenzo Capobianchi. In Italy, Wilshere took advantage of the political and social instability of the risorgimento years, and his collecting activities proved controversial. Nonetheless his motive was entirely didactic; within the UK, the collection has nearly always remained accessible to scholars and the public.Recent research on the chemistry of the Wilshere gold-glass has built a chronological sequence offering insights into the social history of gold-glass in late antiquity. Susan Walker is the principal author of Saints and Salvation: the Wilshere Collection of gold-glass, sarcophagi and inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy, recently published by the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, where the Wilshere Collection is now displayed. From 2004-2014 she was Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean, where she is now Honorary Curator; she is also an Emerita Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and Chair of Publications for the British School at Rome. She undertook much of the research forming the core of the Whitehouse Lecture as Hugh Last Fellow at the British School at Rome in 2013.

A lecture by Simon Ditchfield (York)

A lecture by Ronald Ridley (Melbourne)

A lecture by Emily Michelson (St Andrews). The 16th-century conversionary campaign against Jews took place largely in public, in the presence of many kinds of onlookers. Nowhere was conversion a greater spectacle than at forced sermons. This talk traces the journeys of the three main populations who converged at conversionary sermons in the early 1580s: Jews, Neophytes, and Christians. It blends an examination of urban renewal with religious questions to recreate the moment when public interest fixed on this new spectacle.

Molly Cotton Lecture by Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai (Tor Vergata). Ricerche di archeologia cristiana in Sabina ed Etruria Meridionale: le chiese di S. Giacinto (Cures Sabini) e dei SS. Gratiliano e Felicissima (Falerii Novi)

A lecture by Derek Duncan (St Andrews)

W.T.C. Walker Lecture in Architectural History by Helen Hills (York). Baroque Naples was tarnished in Protestant Europe with a reputation for excess — most especially an excess of silver in its churches and chapels, part of the mort main of the Spanish church, a prodigious resource that was gathering dust rather than fighting wars or generating interest. Silver was the material par excellence for chalices, pyx and plate, for carte di gloria and sacred and liturgical objects of many kinds, including the spectacular solid silver reliquaries in the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples, unsurpassed amongst European treasuries. Silver was intimately implicated in discourses of the sacred, of assaying, of testing, of purity, purification and authenticity and sanctity through the discourse of light, lux and lumen, shine and the capacity to reflect light. And its threads were entangled in noble dress, furniture and accoutrements of aristocratic fashion. Yet silver was particularly implicated, too, in the violence of Spanish colonialism. This paper examines these apparently divergent qualities of silver to investigate relationships between matter and affect, colonialism and culture in baroque Italy.

A lecture by John David Rhodes (BSR; Cambridge). Many of the spaces and thoroughfares that we take for granted in the centre of Rome are the results of brutal practices that reshaped the city only several decades ago. While every power that has ruled Rome sought–with varying degrees of intensity and success–to fashion the city in its own image, Fascism's sventramento (disembowelling) of several of Rome's neighbourhoods left a spatial and visual legacy that is troubling and difficult to pin down. This talk will range across documentary filmmaking, photography, painting, official planning discourses, and other materials in order to describe a sense of how Rome's disembowelling is a critical element that must be considered in order to grasp the social and aesthetic specificity of modern Rome and Roman modernism.

A lecture by Mark Somos (BSR; Sussex; Harvard)

G.E. Rickman Lecture by Nicholas Purcell (Oxford). In this lecture, Nicholas Purcell revisits the social, financial, and cultural environments of merchants engaged in overseas trade with the city of Rome. He looks at the changing role of those we readily classify as ‘merchants' or ‘traders' in new ways, asking whether our standard scholarly representations of ‘exchange', ‘commerce', or ‘trade' all too conventional.

A lecture by Catherine Fletcher (Swansea). Rai Uno's new show I Medici – known in English as Medici: Masters of Florence – has proved an extraordinary success on Italian television. In this talk, Catherine Fletcher explores its depiction of the Medici family and the debate it has prompted about the relationship between historical fact and fiction. She draws on her own experience of writing a biography of Alessandro de' Medici (Il principe maledetto di Firenze/The Black Prince of Florence) to consider the challenges of presenting this complex past to contemporary audiences, and looks at the ways that social media interaction can change viewers' experience of historical TV.

A lecture by Amy Russell (BSR; Durham)

BSR-Corning Museum of Glass David Whitehouse Memorial lecture by William Gudenrath (Corning Museum of Glass)

A lecture by Annalisa Marzano (BSR; Reading)

A lecture by Phil Perkins (BSR; Open)

A lecture by Mary Jacobus. To launch her book Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton University Press, 2016), Mary Jacobus explores the use of quotations in one of his major paintings. The American painter Cy Twombly (1928–2011), who lived in Rome from the 1950s onward, often spoke of himself as a ‘Mediterranean' painter. His vast tripartite canvas, Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor, spans two decades and was finally completed to coincide with his 1994 MoMA retrospective. Previously known as Unfinished Painting, it exemplifies Twombly's use of quotation. Say Goodbye includes a palimpsest of passages drawn from Rilke, Cavafy, and Seferis, among others. At a distance, it appears empty. Close-up, it provides a literary archeology. How much do we need to know about Twombly's quotations and how do they affect the viewer's experience of his work?

A discussion with UK and Italian think tanks ResPublica and Trinità dei Monti. Welcome and introduction by Christopher Smith (BSR), Pierluigi Testa (Trinità dei Monti), Jill Morris CMG and Daniele Frongia, Deputy Mayor of Rome. ‘The economics of beauty' presented by Annalisa Cicerchia (Fondazione Symbola). ‘The community's right to beauty' by Duncan Sim (ResPublica Foundation) ‘The regeneration of Dundee' by Philip Long (V&A Museum of Design Dundee)

Molly Cotton Lecture given by Maria Paola Guidobaldi