The American Academy in Rome has awarded the Rome Prize for 2018-2019 to Austin Powell, a Ph.D. candidate in Catholic University’s Department of History. This fellowship provides a stipend and a year’s residence (with room and board), a study, and library privileges at the American Academy’s historic villa on the Janiculum Hill in Rome. The fellowship will enable Austin to complete his dissertation, entitled “Charisma, Community, and Authority: Dominican Epistolary Practice in Italy, 1300-1500,” under the supervision of Professor Katherine L. Jansen.
Since its founding in 1897, The American Academy in Rome has supported work in the humanities and arts through a variety of programs. One of these is the Rome Prize, a nationally competitive fellowship. The Academy awards only twelve fellowships for excellence in the humanities each year, and only half of those are for doctoral students (the Academy's announcement and a full list of this year's awardees are available here).
Austin says, “I am very excited for the opportunity to live at the American Academy and work with late medieval manuscripts at places like Santa Sabina, the Vatican Library, and the Biblioteca Nazionale. While in Rome, I will be able to study how medieval readers engaged with the texts at the center of my project by examining the manuscripts themselves, looking for marginal notations, wear and tear, and other physical traces of medieval reading habits.”
Adds Professor Jansen, who is also the Department’s Chair, “This fellowship can be a game-changer. To live and study with artists, architects, curators, musicians, and scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds is a once in a lifetime opportunity which will open new vistas – both professional and personal – for Austin. This award is also a wonderful testimonial to the quality of the Department of History’s Ph.D. program, whose students get the training to compete with the best and the brightest in the country.”