Memoria Romana

The project “Memoria Romana: Memory in Roman Civilization” was initiated in 2009 with the award of a Max-Planck Prize for International Cooperation, in the amount of EUR 750,000, to Professor Karl Galinsky, Cailloux Centennial Professor of Classics and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In the humanities, this award is made every four years and the subject is specified; in this case it was Gedächtnisgeschichte. The project is based at the Ruhr–Universität Bochum, which made the successful application.

Historical scholarship centers on determining what actually happened and why (cf. von Ranke's famous dictum), so zu schreiben wie es war. Studies of historical, social, and cultural memory are complementary: they concentrate on what people, and especially groups of people, remember, how these memories evolve, and how they shape identities. Ancient Rome was a memory culture par excellence. Memory pervades all aspects of Roman culture: literature (incl. historiography), art, architecture, religion, and social and political history. Memory, therefore, is a concrete entity in Roman civilization and modern memory approaches do not need to be imposed artificially or extraneously on this organic presence.

The major undertaking, with a large allocation of funds, in the first two years of the project was to support the work especially of younger scholars in this area on an international basis (the modalities for the applications can be accessed here, for informational purposes). We received many more applications than we could fund and the funds have been expended as of late 2011. We are supporting 14 doctoral fellowships (several for two years) and 17 other research projects by postdocs. The objective has been to employ and to test some perspectives, methods, and impulses from current work on Gedächtnisgeschichte (a.k.a. the memory boom) over a broad spectrum of Roman phenomena.

In the final two years (2012/2013), the emphasis is shifting more toward publication. This includes collected papers from some of the highly successful conferences sponsored by Memoria Romana and monographs resulting from the work of its grantees and others. A limited number of subventions is available.

We welcome suggestions and comments. Please write to Prof. Galinsky at galinsky@austin.utexas.edu.

Forthcoming Publications Supported by Memoria Romana

Update (March 2, 2013): The papers based on our conference in Rome (Oct. 2011), with an introduction by Karl Galinsky and the concluding address by Daniel Libeskind, have been accepted for publication as a suppl. volume of Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Title: Memoria Romana: Memory in Rome and Rome in Memory, going to press by the end of this month (March 2013).

• Alessandro Barchiesi: The War for Italia: Conflict and Collective Memory in Vergil's Aeneid. (University of California Press)
• Virginia Fabrizi: Mores veteresque novosque. La rappresentazione del passato e del presente di Roma negli Annales di Ennio. (Pisa, ETS)
• Damien Nelis and Joseph Farrell (eds.): Augustan Poetry and the Roman Republic. (Oxford University Press)
• Emmanuelle Raymond (dir.): Vox poetae: Manifestations auctoriales dans l'épopée gréco–latine. (Lyon, CECOR)
  • Now available! View online at: http://www.decitre.fr/livres/vox-poetae-9782904974380.html
• Stefano Rebeggiani: “Reading the Republican Forum: Virgil's Aeneid, the Dioscuri and the battle of Lake Regillus”, forthcoming in Classical Philology (2013).
• Aaron Seider: Memory in Vergil's Aeneid: Creating the Past (Cambridge University Press)
  • Look out also for Aaron's article, entitled, “Competing Commemorations: Apostrophes of the Dead in the Aeneid”, in AJP 133.2, June 2012.
• Pietro Li Causi: Il riconoscimento e il ricordo. Fama e memoria nel De beneficiis di Seneca (Palumbo Editore, Palermo)
  • Now available! View online at http://www.palumboeditore.it/
• Lauren Ginsberg: “Magni resto nominis umbra: Wars more than Civil in the Pseudo–Senecan Octavia” in AJP 134.4 (2013), on the cultural memory of Pompey and Caesar in the Octavia and the ways in which intertextuality contributes to that memory.

Congratulations (2012-13)!

• Lauren Donovan Ginsberg (tenure-track Assistant Professor, Dept. of Classics, University of Cincinnati)
• Aaron Seider (tenure-track Assistant Professor of Classics, College of the Holy Cross)
• Claudia Moser (Prix de Rome Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome for 2012-13)
• Kelly Shannon (for receiving her doctorate at Oxford and a fellowship at the University of Erfurt to work on Roman religion with Jörg Rüpke)
• Emmanuelle Raymond (for being appointed Maitre de conferences at Universite d'Angers)
• Sarah Davies (tenure-track Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, Whitman College WA)
• Chris Keith (for his appointment as Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Mary's University College, Twickenham, London; For more on Chris' appointment, see here.)
• Virginia Fabrizi (for being awarded a Dahlem Research School Postdoc Fellowship COFUND at the Freie Universität of Berlin)
• Douglas Boin (tenure-track Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, St. Louis University)
• Sinclair Bell (promotion to Associate Professor with tenure, Northern Illinois Univ.)
• Maggie Popkin (tenure-track Assistant Professor, Dept. of Art History, Case Western University)
• Susan Blevins for defending her dissertation (at Emory University) and moving on to the next stage