WORKS IN PROGRESS

BOOK:

On the Street of the Hidden Shops: A Metaphoric Archaeology of Rome (University of Chicago Press)

Rome is a city where history reveals itself in a continuous peeling back of layers, whether in the underbellies of its structures, in archaeological sites, or in museums. The most remarkable of these is the Crypta-Balbi Museum, which occupies a large part of a block in the center of the city.

One winter day, after visiting the museum, I took a stroll around the block. I passed the usual Roman stew of museum, church, palace, historic marker, decay, and debris, but was struck this time by the broad range of stories they presented. I found testaments to the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the abduction of young Ester Mieli by the Nazis; I watched an unhoused man build a shelter in the doorway of a decommissioned church, a few feet away from a poster protesting the dumping of garbage on the streets; I saw spaces occupied by Polish pilgrims and by hip tourists on e-bikes.

I knew that this same block had housed ancient glassworkers and rope makers, the daughters of prostitutes and other marginalized women, and an 2nd -century latrine. I learned that it had also been a target of fascist city planning and the center of a debate over urban renewal strategies in the 1960s. Many Italians associate the block with the Communist party, and some writers link it to an avant-garde literary journal, Botteghe oscure.

In fact, this block fronts the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, or the “Street of the Hidden Shops,” named for the medieval shops that were set up in the ruined foundations of the Crypta-Balbi theater, built in 13 BCE. The name is apt for a book that seeks to uncover stories that have been forgotten behind and beneath the stones of Rome.

I am represented by Karen Gantz Literary Management. Thank you to the New York Public Library for supporting me and my work through the Humanities Research Center .

Mobile Things

I am interested in the mobility of objects and their shifting meanings as they circle the globe. What stories do they tell? How do their meanings and values change? And how can museums better communicate these layered histories?

My work in this area has been supported by the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where I was a Visiting Fellow in the spring of 2018. There I investigated strategies for re-activating once peripatetic collection objects, attending to objects that spanned the Mediterranean, literally or conceptually, in the early modern period.

A related project, carried out in the collection of the Walters Art Museum through a 2009 course a Johns Hopkins University, resulted in an on-line tour of select Walters' objects, titled Art on the Move. I discuss this project in more detail in the Archive Journal; it has also been featured by the  Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities.

My 2018 article in Art History investigates historical attitudes toward mobility in the context of sixteenth-century Venice, with particular attention to objects imported from the eastern Mediterranean. 

Sustainable Heritage

The protection and preservation of cultural heritage is very much in the news, as we watch thousands of years of human history eroded and destroyed by acts of war and terrorism, by natural and human-caused environmental stress, and by the impact of globalization.

But "preservation" is complicated. Who decides what gets preserved and how? How should the benefits of modern life be balanced with the desire to preserve the past? What are the best ways to share the benefits that come from preservation and to distribute the costs and risks, and how should we balance local concerns with global ones?

I have long been interested in the role museums play in such questions, but I am increasingly focused on spaces outside of museums, from archaeological sites to historic cityscapes to spaces of daily living. A series of essays on Italian topics is in the works.