Conference: "Texts and Monuments in Augustan Rome" in Rome, Italy

The aim of this summer’s international conference is to enlighten the relationship between texts and monuments in the Augustan city, giving particular (though not exclusive) attention to the Forum Romanum, an important city center often overlooked in scholarship on Augustan Rome. Investigating the relationship between the written Rome and the built Rome is nothing new; the last two decades have already seen important works by Ann Vasaly (1993), Catharine Edwards (1996), A.J. Boyle (2003), and Tara Welch (2005). A parallel preoccupation with text-image relationships more generally has also blossomed in the past decade, guided by, among others, Jaś Elsner (2007), Verity Platt (2011) and Michael Squire (2009, 2012). These works have made important inroads, paving the way for future studies of verbal-visual interactions. In our conference, we aim to take a next step forward by focusing narrowly on the entanglement of individual monuments and the texts that shape them, and vice versa. How do monuments shape texts, and how do texts shape monuments? In what ways do the physical realia of Rome populate and inflect the literary landscape, and what new resonances do authors give to the city through their narratives?

Support generously provided by a grant from the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, Henkels Lecture Series; the Classics Departments at New York University, Stanford University, and the University of Notre Dame; the American Academy in Rome; and the University of Rome, La Sapienza.

Organized by mloar [at] stanford.edu (subject: Texts%20and%20Monuments%20in%20Augustan%20Rome) (Matthew P. Loar), Sarah.C.Murray.164 [at] nd.edu (subject: Texts%20and%20Monuments%20in%20Augustan%20Rome) (Sarah C. Murray), and sr193 [at] nyu.edu (subject: Texts%20and%20Monuments%20in%20Augustan%20Rome) (Stefano Rebeggiani).