Rome Study Center

UC Rome Faculty

Paolo Alei

Prof. Paolo Alei

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Renaissance Art in Rome
Rome: The Age of the Baroque

Paolo Alei's undergraduate education combines both the Italian and American university systems. After two academic years at the University of Rome "La Sapienza," he transferred to John Cabot University, Rome, where he earned his BA in art history. During this period he spent a semester at the University of Venice and another one at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his MA from Columbia University, New York, where he specialized in Venetian Renaissance painting with Prof. David Rosand, and his PhD from Oxford University with a dissertation supervised by professor Martin Kemp on a Plinian topos in Renaissance art—the Renaissance heritage of Timanthes' Sacrifice of Iphigenia. Paolo Alei is a member of the International Association for the Carnival of Venice and has served as a consultant for studies of the ancient Venetian Carnival. He has recently published a book, Venice Carnival, for Artmedia, London. In the last five years, he has taught several courses on Renaissance and Baroque art in various American undergraduate programs in Rome. He is currently rewriting his dissertation and working on an essay on Titian's Louvre Entombement for two forthcoming publications.

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Stefan Bauer

Prof. Stefan Bauer

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Christianity through the Ages

Stefan Bauer is a historian specializing in the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the sixteenth century. Dr. Bauer earned an M.A. in History and Literature at the University of Aachen, Germany, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies at The Warburg Institute, University of London. He has published two books on historiography and has received several research fellowships and prizes in Rome and elsewhere. His current book project deals with the historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530-1568).

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Crispin Corrado

Prof. Crispin Corrado

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Ancient Roman Civilization
Ancient Roman Art

Crispin Corrado is a classical archaeologist specializing in Roman art, who has lived in Rome for seven years. She received her Ph.D. at Brown University, and an MA in Art History and BA in Classics from the University of Chicago. Professor Corrado was a student at the American Academy in Rome's Summer Program in Archaeology, and excavated for two seasons at Pompeii with a team from the University of Rome. She has worked as curatorial intern in the departments of ancient art at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Vatican Museums. While working at these institutions, Professor Corrado assisted in the creation and implementation of exhibitions of ancient art, co-authored catalogs, wrote articles and presented guest lectures. Her major research interests include Roman wall painting, sculpture, and domestic architecture; she is writing an article on Roman sculptural examples of deity assimilation, and her Master's thesis on ancient Roman wall painting was published in the Rivista di Studi Pompeiani. She is currently researching and writing a book on imperial Roman villas.

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Antonella De Michelis

Antonella De Michelis

Courses taught at UC Rome:
The Urban History of Rome
Renaissance City and Society

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Antonella De Michelis has been living in Rome for several years. She is an architectural historian and has earned her degrees from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Her research interests focus on papal urbanism of early 16th-century Rome, in particular the papacy of Paul III Farnese (1534-49), which stems from her doctoral thesis entitled Mapping Farnese Rome: The Urban Planning Process and Projects under Pope Paul III, 1534 to 1549. She is currently publishing a conference paper she presented at the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2004 Annual Symposium at London.

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Prof. Cristiana Filippini

Prof. Cristiana Filippini

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Rome and the Medieval World

Cristiana Filippini (Laurea in Lettere in History of Art at the University of Florence and Ph. D. at Johns Hopkins University) lives and works in Rome, where she teaches art history at various American universities. Her major fields of study are medieval and 17th-century art, with special attention to Rome. She has given several papers and published articles on the subject of Roman art of the Middle Ages, in particular on the issue of narrative strategies in the painting of the Papal city. She is currently working on a monograph on the eleventh-century frescoes of the Church of San Clemente in Rome and researching medieval painters' workshop organization.

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Prof. Julia L. Hairston

Prof. Julia L. Hairston

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Rome and Renaissance Literature
Gender Wars in Early Modern Italy

Julia L. Hairston earned her degrees from Vassar College, the University of Rome "La Sapienza", and Johns Hopkins University. Her primary field of research is Italian literature of the Renaissance, and she specializes in women's writing. She has published articles in Renaissance Quarterly, Exemplaria , and MLN and edited a collection of essays devoted to gender issues in Italian culture. She has also won fellowships from Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. At present, she is preparing a critical edition with facing-page translation of the complete poems and letters of Tullia d'Aragona, a sixteenth-century Roman courtesan and woman of letters (University of Chicago Press), a monograph on d'Aragona, and is co-editing a collection of essays on the body in early modern Italy (Johns Hopkins University Press).

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Prof. Philip Larrey

Prof. Philip Larrey

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Science and Religion in Italy

Originally from Mountain View, California, Fr. Philip Larrey moved to Europe in 1984 in order to complete a Diploma in Classical Languages in Salamanca, Spain, followed by a Licentiate and Doctorate in Philosophy at the Jesuit-run Pontifical Gregorian University by 1994. His areas of interest include 20th century North American analytical philosophy, the philosophy of science, the notion of «Intelligent Design», and the history of Christianity. He is managing editor of the philosophical journal Sensus Communis and a regular contributor to Aquinas, the official publication of the philosophy department of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, where he is Adjunct Professor to the Chair of the Philosophy of Knowledge. He has offered courses on epistemology and metaphysics in Madrid (Spain), Kaoschung (Taiwan), Denver (USA) and the Island of Guam (USA).

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Gregory O. Smith

Prof. Gregory O. Smith

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Culture & Identity in Modern Italy
The Sociology of Rome

Gregory O. Smith, D.Phil. (Oxon.), has lived and worked in Italy for more than twenty years. Born in Texas, he completed his graduate work at the University of Oxford before moving to Rome where he has held various academic positions, including Dean of Academic Affairs at the American University of Rome. He has taught at many universities, among which Temple University, Cornell University, the American University (Washington, DC), and Loyola of Chicago. He was Co-Director of the Institute for Complexity Studies in the 1990s, and organized various conferences and publications on the applications of complexity theory to the social sciences. He continues his research on Italy, focusing in particular on the impact of global change on Italian social fabric. He has also worked for British universities, directing several academic programs in Italy.

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Prof. Anne Wingenter

Prof. Ann Wingenter

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Gender in 20th Century Italy

Anne Wingenter received her Ph.D. in History from Loyola University, Chicago in 2003. Her PhD thesis, a study of war mothers and widows in Fascist Italy, was awarded the Society of Italian Historical Studies’ dissertation prize for that year.  In Rome since completing her doctorate, she has taught courses in the history of travel and modern Italian history for a number of study abroad programs. Her research interests include: gender and women's history; modern Italian history; the history and literature of travel; and, most recently, the history of imperialism. Recent publications include “The Crowd is a Woman: Re-Membering Italian Fascism,” in Shifting Borders: Negotiating Spaces. Bordighera Press, 2006 and “ Voices of Sacrifice: Letters to Mussolini and Ordinary Writing Under Fascism” in Ordinary Writing, Personal Narratives. Peter Lang (Forthcoming 2007). She is currently beginning a project that looks at issues of race in the writings of Italian travelers and colonists in Africa.

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Maria Rita Coppotelli

Prof. Maria Rita Coppotelli

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Italian Language

Maria Rita Coppotelli earned her undergraduate degree in Literature and Music History from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. Later she completed a specialist degree in Language Pedagogy from the Scuola di Specializzazione all’Insegnamento of Latium with a dissertation entitled “Sport, young people, and mass ideologies”. In collaboration with Italian Society of Musicology, the University of Pisa, and the Marco Besso Foundation, she published articles on the manuscripts of composers Alberto Franchetti and Giovanni Pacini and on the figure and myth of Beatrice Cenci in musical theatre. Since 1999 she has been teaching courses on Italian language and culture and began teaching for the University of California, Rome Study Center since its foundation in fall 2003. Her current research focuses on impresari between Italy and America in the 20th century.

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Katia D'Angelo

Katia D'Angelo

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Italian Language

Katia D'Angelo is a teacher of Italian as a second language and a teacher trainer for DITALS certification and in other teacher training workshops (2007 DILIT International House and 2008 Italian Institute of Lima). She has taught Italian at Dilit International House, Pontificia Universitą di Scienze della Formazione, University of California study abroad program in Rome, and at the Italian Cultural Institute of Barcelona. She is currently working on a manual for teenagers learning Italian and an activities book for improving oral comprehension.

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Nadia Martini

Courses taught at UC Rome:
Italian Language

Nadia Martini graduated with distinction in History and Literature from the University La Sapienza of Rome. Having a great interest in Contemporary History, she worked on a research paper in which she explored the thesis that an attempted coup d'état had taken place in connection with the institutional referendum of 1946.After completing her degree, she focused on foreign language acquisition and studied at the DI.L.IT. international House of Rome, where she specialized in teaching Italian as a foreign language. In an endeavour to put theory into practice, she moved to Vienna and experimented with comparative methods of language acquisition, studying German while teaching Italian. After five years abroad, she moved back to Italy and completed a Master in Pedagogy of History at the University of Milan. Moreover, she did editorial work and wrote press reviews for weekly publications in German and cultural reviews for a literary magazine. She now lives and works in Rome and since 2004 has been teaching Italian at the University of California Rome Study Center.

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