The BSR Podcast

A lecture by Stefano Camporeale (Siena) part of the City of Rome Lecture Series.

With the co-ordination of the Soprintendenza of Rome, a research team carried out in 2013-17 an archaeological study and restoration programme of the northern substructures of the Domus Tiberiana. Through stratigraphic, technical and structural analyses of this complex, new data has emerged on the function and different phases of the various rooms and buildings, on the construction processes, and on the urban organization of the Palatine’s northern slope.

Dal 2013 al 2017 un gruppo di lavoro coordinato dalla Soprintendenza di Roma si è occupato dello studio archeologico e del restauro delle sostruzioni settentrionali della Domus Tiberiana. A partire dall’analisi stratigrafica, tecnica e strutturale di questo complesso sono emerse nuove informazioni sulla funzione e fasi cronologiche dei vari ambienti ed edifici, sui processi costruttivi e sull’urbanistica delle pendici nord del Palatino.

A lecture by Eloisa Dodero (Musei Capitolini) as part of the City of Rome lecture series.

L’istituzione del Museo Capitolino con i due chirografi di papa Clemente XII del dicembre 1733 rappresenta un episodio di grande importanza nel panorama culturale dell’Europa del Settecento. Prototipo del museo moderno, per la razionalizzazione degli spazi espositivi, l’apertura al pubblico dei giovani artisti, la creazione di nuove figure professionali e la pubblicazione di cataloghi illustrati e guide per i visitatori, negli anni centrali del Settecento il Museo Capitolino costituisce una tappa immancabile nella Roma del Grand Tour e come assoluta novità viene percepito, tra gli altri, da Jean-Jacques Barthélemy e Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Questa presentazione intende ripercorrere i momenti fondamentali della storia più antica del Museo Capitolino, dall’atto fondativo del 1733, maturato nella necessità di salvare la collezione del cardinale Alessandro Albani dal rischio di una rovinosa dispersione, al trauma della partenza per Parigi dei capolavori capitolini all’indomani del Trattato di Tolentino del 1797.

Tomaso Binga in conversation with Raffaella Perna (Sapienza) followed by a performance. Part of the BSR Fine Arts Talk Gender Series

A talk by John Walter as part of the BSR Fine Arts Talk Gender Series

BSR-Institute of Classical Studies Rome-London Lecture by Catharine Edwards (Birkbeck).

Volney’s hugely influential work Les Ruines (1791) had a profound effect on responses to ruins, not just those of exotic Palmyra (with which Volney’s treatise opens) but also the more familiar ruins of Rome. Les Ruines plays a small but crucial role in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her later writing, especially works composed in or about Rome (her fragmentary story ‘Valerius: the reanimated Roman’ and her novel The last man), deploys the remains of ancient Rome to explore complex temporalities, alert to the politics of ruins and inflected by a distinctively Volneyan aesthetic.

Round table with Alan Williams (National Collection of Aerial Photography), Elizabeth J. Shepherd (Aerofototeca Nazionale-ICCD) and Alessandra Giovenco (BSR).

A lecture by Ian Campbell (QUB)

Society for Renaissance Studies Lecture by Jane Grogan (UCD).

This paper introduces a long-forgotten Tudor figure, William Barker, and argues for his significance to our understanding of post-Reformation English Renaissance culture. Sometime Cambridge scholar, traveller to Italy, and accomplished translator from ancient Greek, Barker became a key figure in the ill-fated Ridolfi plot (which sought to put Mary Queen of Scots on Elizabeth’s English throne). But quite apart from the interest of his own story, his life and works cast light on unnoticed intellectual networks operating in Renaissance England, and point to the need to rethink our understanding of its social and political world, as well as its literary history.

A lecture by Andrew Hopkins (Università degli Studi Dell’Aquila)

A lecture by Robin Lane Fox (Oxford), co-organised with the American Academy in Rome as part of the 2018 Jerome Lecture Series.

The Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures Series is among the most prestigious international platforms for the presentation of new work on Roman history and culture. They are presented at both the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan. In 2018, the forty-fifth year of the lecture series, Robin Lane Fox, a noted scholar of ancient history, will discuss the natural world in pagan and Christian Rome.
The lectures will explore the differing approaches to the natural world by pagans and the early Christians, from Paul and the Gospels to circa 500 CE. They will bring out differing emphases in their respective writings and art and will ask what practical effects such different ways of seeing had on contemporary life.