The dates for the 2025 Seminar are June 2 to June 27.
There are extraordinary and understudied materials in libraries and archives in the city for archeologists and classicists, art historians and historians, musicologists and students of theater and performance, historians of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the world, specialists in the Near East and East Asia. The holdings of the Vatican Library alone include priceless manuscripts and documents from East Asia, the near East, and North Africa – as well as a vast collection of ancient, medieval and early modern texts in Greek and Latin, a unique resource for the history and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, of Christianity from its origins until recent times, of relations between Christians and Jews from antiquity onwards, and other subjects without number.
Previous seminar participants include students of art history, history, literature, political science, medieval studies, film studies, and musicology. Their areas of intellectual interest ranged from Byzantine art, papal humanism, hospitals, charity and pilgrimage, Persian embassies and the Chinese missions to art and science, fascist textile production, the history of sexuality, and politics and church in the postwar era. They have taken up primary sources like Anglo-Latin manuscripts, a Hebrew Arthurian legend, socioeconomic records of daily life, institutional records of church and state, art and material culture, films, and twentieth-century letters. Participants have come from Brown, Catholic University, Emory, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, Syracuse, University of Chicago, University of Melbourne, University of Minnesota, University of Notre Dame, University of Texas Austin, University of Toronto, and others.
The professors in charge of the seminar this year are Paula Findlen (Stanford) and Heather Minor (Notre Dame). Please direct any questions about the seminar to Prof. Minor at hhydemin@nd.edu.
This seminar is made possible by generous support from Stanford University, the Princeton University Humanities Council, and from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, the Charles and Margaret Hall Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and the Center for Italian Studies.
Qualifications
We welcome applications from students from any discipline at any stage in their graduate education who have not done extensive research in Rome prior to the seminar. To be eligible to apply, you must be enrolled full-time in a Ph.D. program. The focus of your research need not be Rome but you should have an interest in developing that research through the use of primary sources located in the city. Each successful applicant will receive a stipend of up to $4,000 to defray travel costs, housing, and meals in Rome
Application Instructions
Please send through Interfolio – http://apply.interfolio.com/152258 – the following documents: a CV, a statement of interest, the name of one referee and the email address of the referee. Please confirm with your referee directly that an Interfolio link arrives to upload your letter of reference.
The application deadline is October 31. Review of applications will take place quickly after the deadline and applicants will be notified of the outcome no later than January.
For questions about the seminar, please contact Prof. Heather Minor at: hhydemin@nd.edu.
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The Background Check policy does not apply to applicants to the seminar.
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