Recipients of the George T. and Margaret W. Romani Fellowships

2022-23

Laura Hutchingame (Art History)

In the shape of an inverted ship hull, and decorated with painted ornamental motifs and sculpted details, wooden ship hull ceilings appeared in civic and religious buildings in the Upper Adriatic region c. 1250-1450. The extant ceilings are scattered throughout the terraferma and are located near historic lumber reserves for the Venetian Republic. In late medieval Venice, however, the overlapping traditions of shipbuilding, carpentry, and wood construction, as well as the artisanal collaboration institutionalized by the trade guilds, offer a particular inflection of the ship hull ceiling that merits investigation. Three intact ceilings remain in the Venetian churches of S. Giacomo dell’Orio(late 13th c.), S. Caterina (14th or 15th c.), and S. Stefano (early-mid 15th c.). As a prominent Mediterranean entrepôt, a port for travel to the Holy Land, and center of the largest pre-industrial manufacturing enterprise in Europe at the Arsenale (state shipyards)—late medieval Venice provides a rich context in which to examine three cases of a larger phenomenon. With a focus on the three cases, my dissertation, Ship Hull Ceilings in the Venetian Lagoon: Construction, Shipbuilding, and Craft, c. 1250-1450 is the first study of the ceilings in relation to nautical architecture, artisanal expertise in Venice, and environmental histories. My project approaches ship hull ceilings as sites of converging craft traditions and reconsiders conceptions of artistic production, manufacture, and labor in the late medieval lagoon.

2021-22

Hannah Maryan Thomson (Art History)

Hannah’s dissertation, A Gallery of Stones: The Castilian Frontier City of Ávila, 11th – 14th centuries, employs a social-art-historical approach to rethinking eleventh- to fourteenth-century frontier spaces by centering architecture and urbanism at the forefront of Christian conquest in Castile. Eleventh- to fourteenth-century Castile, in central Iberia, was a period of immense social, political, and economic upheaval which ushered in a substantial building boom as the region was flooded with new settlers. The rare preservation of Ávila’s towering twelve-meter-tall walls, which still retain their original perimeter intact, multiple parish churches, the cathedral, and bishop’s palace offer a rare contemporary view of a walled medieval frontier city. Utilizing Ávila’s surviving monuments and their urban layout as primary source evidence, Hannah’s research investigates how the built environment responded to and shaped the social fabric of the city.

2022-21
Not offered

2019–20

Kersti Francis (English)

2018–19

Not offered

2017–18

Adam Woodhouse (History)

2016-17

Not offered

2015–16

Lucia Staiano-Daniels (History)

2013–14

Jimmy Fishburne (Art History)
Aaron Mead (Philosophy)

2012–13

Lindsay Johnson (Musicology)
Sara Torres (English)

2011-12

Emily Selove (Near Eastern Languages & Cultures)
Antonio Zaldivar (History)

2010–11

Kate Craig (History)
Katherine McLoone (Comparative Literature)

2009-10

Marine Aykazyan (French & Francophone Studies)
Heather Sottong (Italian)