MEMORY IN ROME AND ROME IN MEMORY
            A Conference at the American Academy in Rome
October 14-16, 2011

Over the past three decades, scholarship on social and cultural memory has flourished.  What do societies choose to remember, what do they choose to forget, who controls this process, and how do these memories shape their culture?  Ancient Rome is a paradigm: Roman writers defined history as the preservation of memory.  This conference illuminates various aspects of the phenomenon and also places it in a larger context, such as contemporary architecture of commemoration and recent breakthroughs in neuroscience.  The conference is part of the Max-Planck Award project Memoria Romana, which is currently funding fourteen doctoral fellows and seventeen other grantees.

Oct. 14 (Friday)

9:30 am  Welcome and Opening Remarks
Prof. Christopher Celenza, Director, American Academy in Rome
Prof. Karl Galinsky, Director, Memoria Romana Project

9:45  Session I: Rome – memory and memoirs

Session Chair: Corey Brennan (Rutgers University/American Academy in Rome)

9.45 Richard Jenkyns (Oxford University)
The Memory of Rome at Rome

10.45-11.15 Break

11.15 Harriet Flower (Princeton University)
Memory and Memoirs in Republican Rome

12.15 End

2:30 pm  Session II: Memoria in ancient Rome

Session Chair: Karl Galinsky (Univ. of Texas at Austin/
Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

2.30 T. P. Wiseman (University of Exeter)
Popular Memory

3.10 Response: Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp (Universität zu Köln)
In Defence of Concepts, Categories and other Abstractions:
Remarks on a Theory of Memory (in the Making).

3.35 break

4.00 discussion

4.30 Gianpiero Rosati  (Università di Udine)
Myth, memory, and power in Statius'  Silvae

5:30 Reception  BASS GARDEN

Oct. 15 (Saturday)

9:30 am  Session III: Memoria in Roman art and topography

Session chair:  Elizabeth Bartman, President, Archaeological Institute of America

9.30 Diane Favro (UCLA)
Moving Events: Scripting the Memory of Roman Procession

10.30 break

11.00 Jessica Hughes (The Open University)
From Arch to Archive: The Memory-Life of a Roman Spolia Monument

11.50 Anna Anguissola (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
Remembering Greek  Masterpieces: Copies as a Strategy for Memory in Roman Art

12.40 End

2:30 pm  Session IV: Ancient and modern memories

Session Chair: Vernon Hyde Minor (Univ. of Illinois)

2.30 Lisa Mignone (Brown University)
Remembering a Geography of Resistance: Aventine Secessions, Then and Now

3.15 Bernard Frischer (University of Virginia)
Cultural and Digital Memory: Case Studies from the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory

4.15 Break

4.45 Alessandro Treves (SISSA, Trieste)
Remembering Space, and Making Space for Memories

6.00 End

Oct. 16 (Sunday) VILLA AURELIA: SALA AURELIA

11.00  am Session V:  An architect’s perspective on memory

Session Chair: Karl Galinsky

Introduction of speaker
Cinzia Abbate
Studio AeV

Daniel Libeskind (Studio Daniel Libeskind, New York)
Counterpoint

Followed by discussion

12.15 End

On Oct. 14 and 15, all talks will take place at the American Academy in Rome, Via Angelo Masina 5.  There will be discussion after each lecture.  The program will be open to the public - no registration is required.
We regret very much that Prof. Aleida Assmann will not able to take part in the conference due to her husband’s illness and we wish Jan Assmann a good and complete recovery.

Invited Discussants

Douglas Boin (Georgetown)

Glenn Most (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)