Featured Interview | Rome Archive Seminar

Interview with: 

Professor Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of History
Hannah Johnston, PhD student, Department of History
Harleen Kaur Bagga, PhD student, Department of Art and Art History
Megan Khoury, PhD student, Department of Art and Art History










 

1. Please tell us about the Rome Seminar and how it benefits Stanford.
   
   Paula Findlen: The Rome Seminar gives graduate students a structured opportunity to focus on the nature of research itself before they embark on a dissertation. Essentially, we're offering the seminar we would have loved to have as graduate students! 
   
   The seminar emphasizes the value of knowing the history of a repository to understand why things ended up there as well as how this material is organized and reorganized over many centuries. We also want to show students why it's important to talk with librarians and archivists. They know things that catalogues alone can't tell you. Last but hardly least, getting comfortable having scholarly conversations in Italian, or any foreign language, is a learned skill. You need to practice!
   
   Stanford's partnership with Notre Dame and Princeton highlights the value of doing things across institutions. Our students who do this program not only get a funded month of guided research in Rome but they meet faculty and students from other universities as well as curators and archivists. They return to campus with this experience guiding them as they write grants and dissertation proposals, which is quite important for that next stage of getting to a fantastic dissertation.
   
   In other words, the community has a great payoff beyond a single summer.
    
2. What skills did you learn that are most valuable to you?
   
   Harleen Kaur Bagga: Apart from the actual skill of accessing archival records, the emphasis on paleography was helpful to me. Going in, I was nervous about reading historical handwriting that can actually be quite different from the kinds of handwriting we are used to – consider the abbreviations, shorthand, and even the very strokes of the hand. By the end of the seminar, I felt more comfortable tackling documents written by different hands.
    
3. Please talk about the impact of the Rome Seminar on your professional growth as a grad student/researcher.
   
   Megan Khoury: The Seminar extends beyond the walls of the archive by creating opportunities for professional relationships to flourish. One of the organizers was able to introduce me to the former head of the American Academy in Rome who was giving a researchers-only tour of a church that was closed to the public. While attending this tour, I met scholars I had been citing in my research for years, as well as former Fulbrighters who shared their experience with me, preparing me for my own Fulbright. The Rome Seminar is immensely valuable in establishing human networks and revealing sources sometimes more valuable than those in archive.
    
4. Can you talk about a particularly vivid memory you have of your time on the Rome Seminar?
   
   Hannah Johnston: One of my most favorite memories is of going with a group of friends from the Seminar to register for our readers’ cards at the Vatican Library. I had felt somewhat intimidated by the process—you have to pass through customs just to get into the library to start your registration!—but the Seminar not only demystified it, but also introduced me to peers who were all sharing this experience. Going with them made the process so much easier, and it’s hard to overstate how much better research work is when you have friends to take your breaks with!