OUR HISTORY & MISSION

Many thanks for your interest in our 2006 NEH Summer Institute, We’d like to take this opportunity to tell you something about how the Institute will run and what we hope it will accomplish.

The idea for this Institute sprang from a combination of excitement and frustration: excitement over the potential of computer modeling to help us understand the Roman world, and frustration that its capabilities are neither widely nor well understood. Though courses on Roman social history, political theory and practice, urbanistics, and popular culture appear with growing frequency in the curriculum, they rarely bring to bear the evidence of Roman buildings and public spaces. Applying textual and material evidence simultaneously to a single problem is not easy, nor is the ability to think three-dimensionally with two-dimensional tools. Students, even when in Rome, find it difficult to work back from what remains on a site today to what was there two millennia ago. Yet digital simulations of Roman buildings are readily available, ranging from the fanciful animations seen in films and television to the QuickTime movies common on educational CDs to fully three-dimensional Virtual Reality models. We need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the technologies that produce them and the value of such models for teaching and research. This institute was thus conceived with three goals: to demystify the technology, to show what it can do, and to equip participants with the knowledge and the tools necessary to use it in their own work. Helping us realize these goals will be the extraordinary resources of UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center and the facilities of its Academic Technology Center, which will supplement the more traditional strengths of a major research library and a dedicated faculty.

SCHEDULE OVERVIEW

The Institute will begin with a survey and demonstration of the technologies currently used to recreate ancient buildings, concentrating on the Pantheon at Rome and the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, which we can compare with, in the former case, the existing structure and in the latter, its recreation in Malibu (the newly reopened Getty Villa). We will then concentrate on three famous, highly problematic locales that are the focus of much recent scholarly discussion: the Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum), The Roman Forum, and the Capitol. We will consider the ancient textual and archaeological evidence for each site, the practical uses and ideological significance of each site, and what computer-generated reconstruction of these structures and their surrounding spaces can add to our understanding of those functions. Participants will have the opportunity to interrogate and manipulate these models for themselves and will be encouraged to consider how best to bring similar experiences to their students. We will be assembling a collection of ancient texts (in translation) and modern scholarship for your use, as well as DVD/CD-ROM versions of the models that you will be able to take home with you. We should thus be able to bring the fruits of current research into classrooms across the country.

INSTITUTE FACULTY

The Institute faculty has been drawn from a pool of scholars well known for their innovative efforts to integrate the study of the Roman material world into more traditional studies of Roman literature and politics. The co-directors have complementary interests: Sander Goldberg, from UCLA’s Department of Classics, comes to the study of Roman spaces through the study of Roman literature, while Diane Favro, from the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, builds her work upon a background in architecture and urbanistics. Investigation of our three target sites will be headed by a group of visiting scholars well known for their research in these areas: Harvard’s Kathleen Coleman, for the study of the Colosseum, Robert Morstein-Marx (UC Santa Barbara) and Joy Conolly (NYU) for the Roman Forum, and Mary Beard (Cambridge) for the Capitol. Oxford’s Nicholas Purcell will join our final, more theoretical discussion of urban design.

Our two British colleagues will be joining us via video conferencing technology, but all other visiting faculty will be on hand for instruction and private consultation during their sections of the program. We will also have a session with Dr. Kenneth Lapatin of the Getty Museum’s Department of Antiquities. The co-directors will of course be available continuously throughout the two-week period.

LOCATION

The Institute will be held on the UCLA Westwood campus in the facilities of Academic Technology Services (ATS). In addition to ATS’s Technology Sandbox, we will also have access to the Visualization Portal, a state-of-the-art facility ideal for projecting the ETC real-time models of ancient Rome. One day will be spent at the Getty Villa, newly re-opened in Malibu.