Each semester the Italian Academy invites prominent Columbia University professors to open one of their regularly scheduled classes to the public, bringing students and the community together in the Academy building. This spring the Academy welcomes professors from the departments of Art History, Classics, and Italian who will lecture on topics related to Italian history.
Carmela Vircillo Franklin received her B.A. and Ph.D. in Classics (Medieval Latin) from Harvard University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 1993. From July 1, 2005 until September 2010, she served as the 20th Director of the American Academy in Rome. She has now returned to Columbia for the academic year 2010-2011. Her research focuses on Medieval Latin texts and their manuscripts, and much of it is conducted in Europe’s great manuscript repositories, especially the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Among her recent publications are The Latin Dossier of Anastasius the Persian: Hagiographic Translations and Transformations (2004), which follows an interdisciplinary approach to early medieval culture, transcending traditional linguistic and geographical boundaries; and Material Restoration: An 11th Century Fragment from Echternach in a 19th Century Parisian Codex (2009), a study in “material philology.” She is now engaged in a book project provisionally entitled The Liber pontificalis of Pandulphus Romanus: From Schismatic Document to Renaissance Exemplar, centered on the redaction of the papal chronicle created during the schism of 1130. Her other books include The Ecclesiae Atinatis Historia of Marcantonio Palombo (1996) and Early Monastic Rules: The Rules of the Fathers and the Regula Orientalis (1982).
