CCNY Historian Barbara Ann Naddeo Wins 114th Rome Prize

Dr. Barbara Ann Naddeo, Associate Professor of History at The City College of New York (CCNY), was named a winner of the 114th Rome Prize by The American Academy in Rome at its annual awards ceremony at The Harmonie Club in Manhattan last night. 

Professor Naddeo received the award in the Renaissance and Early Modern Italian Studies field, which entitles its recipient to an academic-year-long fellowship at The American Academy in Rome. Beginning September 2010, she will spend a year in Rome as one of a cohort of American scholars working and residing at The Academy for the pursuit of academic and artistic projects. 

The Rome Prize honors Professor Naddeo’s ground-breaking scholarship in her book-in-progress, “Birth of a Metropolis: The Open City and the Social Sciences of Naples, 1650—1800.”

A specialist in the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe, with a focus on Italy, she postulates in “Birth of a Metropolis” that the notion of a city as a laboratory, if usually linked with the intellectual endeavors of the 20th Century, can be dated to the early modern period (approximately C.E. 1500 to C.E. 1800). This is long before sociologist Robert E. Park famously formulated the idea at the start of the last century.

Professor Naddeo will use the fellowship to continue her research.
 
“This is a great opportunity to undertake new archival work and writing in Italy,” she said. “Rome is a city of incomparable beauty, and the host of innumerable libraries and archives which are all of inestimable wealth and importance for the study of early modern European history.”
 
She plans to work in the Vatican Secret Archives, the State Archives of Rome and the Biblioteca Corsiniana as well as return to the cultural institutions of Naples.

Professor Naddeo expects that her new research will take her project in unforeseeable directions, both complicating and enriching her narrative as presently constructed. As she puts it: "Archival work always bears a number of invaluable surprises. And those surprises are precisely what the historian seeks to highlight and account for, as well as what makes archival work both rewarding and fun!" 

Her first book, “Vico, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Enlightenment Social Thought,” an intellectual biography of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, will be published by Cornell University Press this fall. 

Professor Naddeo has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors, including a Fulbright, a Stanford Humanities Fellowship and a NEH Fellowship at the Newberry Library.
 
The Rome Prize is awarded annually through an open competition that is juried by leading artists and scholars in the fellowship fields which include Ancient Studies, Design, Historic Preservation & Conservation, Literature, Medieval Studies, Modern Italian Studies, Musical Competition, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and Visual Arts.
 
The mission of The American Academy in Rome, founded in 1894, is to foster the pursuit of advanced research and independent study in the fine arts and humanities. It is one of the most illustrious research centers dedicated to Italian studies worldwide.