Congratulations to Professor Maggie Popkin who has been awarded the Rome Prize, which involves residence at the American Academy in Rome! Professor Popkin’s project is titled “Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome,” and her description is as follows:

“My project investigates souvenirs from the Roman Empire commemorating places, people, and events that straddled spheres of religion, spectacle, leisure, and politics. Souvenirs offer a unique resource for exploring the experiences, interests, imaginations, and aspirations of people living in the Roman world beyond elite, metropolitan male authors and moneyers. I argue that souvenirs generated and shaped shared memory and knowledge and constructed imagined cultural affinities across the empire’s heterogeneous population. At the same time, souvenirs strengthened local and regional identities and excluded certain groups from the social participation they afforded so many others. Drawing on a fundamentally multidisciplinary approach, my project demonstrates how souvenirs—affordable, portable, and widely accessible—were critical to shaping how Romans perceived and conceptualized their world and their relationships to the empire that shaped it.”