Congratulations to Brian McPhee, one of our graduate students, for winning the Arthur Ross Rome Prize.
The American Academy in Rome presents these fellowships to support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. For 2019-2020, Rome Prizes were awarded to thirty American and six Italian artists and scholars, who will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board for a period of five to eleven months at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome.
In Rome Brian will be working on his dissertation, entitled “Blessed Heroes: Apollonius’ Argonautica and the Homeric Hymns.” He argues that Apollonius engages deeply not just with the epics attributed to Homer, but to his hymns as well, and in fact innovatively fashions the Argonautica into a generically-hybrid “epic hymn” that unites the two streams of Homeric hexameter poetry. In his downtime, Brian looks forward to exploring the city and trying to order espresso in Italian.