Are you interested in Italian (art)history, archaeology or architecture? Then you might enjoy coming to the KNIR! The Royal Netherlands Institute Rome is the oldest and largest of the Dutch Scientific Institutes abroad. The KNIR offers a unique environment in which students and researchers from various backgrounds can work on these and other themes within an excellent interdisciplinary and international context.
The institute’s research facilities, with the extensive library available 24/7 to our guests, the new laboratory for material culture and digital methods, the proximity to museums, archives and archaeological sites and the numerous contacts with Italian and international scientific institutions in Rome and elsewhere give the institute an important role as an intermediary between the Dutch, Italian and international academic communities.
Rome and Florence are of paramount importance to those working in the humanities, since most of its disciplines originate in late medieval or early modern Italy, and even postmodernism has some of its most significant roots in Italian intellectual debates. Therefore, Rome and Florence offer an ideal ground to explore the historiography of art history, history and adjacent fields from both a historical and a contemporary perspective.
The Minor program Italian Art & History, hosted and financed by the Dutch Institutes in Rome and Florence, offers the opportunity to do so to a select group of students from Dutch universities, allowing them to work with a large variety of methodologies in order to understand present-day Italy through its historical developments, as well as stimulating them to critically assess their disciplinary orientation in a profoundly cross-disciplinary context.
What distinguishes this Minor is the on-site teaching, where students are invited to always take into account the first-hand observation of objects, locations, urbanistics and social contexts. In all its courses, students are trained in documenting and analyzing visual materials and performative practices in the Roman and Florentine contexts.
The programme runs during the first semester of 2024-2025. From late August until Christmas, students will stay two months at the KNIR in Rome and two months at the NIKI in Florence. The Minor is concluded with a final essay written in January under the supervision of one of the teachers.
In Rome and Florence: 26 August - 20 December 2024
Rome, caput mundi, is the city of cities. No other place in the world has played such an important role in the development of Western culture, from antiquity until today. Rome’s history of three millennia is still tangible on every street corner and every square in the city, from the Capitol to St. Peter’s and from the classical Forum Romanum to Mussolini’s Foro Italico. In this course we will discuss the many ways to approach and think about this rich cultural heritage. During fourteen days we will research the themes of imagination, authenticity and memory in the construction and presentation of Rome’s world heritage. Participants in the course will actively become acquainted with the fascinating past and present of Rome, visiting a series of famous and less-known sites.
