Six ACM Faculty Will Travel to Italy to See the Florence Program in Action

Faculty from six colleges will travel to Italy on April 12-16 on an ACM-sponsored site visit to the Florence program.

The professors will be both observers and participants during their time in Florence, getting an inside view of the program in action while also sharing their expertise with students by giving guest lectures on topics ranging from Renaissance architecture to art history to fashion.

The five-day itinerary will be busy, as the faculty group meets with students and instructors, attends classes and field trips led by Florence-based staff, and even takes in a wine tasting at one of the oldest wine and olive oil producers in Tuscany — purely for academic purposes, of course!

“Florence Program Director Jodie Mariotti did a superb job of coordinating the topics of the faculty presentations with the content of the courses that the students are taking,” said Joan Gillespie, ACM Vice President and Director of Off-Campus Study. “One of the great strengths of the Florence program is that so many class sessions are held on site around the city, and the faculty who are visiting from the ACM campuses will get the opportunity to do that.”

The schedule of faculty presentations includes:

• A lecture on 20th century art by Gregory Gilbert (art history, Knox College) will be combined with a visit to an exhibit entitled From Kandinsky to Pollock, which is focused on relations between Italy and the US from the 1920s to the 1960s, at Palazzo Strozzi.
• Macalester College mathematics professor Tom Halverson will use a field trip to the Duomo to illustrate the mathematical principles he will discuss in his presentation on Italian Renaissance mathematics, engineering, art, and architecture.
• On a day trip to the Medici Villa of Poggio a Caiano, Beloit College art history professor Jo Ortel will give a lecture when the faculty and students visit Palazzo Fabroni Pistoia. Later in the day, Ben Zeller (religion, Lake Forest College) will talk about food and foodways in Tuscany during a visit to Capezzana, one of the region’s top producers of wine and olive oil.
• The collections of Palazzo Pitti will be the setting for two presentations. At the Galleria del Costume, Coe College theatre professor Susan Wolverton will lecture on the rich tradition in high quality textiles and luxury goods connected to fashion. Rebecca Tucker (art history, Colorado College), who will serve as Affiliated Scholar with the Florence program in spring 2017, will give a lecture on the Medici as collectors of art during a visit to the Palatine Galleries.

The Faculty Site Visits Program promotes engagement with consortial off-campus study by sponsoring visits by groups of faculty to program locations in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the US.

Links:

• Florence: Arts, Humanities, & Culture (fall semester)
• London & Florence: Arts in Context (spring semester and winter quarter/trimester)
• ACM Faculty Site Visits Program