Faculty Directors Bill North and Victoria Morse discuss the rich cultural and academic experiences to be had on the History, Religion, and Urban Change in Medieval and Renaissance Rome program, which will run next in the Spring of 2027.
What was the inspiration behind the program? Why study history, religion, and urban change in Rome?
V: We both had the opportunity to have fellowships at the American Academy in Rome as graduate students and post-graduates. One of the things that they do is a Walks and Talks series: going around to see things in Rome with somebody who has a kind of specialist knowledge. For me, that was very much a model that I had in mind when I was thinking about an OCS program. We knew we wanted to go to Italy because we both really enjoy Italy and have gotten a lot out of the opportunity to live there, and when we were batting around different ideas, those walks and talks were really inspiring to think about. I’d like to kind of give back to the students, you know… pay forward the opportunities that I’d had.
B: We were debating two main models. One was a multi-city trip, (there are some other OCS trips that work that way) or a trip where we stayed in one city. We decided to be in Rome in part because for a lot of the questions that we’re very interested in, Rome provides ample material wherever you turn. One of our themes in the course is the interaction between different pasts and the present, and the ways in which people are continually navigating and negotiating the presence of the past. They’re deciding what to keep and what to erase; a lot of the things that we do in our courses are exploring that process, recognizing it when it is in front of you, and understanding how people use the past for new projects to create identity, to create senses of power and meaning.
One of the things we valued most about getting to live outside of the country is just getting to live outside of the country. Being able to settle down somewhere and cook for yourself, go to the grocery store, get to know a neighborhood, have people in the neighborhood get to know you. We thought that Rome was rich and complex enough that it would be a place where we could really settle down. Sure, we study medieval history, but the students would be living in a major European city and really getting bedded down in it. So it would have enough for us academically, but plenty to offer them as a place to live.
What does a typical day look like on the program?
B: I would say there are two versions of a typical day. One is where we are having classes, and another is when we’re more in the field. We tend to have classes in the Study Center two days a week, and then site visits both in Rome and outside of Rome on another two days. Class days begin right around nine, and then you have some mix of the two six-credit classes that Victoria and I teach. We also have an Italian language component that gets fit in, and a once a week meeting with a European Studies course called Italian Encounters where we think about our own experience through a number of different lenses; that could be travel writing, contemporary sociology of tourism or different kinds of narratives. We’ve used Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as a kind of lens through which students are encouraged to see the places they’re visiting. The day goes from about nine—on the longest day of the week—until about 3:30, with a lunch break in between.
V: Usually on one day we meet up somewhere in Rome to see something, and then the students are free to be in that part of Rome for the day or make their way back.
B: So we might say, “We will meet you in this particular neighborhood.” We’ll spend an hour to two hours visiting that neighborhood, and that will be the day. Other times…
V: The catacomb day is a little longer.
B: Well, the catacomb day is a little longer. I have a passion for catacombs.
V: On days when we go out of town, we normally take a coach just because there are so many of us. We can’t really use public transportation unless it’s on a train route. That tends to be, you know…go see something, have a lunch break, do a little more visiting, and then come back around four or five. We try to get back in time for dinner.
B: The weekends, unless we have a longer trip, are unprogrammed for the most part. Of course, sometimes we’ve had to take the weekend slot to do certain activities. The Vatican Museum, for instance, can be very difficult to obtain tickets for, and so when our partner organization secures the tickets that’s when we go. But we do try to leave people the weekend. And we have at least a couple of weekends that are three-day weekends so that people can do longer trips. We do restrict travel to within Italy, partly so that nobody gets lost in the world of international air travel.
V: I would have used the term stuck.
B: Yeah, and partly it’s just because there’s an awful lot to see in Italy. Our experience has been that people do find that to be true—they don’t get bored. But it’s really more because our program is pretty much like a Carleton term. Once we start, we’re going. And if somebody were to take a weekend and suddenly there’s a wildcat strike with airline pilots in Poland and they’re in Warsaw, we have very few resources to help them. Whereas if there’s a train strike in Milan and they’re in Milan for the weekend, we can actually rent a car and drive to Milan and back.
V: I think the other thing is that we do want people to try to use their Italian even though plenty of people are just starting out and don’t know very much. But if you stay in Italy, you have more opportunities to hear Italian, use it, and think about it. And even if your Italian is at the level of ordering a coffee or reading a sign, you’re having more opportunities to practice.
How is student housing organized?
B: Our partner organization begins almost a year in advance to put together a variety of housing contracts. They work with local partners who specialize in student housing, but they also just go into the open rental market to identify properties and apartments that would be appropriate. They have a person on staff whose responsibility is housing, and they work with our students. If there are issues that arise, they try to resolve them. Sometimes it takes very little time, other times it takes a little more. But that’s where our partner organization really takes a burden off of us, because if we were doing it, that would be very very difficult—probably not possible. Once we’ve set our number of students in the early fall, then they can make contracts. And then they’ll come and say, “Here’s what we have identified.” And then they tell us how many rooms and beds there are per apartment.
V: We also have a housing questionnaire. And we go through and do our best to match people up in ways that respect their preferences and figure out how to fit them into those particular configurations of apartments.
What makes this program unique? What do you want students to know about Rome?
V: It’s one of the few OCS programs that focuses on the premodern world. There are a couple of others in classics, but in terms of really focusing on a piece of the deeper history that’s not contemporary, it’s fairly unusual in the OCS world. And for a very good reason; people want to have homestays and go where they’re learning their language or whatever. But being in Rome allows us to teach medieval history in a way that we could not teach at Carleton. It’s super exciting for us in that way.
B: I think OCS actually is one of our most interdisciplinary kinds of contexts for teaching. I mean, organically. You know, everything I’ve heard about the London program is that you’re doing history and literature and sociology and art history, architectural history and urban studies all in a moment. We’re doing something similar. We feel something similar.
V: That said, if you think about Rome as being the heart of the ancient Roman Empire, the heart of Catholicism and a modern capital with a really important role to play in World War II and in the contemporary Italian state…there’s a lot of major things that are all right there. A lot of what we’re looking at is, “How does a city deal with the fact that it has all that history?” The history of ancient Rome is supercharged. I mean, we can count on our students knowing about Roman gods, right? Of the very few things that you can count on pretty much all Carleton students knowing, they’re going to know who Jupiter is, who Zeus is, in a way that you just wouldn’t assume about anything else. And then, for the religion part, Catholicism is a major world religion, and we had the fascinating experience on the last program to be there when the Pope died and for the election of the new Pope. Even if you’re not particularly affected by that, there’s this whole theater and pageantry and world-level political activity going on that is, I think, really fascinating for people.
What are you most looking forward to?
V: As I said, I really like to live in Italy and so there’s just plain joy in being able to organize my life in the different way it gets organized when I’m in Rome: not having a car, walking to the grocery store, buying different food, shopping at the market. There’s a lovely little hardware store that is about as big as this office that has everything in the universe packed in. There is great joy in walking in and saying, “Do you have a whatever-it-is?” And they’re like, “Yes!” And they go zipping off to that shelf and climb way up on the ladder, and look behind other boxes, and pull out the whatever-it-is. So those kinds of things to me are just an utter joy of being in Italy. Not to mention the coffee is good. So that, and then I think we always have this wonderful mix of getting to deepen our knowledge and relationship with specific places that we go to frequently, and going to whole new places and being like, “Whoa, I can’t believe we’ve never seen that before.”
B: I would also say that we’ve been fortunate to go with groups of students who have been very excited about what we’re doing and very motivated to explore on their own. Every time we go back, the students show me a new dimension of something that I feel like I know pretty well. And they have their own new haunts. They take us to different places. They see different things. We had a student two programs ago who was a religion major and really made a point to visit any church we went by. He went to modern churches, medieval churches, baroque churches, and following him around opened up spaces that I find very interesting to think about, relate to what I am teaching, but that I wouldn’t necessarily have paused to go into. Having 25 people who are all looking and responding differently is really an exciting gift. And every program ends up being very different because it’s a different group of people.
Why should students consider going on an off-campus studies program?
V: Well, partly because it is a fabulous opportunity to go and immerse yourself in a new place in a way that’s going to change your perspective on where you normally live. That is easier when you’re at Carleton than it’s going to be at any later point in your life, most likely. Unless you’re working for a company that sends you to go work somewhere, mostly it just gets harder and harder to take ten weeks and go live in a new place. I think it is extremely valuable to actually go out, see the world, go to some place that you haven’t been before, or you haven’t lived in before, and really kind of settle down there and try to see what the world looks like from that perspective. And you interact with people who have many similarities to you, but also many, many differences. You learn different value structures, attitudes, and ideas.
B: Also, it takes you out of a variety of comfort zones. You’re challenged to observe more intently. Those habits where you don’t even really look at the route you’re taking to do certain things become something that you are thinking about. You’re noticing things. I would also say that you should go on an off-campus study if you want to. Maybe it goes without saying, but if you want to, then in some ways you’re already thinking this is a worthwhile thing to do, and that’s a good state of mind to pursue off-campus study. It’s really wonderful when you have students who want to be there, and who know it’s going to be challenging but are kind of open to what comes. OCS offers you so much to think with: physical experiences, visual experiences, auditory experiences that offer you new comparables.
V: Yes, and it’s important to remember that off-campus study can have different meanings for different people. Clearly we have lots of international students who are already having off-campus experiences by being here at Carleton, and we’ve had many international students come along with us on the Rome program because they wanted another international experience. They wanted to know what it was like to be in Italy as opposed to in the U.S. or wherever they were originally from. But for a lot of people who haven’t been out of the U.S. before, it’s an eye-opening experience just to be in a place that organizes itself differently. Being in an Italian-speaking world, feeling what it’s like to be the person who’s speaking your own language when you’re in another language-dominant community gives you a different perspective when you come back here and you run into people speaking languages other than English. I think that’s all positive. And Rome is just full of everybody, you know? Everybody in the world is somewhere in Rome.
Is there anything else you’d like to highlight about the program?
B: I think one of the things I’d like to highlight is that although it’s a program that focuses on specific areas—history, religion, art history, and urbanistica (urban studies)—we welcome and enjoy having students from across the disciplines. It’s not a program where you think, “Oh, if I haven’t decided on a history major, then this isn’t for me.” We’ve had wonderful students who are majoring in CS, mathematics, physics, geology…across the board. It’s a very Carleton experience. The right person for the program is the person who wants to actually do our program.
V: We’re eager to find people who are going to lean into the program and be good members of the community in whatever way that looks like for them.
B: That’s another aspect of off-campus study: you are put into a group that you haven’t necessarily chosen. It’s another experience of adjustment and getting to know people better.
V: We’ve had students who’ve said, “Well, I signed up in part because I thought I’d meet a whole different group of people than the people I normally hang out with.” So that’s another plus.
