Professor Charles Waldheim, Associate Dean and Director, Master of Landscape Architecture Program, has been awarded the annual Rome Prize Fellowship of the American Academy in Rome in the Landscape Architecture category.

The Rome Prize Fellowship extends Prof. Waldheim’s research on the role of landscape as an element of urban order in the context of decentralizing urban form in North America. He will use the time in Rome to examine the role of landscape in a particular moment of depopulation in the urban history of Rome: the ancient Roman disabitato. This experience at the American Academy in Rome will contribute a chapter to Prof. Waldheim’s ongoing work on agrarian models for contemporary urbanism.

Through its annual fellowship program, the American Academy supports a small group of individuals highly regarded for their work in 18 arts and humanities disciplines including architecture, landscape architecture, painting, poetry and musical composition. These artists and scholars spend a period at the Academy, working on independent projects and participating in informal dialogue and organized symposiums with other Fellows.

The American Academy in Rome is the only American overseas center for independent study and advanced research in the fine arts and humanities. Its original founders included architects Charles Follen McKim and Daniel Burnham, painters John La Farge and Francis Millet and supporters Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., J.P. Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt. Through its Rome Prize fellowships and visiting artists and scholars program, the Academy provides an opportunity for interaction between individuals in disciplines such as archaeology, architecture, classical studies, historic preservation and conservation, history of art, landscape architecture, literature, modern Italian studies, musical composition, post-classical humanistic studies and visual art.