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Education

KNIR Course: Excavating National Pasts

4 December 2023

Excavating National Pasts: Rome and the (Trans)national Archaeologies of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries

This course deals with the history of archaeology, which developed in Europe from antiquarianism and connoisseurship into an academic discipline with its own sets of problems and questions, methods and tools. Since the nineteenth century, the process of nation building and the search for new national identities, rooting in a common past, started to play an important role in the formation of archaeology as a scholarly discipline. Romanità and the Roman past that was shared by all Italians in and beyond Italy became the main ingredients of new narratives that served both the liberal governments since the country’s unification and the fascist regime of the 1920s and 1930s. 

This course questions how local, national and transnational archaeological institutions, projects, and networks interacted in Rome, while at the same time such initiatives (co)constituted the cultural hierarchies and imaginings that played a crucial role in the colonialist, racist and fascist worldviews of the modern era.

More information and application.

Dates: 18-30 March 

Language: English  

For: (R)MA students and PhD’s  

Credits: 5 ETCS 

The KNIR

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.

Interested? Apply via the website. If you have any doubts or questions, feel free to reach out to our KNIR ambassadors. They can answer all your questions and help with applying.

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