Many of you have written me asking how we are doing! Thanks for your caring inquiries. The answer is: everything here is pretty normal, Yes, the tourist crowds have thinned, but the city is by no means deserted – despite what the news or an extreme article in The New Yorker might tell you. (More […]
How to Navigate Italian Bureaucracy: #1, the Post Office
Italian bureaucracy is infamous, and for good reason. As a “high context culture,” meaning in Italy is often conveyed in subtle ways that a non-native speaker or foreigner might miss. Add to this that contemporary Italians- and especially Romans – are descendants of a culture that practically invented the concept of bureaucracy to manage a […]
We have arrived…
After a lot of paperwork, and the eruption of a worldwide coronavirus panic, we finally managed to arrive in Rome. While some people wore masks on the plane (mostly incorrectly, I should add) the only notice something was up came when we landed. Instead of deplaning onto a jetway we parked on the tarmac and […]
The First Day
I met my students for the first time on Tuesday, for the first session of my seminar in the History of American Foreign Policy. What an amazing group of students! I am very excited to teach this group. I am also confronted immediately with the differences between American and Italian styles of teaching at the […]
My First Blog Post
Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken. — Oscar Wilde. What happens when an American historian goes to Rome on a Fulbright, at a very confusing time in U.S. politics ? Add in a splash of pandemic and stir.
Hi, I’m Lauren.
I started this blog to catalog the experiences I was about to have as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Rome, Italy, in Spring 2020. For some months I had envisioned my biggest challenge as a Fulbrighter, and one likely to be of interest to a lot of people, would be how to explain U.S. history […]
Adventures of a US Historian on a Fulbright in Rome 