somehipcat

Just got my Italy letter today: it's a no. Auguri to all of the principle candidates!

No Italy notification here, and I'm in Iowa. Maybe Monday?

Wishin&hopin, Thanks for your kind words! Looking at 19th century travel guides, especially Baedecker's or Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, would be one of the more diverting parts of my project. I'm just finishing up my senior year of undergrad, and I'm planning on pursuing an MFA in fiction the year after next. Se tutto va bene, we will both be drinking a cappuccino in Piazza Sant'Eustachio in a few months. But the more I think about things like that, the worse it gets. It's been an awfully long wait. I'll definitely keep you posted if I hear anything!

I'm also waiting on a research grant to Italy. I applied to study at La Sapienza in Rome, and my project is to look at how 19th century American novelists portrayed contemporary Italian (particularly Roman) life in their novels, with an emphasis on how Rome's changing urban layout (i.e. the excavation of the Forum) may have affected how these novelists negotiated the tension between contemporary and ancient Rome. It also generally deals with racism in Grand Tourist narratives. Hard to sum up all the particulars, but I feel like I have to - the short answer to your question, "American lit," seems ludicrous. In bocca al lupo!