Professor Ingrid Rowland

Professor Ingrid Rowland, a renowned scholar of Vitruvius and the Baroque and Renaissance period who teaches at the School’s Rome program, shared stories of her background, her teaching style and why the Rome experience is crucial for developing architects. Among students she is known as a phenomenal thinker and “perhaps the quirkiest professor one will ever have.” The daughter of a Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sherwood Rowland, Prof. Rowland knows much about Roman and Etruscan history along with colorful tales of the Borgia and various other Italian Renaissance families. She is the author of many books including, most recently, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher Heretic, which the New Republic called “A marvelous feat of scholarship .... This is intellectual biography at its best.”

What is your background?
I’m a full professor at the Rome Studies Program of the School of Architecture. I teach architectural history to third-year architecture students and also to graduates. According to Italian immigration I’m a “detached” professor. It’s the same word you use for “detached retina,” and so, I’m detached from South Bend to Rome. In Notre Dame terms, I work on the Rome campus.

My background is completely odd. I started out thinking I would do scientific archeology, and as I was studying archeology, I got interested in Greek literature. When I was interested in Greek literature I went to Rome where I fell in love with baroque architecture. I ended up doing something called “Antiquity in the Renaissance” which made it so that I could take my knowledge of classics and apply it to Renaissance art, Renaissance literature, even the way people walked and danced in the Renaissance. And from the Renaissance period I got interested in the 17th century and had been working on various kinds of history on the 17th century. Because of my classical training I’m also really interested always in language and in foreign translation, and my translation projects come out of that. I’ve translated Vitruvius’ The Ten Books on Architecture from Latin to English. I just finished a translation of the Italian 16th century philosopher Giordono Bruno’s work, which is like a dialogue with sonnets. I translated that into English, putting the sonnets into rhyming English sonnets, and my next project is on Pompeii in the modern imagination. I’m really all over the place. 
 
Tell us about your teaching style. It’s been said that you use gossip as a form of teaching.
I slid into my teaching style because I was always looking at my students’ faces and I’ve been operating by watching them, and seeing what works for them. In graduate school we were always told that the kind of history the ancients wrote about isn’t the kind of history we’re interested in and then they’d say, “The ancients wrote gossip and we’re really interested in historical processes.” And I thought, wait a minute, I’m really interested in gossip; nobody that I ever talked to was uninterested in gossip, and therefore, I started realizing that a lot of what I do is research into gossip of the Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque world. And it’s still just as interesting to people as it always was.

Mostly what I do teaching is telling stories, in the belief that if you look at a building and simply put a date on it, it doesn’t mean anything if the date isn’t attached to people. I find that my students remember stories much better than anything else. And if you tell a story, they’ll associate the story with the building. If it’s a gossipy story, it often works even better, and students tend to come back from Rome knowing through people what was going on. What I found out just recently in the past month is that if I do a whole series of buildings connected to a single person---that works really well. And this is something I just tried for the first time, and everybody said it was the best class ever. I think it was the fact that they have been having class long enough that it no longer seems like a strange thing walking around Rome and buildings, but in fact, the human connection always works pretty well.
 
Why is the Rome program so important to the School of Architecture’s curriculum?
I think that the best thing about university students is that they’re still curious and they’re uninhibited about being curious. They see something, they ask a question and there’s nothing constraining them. They don’t worry about seeming dumb. They just want to know. And the best thing about taking them out in the real world of Rome, rather than showing them slides, is that you’ve got the real thing in front of you. They can ask all the things that you’ve not noticed or that you’ve tried to ignore. When you’re doing a slide lecture you control the images. When I go out into Rome, I’m under no control of anything. I can’t control what they see. I can’t control what they ask. And so it’s much more challenging, and therefore I’m always learning much more than I would if I’m simply giving the canned lecture in the studio.

I think what Rome gives Notre Dame students is a completely different context. In a certain way you could do a program abroad anywhere, but Rome has the advantage of having a culture that goes back at least 2,500 years which gives them a long time span. It gives them a foreign country and it gives them a tradition to which they can relate because Rome has also been the capital city for so many years.

There’s a way of living in Rome that they all love. Frequently, you don’t see the changes until they come back to South Bend, and when I come and see them on parents’ weekend, the year afterwards, they’ve all grown up. They’ve all turned into sophisticated men and women. So these kids that I took around turned into, not only grown-ups, but very graceful grown-ups. They’re cosmopolitan and they have a real understanding of their own lives and of other people. They’re really receptive, but they’re also, in a way, leaders because they’ve learned who they are, and because of that they can give to the rest of the world in way they couldn’t before. They’ve gone from being absorbers to people who can really give of themselves.