Earlier this year, Nastasya Kosygina, a PhD candidate in Visual Studies, was awarded the Anthony M. Clark | Jesse Howard Jr. Rome Prize in Medieval Studies. The Rome Prize is a highly competitive and prestigious fellowship awarded by the American Academy in Rome, which has the core mission to encourage innovative work in the arts and humanities. Recipients receive a stipend, private workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill. Natasya shared, “I’m deliriously happy and excited to be [the Academy’s] candidate in medieval studies.”
As an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, Nastasya majored in art history, classics, and chemistry, obtaining both a B.A. and a B.S. in the process. During her time at UCI, Nastasya’s interests in the material culture and archaeology of the premodern Mediterranean have continued to flourish. Across each of her concentrations, she is driven by the desire to understand what life was like for marginalized individuals and communities in the premodern world. “Where everything is biased towards the rich and powerful, how do you talk about everybody else?” Nastasya’s work–the question which threads her research together–proves to be evocative, timely, and necessary.
Nastasya is currently on fellowship in Germany with the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich. There, she is working on a chapter of her dissertation on urban infrastructure, labor, and water culture in late imperial and early medieval Rome. The chapter itself centers on the occupation of the city of Rome in the early medieval period by the Byzantine Empire. Between living on a farm and engaging with the academic life at LMU Munich, Nastasya is hard at work interrogating the dissonance between Roman and Byzantine understandings of natural disasters and city planning.
Given that most of Nastasya’s research is intimately connected to Rome, the award provides the necessary tools to expand on her work with the Rachel Carson Center. From archival access to community formation, Nastasya anticipates that her time in Rome will be instrumental to her immediate and long-term goals. “[I’m] hoping that that environment will help me really make the best version of my dissertation that I can,” Nastasya voiced.
The Humanities Center congratulates Nastasya on this tremendous achievement.
- Written by Lourdes Isabel Enriquez (B.A., English 2025)