American Academy in Rome, 15 January – 12 March 2015. Understood chiefly as the stark backdrop for neorealist cinema or a glamorous playground for the international jet set, postwar Rome tends to be sidelined in artistic narratives of this period, despite the significant activity of international artists pursuing cutting-edge practice in diverse media – painting and sculpture as well as cinema, experimental music, conceptual art, and literature. In Rome during these years American painters such as Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly encountered artists of the Italian movements La Scuola di piazza del Popolo and Arte Povera, John Cage performed with composer Luciano Berio, and Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman staged their first happening. A principal site of international exchange was the Rome-New York Art Foundation, which between 1957 and 1961 hosted nine exhibitions that not only played a decisive role in the diffusion of American art in Europe, giving early European shows to abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey, but also catalyzed an international, universalizing spirit in contemporary art largely eclipsed by the triumph of American Pop Art at the Venice Biennale in 1964. In conjunction with the preparation of a major exhibition reconstituting the Rome-New York Art Foundation’s groundbreaking shows, planned for the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna in Rome in 2016, the American Academy in Rome and the Terra Foundation for American Art are organizing two exploratory seminars to provide a forum in which specific research projects might coalesce into a deeper and broader collective understanding of Rome as an important center of innovation in the arts during the postwar era and the interaction of American artists within this scene. We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on current research dedicated to artistic activity including painting, sculpture, cinema, music, and writing in the Italian capital from 1948 to 1964. Papers should offer original, unpublished research, preferably but not necessarily deriving from archival material. In line with the seminar format, individual presentations will be followed by discussion. The first seminar is scheduled for January 15-16, 2015 and the second for March 11-12, 2015. Travel reimbursement will be available. Please send abstracts for a twenty-minute presentation and updated c.v., including preferred dates, to Peter Benson Miller, Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, American Academy in Rome, Via Angelo Masina, 5.  00153 Rome Italy by 15 July 2014.