Winter 2015 Presidential Research Lecture – Mapping Rome: Portraits of a City
Friday, February 6, 2015
177 Lawrence Hall
James Tice, UO professor of architecture specializing in the cartography and urban history of Rome, will deliver the 2015 Presidential Research Lecture on Friday, February 6 in 177 Lawrence Hall. As a recipient of the Outstanding Research Career Award, Tice will share his passion for one of the world’s great cities through a series of magnificent cartographic portraits.
In conjunction with his lecture, Tice will mount an exhibition in Hayden Gallery in Lawrence Hall from February 2-13, with a public reception at 6:30 p.m. February 6 following his lecture. The gallery is free and open to the public during regular building hours including weekends.
Tice shares his passion for Rome through the creation of interactive online maps. “When I first started this work over ten years ago, it was a labor of love that I thought twelve people might find interesting,” Tice says. “I had no idea that hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world would find it engaging.”
Rome “is the most thoroughly documented city in the world,” Tice notes. “For almost two thousand years, architects and artists have depicted the city through a variety of cartographic methods employing virtually every kind of media at their disposal: stone, paper and graphite, oil and canvas, copper plates, wood, and frescoed stucco. In the process, they have left a vivid record of their impressions that has created a vivid portrait of one of the world’s great cities.”
Tice began his study of Rome four decades ago as a graduate student at Cornell University. Most recently his research has involved collaborative, interdisciplinary projects with colleagues at UO, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and Rome in the fields of geography, architectural history, archaeology, and computer sciences.
He is currently working on his third venture into interactive online maps related to Rome—the GIS Forma Urbis Romae Project: Creating a Layered History of Rome.
The presentation is free and open to the public, and will be livestreamed on the UO Channel site.
Read more about Professor Tice and his current research projects here.
