Sean Burkholder and Eva Del Soldato awarded the 2025-26 Rome Prize

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The American Academy in Rome has awarded Sean Burkholder and Eva Del Soldato each a 2025-26 Rome Prize, which supports innovative fellows in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Burkholder, associate professor of landscape architecture in the Weitzman School of Design, was awarded the Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize to support his work on lake-based infrastructure and storytelling. Del Soldato, an associate professor of Italian studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize to support her project Lovesickness in the Forgotten Centuries, investigating medical writing on lovesickness produced in the Italian peninsula after the Council of Trent.

They are among the 35 recipients of this year’s Prize, which equips artists and scholars with the time, space, setting, and colleagues to explore and create while residing at the Academy’s 11-acre grounds in Rome for five to 10 months, starting in September.

Rome Prize winners are selected annually by juries of artists and scholars through a national competition. This year’s competition received 990 applications from applicants in 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and 17 other countries.

Burkholder is co-founder of the Environmental Modeling Lab in Penn’s McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and co-founder of the research and design practice Proof Projects. His practice and research look broadly across issues faced by coastal landscapes while focusing particularly on lake-based geographies. He currently is working on his second book, “Lakemaker: Surveys, Stories, and Speculations of Held Water.” His first book, published in 2022, is “Five Bay Landscapes: Curious Explorations of the Great Lakes Region,” co-authored with Karen Lutsky, associate professor of landscape design at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. Lutsky, who earned her master’s in landscape architecture from Penn in 2011, also was awarded the Rome Prize this year. At Weitzman, Burkholder coordinates the first-semester design studio and offers seminars and studios on topics including environmental modeling and monitoring, experimentation, counterfactual speculation, and coastal infrastructure.

Del Soldato is graduate chair of the Department of Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies, and the interim director of Penn’s Center for Italian Studies. In addition, she is executive secretary for the American Association for Italian Studies. She was trained in philosophy and intellectual history at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italy. Her research primarily is devoted to Renaissance thought and culture, with special attention to the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions. She also cultivates interests in the history of the book, the history of libraries and universities, and 20th century cultural institutions. She is the author of several books, including 2020’s “Early Modern Aristotle: On the Making and Unmaking of Authority” on the strategic uses of Aristotle and Plato as authorities in the early modern period. At Penn, Del Soldato teaches Plato and Aristotle, as well as seminars in Latin and Italian paleography, vernacular science in the late medieval and early modern period, Italian philosophy, culture of the courts, intellectual exchanges between Italy and France, and food culture. She is co-organizing the fall exhibit “Reinventing Aristotle” with the Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections and Rare Manuscripts.

Since 1894, the American Academy in Rome has functioned as a residential center for research and creativity. Its purpose is to enable highly motivated scholars and artists to immerse themselves in the experience of Rome, ancient and modern, and to be inspired by daily exchange with the other members of the creative community.