Eva Del Soldato Awarded 2025-26 Rome Prize

The American Academy in Rome has awarded Eva Del Soldato, Associate Professor in the Department of French and Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies, with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize, one of two given to Penn faculty this year and one of just 35 total awarded.

The fellowship will support Del Soldato’s project “Lovesickness in the Forgotten Centuries,” which investigates medical writing on lovesickness produced in the Italian peninsula after the Council of Trent. Penn’s other recipient was Sean Burkholder, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, who received the Gilmore D. Clark and Michael Rapuano/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize to support his work on lake-based infrastructure and storytelling.

The prize 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 up to 10 months, starting in September. Winners are selected annually by juries of artists and scholars through a national competition, which this year received 990 applications from 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and 17 other countries.

For the full announcement, visit https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/sean-burkholder-and-eva-del-soldato-awarded-2025-26-rome-prize.