Nichols Fellows 2023-2026

Angela Commito, Senior Lecturer in Classics, and Stacie Raucci, Frank Bailey Professor of Classics, have collaborated in a course project and have been awarded the 7th Byron A. Nichols Fellowship for a three-year period beginning in September, 2023.

Their course project, “Ancient Roman Gardening: Cultivating Interdisciplinarity, Community and Well-Being,” begins from a base of historical gardens, gardeners, and gardening in the ancient Roman world, using interdisciplinary evidence in the form of texts, visual imagery, material culture, and palaeobotanical remains.

Students will explore how people developed gardens, what they planted, where they placed them, who had access to them, and what were their uses (such as food, leisure, religion, medicine, and more). Students also will design, build, plant, and cultivate their own pop-up gardens on campus in teams, specifically serving needs and desires of the campus community. To complete their projects, students will engage with experts in the larger Schenectady community.