IATH NEWS

Katherine Rinne on Water and Cultural Heritage in Rome

February 28, 2012

Katherine Rinne will be speaking on her IATH project on March 2 at an international conference on "Water Cultural Heritage: Enhancement Strategies," sponsored by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche (the Italian National Research Council). The conference is the concluding event by a European Union initiative, Water Shapes. Water Shapes is a multinational effort by Mediterranean-area countries to increase awareness of the connection between water and cultural heritage sites, and the subsequent need to preserve and enhance tangible and intangible heritage assets connected to water sites and archaeological artifacts.

Rinne’s presentation, "Aquae Urbis Romae: the Waters of the City of Rome," will take place at the Casa dell’Architettura in Rome. She will discuss her IATH project, Aquae Urbis Romae: the Waters of the City of Rome, as a research tool. The project is an interactive cartographic history that shows the relationships between hydrological and hydraulic systems and their impact on Rome’s urban development.

The Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche will also host a book presentation for her recently published The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (Yale University Press), on March 3 at the Accademia di San Luca.

Rinne is an independent scholar, and currently an adjunct professor in the department of architecture at the California College of the Arts. Her research for both her book and her IATH project has been sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the John Anson Kittredge Educational Trust, and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT.