American Academy in Rome Honors Kevin Martín with 2025-2026 Rome Prize
Kevin will deeply engage with his work in Modern Italian studies and collaborate with artists and scholars across disciplines during his prestigious fellowship year in Italy
ROME, ITALY and NEW YORK, NY– April 23, 2025 – The American Academy in Rome announced today the winners of the 2025–26 Rome Prize, the rigorous competition supporting innovative fellows in the arts, humanities, and sciences. The Marian and Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize is awarded to Kevin Martín, who will spend his year at the AAR conducting research for his dissertation project “Silenced Lexicons: The Historical Sociolinguistics of Italian-occupied East Africa, 1882-1947.” The Rome Prize equips artists and scholars with the time, space, setting, and colleagues to explore and create in the singular city of Rome. The 35 recipients will reside at the Academy’s 11-acre grounds in the Eternal City for five to ten months, starting this September.
“The Rome Prize is one of the world’s most prestigious fellowship programs and provides the rare opportunity for scholars and artists across a range of sub-fields to collaborate with each other,” said Peter N. Miller, President of the American Academy in Rome. “Presented with the opportunity to deeply engage with their work and with that of the other fellows, Rome Prize winners return home with perspectives profoundly enriched by their immersion in an interdisciplinary community set in Rome. The winners form the heart of the Academy, embodying its ethos and extending its international impact through their work now and into the future.”
Kevin's project, "Silenced Lexicons," will investigate matters of language contact in the ex-colonies of Italy in the Horn of Africa. By applying methods from the interdisciplinary field of historical sociolinguistics to surviving written materials from Italy’s colonial past, his project foregrounds a much overlooked figure in modern Italian studies: the Italophone East African colonial subject. Kevin will devote his residency in Rome to finding and analyzing legal documents, telegraphs, and epistolary materials from this period which both substantiate their existence, and explain their persistent omission from scholarly discourse.
Rome Prize winners are selected annually by juries of distinguished 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 different countries. The acceptance rate was 3.54 percent. The recipients range from 28 to 71 years old, with an average age of 45.