Faculty BiosMeet your faculty leaders for the Rome trip.
Shane Bjornlie is Assistant Professor of History specializing in Roman and late-antique history at Claremont McKenna College. Professor Bjornlie received his Master’s and PhD in history at Princeton University. He has taught at Princeton University, Bryn Mawr College and has been a member of the faculty at CMC since 2007. His teaching includes courses on the Roman Republic, Roman Empire and Early Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on the political, economic, social and literary history of these periods. His research on cultural change after the fall of the Roman Empire has made Professor Bjornlie a regular traveler to Italy. As a graduate student, Professor Bjornlie studied Italian in Rome and worked on archaeological excavations in northern Italy. More recently, Professor Bjornlie lived at the American Academy in Rome for a year with his family while preparing the manuscript of his new book, Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae, 527-554 (forthcoming, Cambridge UP). Professor Bjornlie’s favorite things to do while at Rome include visiting the ruins at Ostia, strolling through the warren of cobbled streets in Trastevere and drinking a cappuccino outside of the Pantheon of the 2nd-century emperor Hadrian. Although a native to southern California, Professor Bjornlie has found that all his roads eventually lead to Rome.
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Seth Lobis has taught in the Literature department at CMC since 2007. His teaching and research focus on British literature from 1500 to 1700, including Shakespeare and Milton, and he has a special interest in Anglo-Italian literary and cultural relations during that period. He received his Ph.D. in English and Renaissance Studies from Yale University. Before starting graduate school, he lived in Siena and Bologna for six months and has since traveled extensively in Italy. His Italophilia extends from sixteenth-century epics and fourteenth-century frescoes to Bolognese pasta and Neapolitan pizza.
Victoria Sancho Lobis has given art history courses at Columbia University, New York University, and the University of San Diego. Her teaching interests include the production of early modern European art, the history of art collecting, the legacy of ancient Rome, and the idea of the Baroque in European art and architecture. Her primary research area is seventeenth-century European art, more specifically, prints and drawings created by Peter Paul Rubens and his workshop. Lobis received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University, where she studied Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture with a minor field in ancient Roman art. Over the course of two and half years, she conducted dissertation research in the museums and libraries of western Europe, a highlight of which was a month-long stint exploring ancient and Baroque art in Rome. She looks forward to returning to Rome—to the Bernini rooms of the Galleria Borghese, to the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican, to the chapels of Santa Maria del Popolo, and to the coffee bar at Sant’Eustachio.
