ABINGTON, Pa. — Thomas Heise, an assistant professor of English at Penn State Abington, spent time this summer living and working in Italy. The award-winning novelist and poet presented at Sapienza University, one of the oldest and largest universities in Europe, and served as a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome.
Heise is a scholar of 20th and 21st century literature. His teaching, writing and academic research intersect with a focus on contemporary American literature, creative writing, city life and culture, and crime narratives.
Recently, Heise talked about his experiences in Italy and his current writing.
Penn State Abington (PSA): What were the principal themes and conclusions of your presentation at Sapienza University?
Thomas Heise: I was honored to be invited to give a talk in June at Sapienza — the University of Rome — at a conference titled "Bad Cities: Literature & Urban Violence." I spoke about a number of contemporary crime novels, which I read as fundamentally about urban gentrification. At heart, they’re stories about the death of a place, the death of a way of life. They’re stories about older urban neighborhoods being dismantled and people displaced. The crime plot serves as a useful vehicle for investigating these changes and dramatizing them as matters of life and death.
PSA: What does it entail to be a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome?
Heise: A couple of weeks after I gave my talk at Sapienza, I flew back to Rome to work as a visiting artist/visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, one of the leading independent institutions in Europe for the study of the humanities. At any given time, between 30 and 50 people are working there, ranging from Ph.D. students to distinguished professors in a number of different disciplines. There are a lot of Classicists as one might expect in Rome but also architects, choreographers, visual artists and writers.
While I was ‘in residence,’ I was revising the manuscript to my novel and doing research for my academic monograph. It’s a wonderful institution, housed in a McKim, Mead & White building on a hill overlooking the city. Walking around 2,000-year-old ruins really gives one a sense of an expanded time scale about this so-called ‘urban project’ in which we are trying to live, survive and thrive with each other.