For poet and English professor Jennifer Clarvoe, there's no place like Rome. Her familiarity with the Eternal City and passion for its history, culture, and arts should hold students in good stead when she directs the 2010 Kenyon in Rome program next fall.

Clarvoe spent a full year writing in Rome in 2002-2003 when she received the coveted Rome Prize in Literature awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has returned several times to wander its cobblestone streets, climb its seven hills, and shop at the Campo de Fiori. "I know where to get the best cheap pizza and how to cross six lanes of traffic," she said.

She is the first English professor to direct the semester-long program offered to juniors in all fields of study through the art history department. "The program's cross-fertilization with different departments is one of its strengths," Clarvoe said.

The 2010 program curriculum for Kenyon credit will include a seminar and workshop taking advantage of inspirational settings such as the Roman Forum. Clarvoe will lead excursions to the city's museums, churches, and ruins, with trips to Florence, Naples, and possibly Venice. Sunday dinners will be savored in a variety of Roman restaurants.

"In Rome you feel the layers of history around every street corner."

She and her students will be housed among cafés, markets, and monuments in the city's historic center, near their instructional home, the Pantheon Institute, where faculty will offer Italian language instruction (required) and a variety of courses ranging from art and architecture to history and political science.

Clarvoe's previous Rome residency deepened her interests in classical Roman poetry and the relationship between works of art and literature, leading to the creation of a new Kenyon course based on literary works responding to visual art. "Poetry and the Visual Arts" will be taught with a distinctly Roman slant as part of the 2010 program. "I'm really happy to bring things full circle in being able to take Kenyon students to Rome with me, so that they, too, can travel not only through the books and poems, but see the works themselves," she said.

"In Rome you feel the layers of history around every street corner," she said. "I hope that kind of time-travel on foot has the same effect on my students as it had on me."

Learn more information about the 2010 Kenyon in Rome program.