Clio Rom is a second-year doctoral student in art history at Penn State, with a Masters Italian Renaissance Art History from Syracuse University, with a GIS certificate and BA in Art History from the University of Arkansas. Her primary research interests lie in depicting and engaging with the natural world in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy in objects and spaces such as paintings, botanical texts, gardens, and textiles.
Clio is starting her dissertation research which examines how nature, power, and cultural identity intersected in early modern Italy through a study of the Barberini family and their use of nature as a form of expression and control. Her work will focus on the Barberini garden on the Quirinal Hill during their occupancy throughout the seventeenth century. She hopes to reconstruct the garden's design, evolution, and functions as both a physical space and a cultural artifact that participated in a larger pan-European system of meaning-making through naturalia.