Dissertation Research Fellowship - Rookshar Myram
Rookshar Myram is the first graduate student who came to Notre Dame Rome with the newly launched graduate research fellowship. She arrived in fall 2024 and has decided to extend her residency for spring 2025. While in Rome, Myram is working on her dissertation on the representation of Christ in the Divine Comedy.
Her research is developed through an interdisciplinary approach to iconography, theology, and literary criticism and she argues that in his poem Dante promotes the imitation of Christ’s divinity. While many of his contemporaries emphasized an imitation of the Passion, Dante’s choice to represent only the glorious dimension of Christ supports the possibility for human beings to attain deification. For this sake, the city of Rome is particularly interesting, not only because it is rich in iconography but also for the specific character of the iconography itself, the way in which it distinguishes itself from the rest of the medieval iconography that can instead be found in other Dantean places.
“Coming to Rome has been one of the best choices I could make,” comments Myram. “While in Rome I had the chance to meet scholars who regularly deal with similar topics as mine and work in the same environment. This made my job of finding relevant representations of Christ that may have influenced the medieval poem a lot easier.”
Her decision to come to Rome and move to Italy in general is providing her a different perspective for her research: “Facing the challenges of doing research in a different country rather than keep working on it in the comfort zone of the Hesburgh Library, has proved to be one of the most enriching experiences for my growth as a researcher,” says Myram.
The Graduate Research Fellowship program was launched in early 2024 by the Graduate School in partnership with Notre Dame Global and the Center for Italian Studies. It offers semester- and year-long dissertation research fellowships at Notre Dame Rome to advanced humanities, social sciences and aerospace and mechanical engineering Ph.D. students. The goal of this residential fellowship is to facilitate dissertation research for students who demonstrate the need to conduct substantial work in Rome and its vicinity. It also serves to create a cohort of scholars engaged in the academic communities of ND Rome and of the city.