The UW Rome Center is housed in the historic 15th century Palazzo Pio in the heart of Rome’s Centro Storico. Since 1985, thousands of Huskies have studied at the UW Rome Center, the UW’s home in Rome. Resident Director Amity Neumeister reflects on the UW Rome Center and where it’s headed next.
What is your role as Resident Director of the UW Rome Center?
As Resident Director, I oversee the strategic development and operational excellence of the UW Rome Center (UWRC). In collaboration with faculty and my colleagues in Seattle, we are working to develop new and to grow existing educational opportunities for UW students in Italy, as well as to expand opportunities to support faculty and student research.
I also oversee the UWRC’s day-to-day operations, program organization, marketing and communication activities. For the last three years, I have overseen the renovation work of our classroom space and apartments, which we hope to complete next year.
What services does the UW Rome Center offer?
The UWRC primarily hosts educational programs led by UW faculty, and programs sponsored by other universities. Our services include itinerary consultation, budget preparation, coordination of extracurricular activities, arrangement of housing and transportation, program and student support in the country, administrative services, etc. We also host a number of educational and/or research focused conferences each year.
How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact the UW Rome Center?
Unfortunately, the UWRC was closed to students for the majority of 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant no programs and no revenue for nearly two years. In order to maintain the UWRC, we dramatically scaled back our operational and personnel budgets, and modified our expenditures related to the renovation project. We were also very fortunate to receive support from the Office of the Provost as well as several UW colleges and departments in order to remain afloat during this difficult period.
What are you most looking forward to in the next two years?
I look forward to continuing to grow our new Rome in Residence program, which we began in January of this year. This program is unique in that we’ve hired locally based faculty who are experts in their fields to teach the program, and the courses all meet general education requirements, so the program is accessible for students at all stages of their academic career. The response of students to the Rome in Residence program has been great thus far, and word of mouth about the quality of the experience is spreading. We hope to expand the course offerings and to continue to grow the program, offering it every quarter in the future.
What are the UW Rome Center’s most notable achievements?
The UWRC quietly celebrated 35 years of academic programming in 2020, and so it’s hard to say what are the most notable achievements of the UWRC in its long history here in Rome!
However, I can definitely say that completing renovations of our academic space has been amongst the most notable achievements in recent years. We began renovation work on the 1st floor in 2019, with the goals of maximizing the educational space and modernizing our educational technology, while preserving and honoring the historical features of the Palazzo Pio. We’ve worked closely with our architects to accomplish these goals, continuing the work throughout the pandemic. We completed renovations of the 1st floor and the 3rd floor at the end of 2021, right in time to welcome UW programs back to the UWRC for the first time since early 2020. Faculty and students have been delighted with the space, and we’re excited to be finally filling our classrooms again now that study abroad is back! We are now in the final phase of the project, working on the 4th floor where we have our faculty apartments, and we’re looking forward to completing the last part of the project sometime next year.