The Krieger School sold
Villa
Spelman this month, parting ways with the 10-acre
property in
Florence, Italy, and directing the more than $18 million
proceeds from the sale and the villa's
operating expenses into other avenues, primarily graduate
education. In tandem with the sale, the
school has launched the Singleton Center in Pre-Modern
European Studies, which will help graduate
students find programs abroad and increase the university's
international presence.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Italian Studies at Villa
Spelman was established in the early
1970s in accordance with the bequest of Leolyn and Timothy
Mather Spelman, who had spent much of
their lives in the centuries-old building. In 1985 the
center was dedicated to the memory of Charles S.
Singleton, the internationally renowned scholar of Dante
and medieval and Renaissance literature, who
was a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins for
many years.
Where the villa studies were focused on Renaissance
Italy, the Singleton Center will have a
broader scope, designed to create a connection between the
humanities and European studies
wherever there is interest from students and faculty,
according to David Bell, dean of faculty in the
Krieger School. The plan is to collaborate with European
universities, leading to greater research
opportunities.
"Hopkins has a really long tradition of interaction
with European scholarship--the villa was not
the only instance of this sort of collaboration," Bell
said. "We were founded on the model of German
research institutions at a time when Harvard and Yale were
basically gentlemen's finishing schools.
Hopkins was the first American established research
university, something that was alien to the U.S.
at the time. We were a gateway for new European
philosophical ideas, and this center will continue to
keep Hopkins on the map in Europe."
Christopher Celenza, director of the Singleton Center,
said he hopes that the center will appeal
to scholars from across the university's divisions as well
as to those who are disappointed that the
villa was sold. Celenza, a professor in the Department of
German and Romance Languages and
Literatures, said he believes that this new program "will
make us more than the sum of our parts. The
hope is that we'll involve as many people as possible and
as many new innovative areas of research as
possible."
In addition to the center's facilitating study abroad,
Celenza and Bell said it will establish a
presence on the Homewood campus with lectures and
programming that will make it a regional hub,
starting with an inaugural lecture series planned for
spring 2009.
"We'd like it to be a link between ourselves and other
universities in the area," Celenza said.
"Our hope is to be a clearinghouse for any and all events
in the area that relate to Europe before the
advent of the modern world, before all the things we take
for granted--like industrialization or mass
transportation--came about."
The center will also embrace faculty from other Johns
Hopkins campuses.
"We have a really formidable number of scholars here
working on the culture of pre-modern
Europe," Celenza said. "But we really don't have a means to
unify those scholars that can lead to
interdisciplinary research. I hope as the center evolves
that we'll be the place where that happens."
The Singleton Center was formally approved by the
deans this summer, with the formation of a
faculty board, after it became clear that Villa Spelman
would be sold. The proceeds of the 13 million
euros sale of the villa will be used in a variety of ways
to support academic programs in the Krieger
School, and the annual costs of the Singleton Center will
be fully supported by endowments that used
to partially support the program at the villa, according to
Adam Falk, dean of the Krieger School.
Selling the villa made sense, Falk said, given the
need for millions of dollars in repairs and its
annual operating budget of more than a half-million
dollars. And the new incarnation of the Singleton
Center, he said, will ultimately serve more people with a
wider range of interests.
"The Villa Spelman is a treasure, and while in many
ways we are sad to see it go from Hopkins, I
know that it will be well cared for by the new owner," Falk
said. "And I am very pleased that we will be
continuing the Singleton programs in a new and more
flexible form, allowing us to involve more
students and more faculty than we have in the past."
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