Two PhD students awarded the Rome Prize
Two Yale PhD students are among the recipients of the 2026–27 Rome Prize and Italian Fellows Program, awarded annually by the American Academy in Rome.
Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra, a PhD student in the School of Architecture and the Department of Religious Studies, and Tom Zhuohun Wang, a PhD student in the Departments of History and Classics, are among the 31 fellows selected for the fellowship, which supports innovative work in various disciplines across the arts and humanities.
The Rome Prize provides artists and scholars with dedicated time, space, and a transdisciplinary community in which to advance their work within the city of Rome. Fellows will reside and work at the academy’s 11-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill for periods ranging from five to 10 months, beginning in September 2026.
The academy supports 13 disciplines: ancient studies, architecture, design, east-west intersections, historic preservation and conservation, landscape architecture, literature, medieval studies, modern Italian studies, musical composition, renaissance and early modern studies, and visual arts. In 2025, environmental arts and humanities was introduced as an additional field of study.
“Coming from a wide range of disciplines and practices, the 2026-27 cohort is united by their commitment to intellectual generosity and to cross-disciplinary engagement," said Peter N. Miller, president and CEO of the American Academy in Rome. “The Rome Prize is a bedrock of the Academy's mission to support the most compelling minds in the arts and humanities from across the United States. We look forward to welcoming this cohort and to the questions, ideas, and discoveries that will shape their time in the Eternal City.”
Wang was awarded the Arthur Ross Rome Prize, part of the ancient studies discipline. His research focuses on the way that ancient cities across the Roman Empire managed their finances. Ancient cities, like modern ones, spent huge amounts of money building infrastructure, maintaining it, managing archives, operating public baths, offering public festivals, etc. It has long been a matter of debate whether they relied primarily on occasional donations by wealthy individuals to finance their many expenses or had more regular sources of revenue. Wang will provide the first robust dataset to show that cities did indeed have well-managed assets that generated considerable capital to cover their public expenses. From a body of texts, inscriptions, ancient coins, and archaeology, he hopes to show that Roman cities had powerful fiscal structures to keep themselves vibrant and economically sound.
“This is truly innovative work,” said Noel Lenski, Dunham Professor of Classics and History at Yale and Wang’s adviser. “Previous scholarship has been content to accept that the showy public inscriptions put up by big donors provide all the evidence we need to explain ancient civic finance. Wang is digging deeper into the source pool to show that sound investment and careful capital management were the true drivers of financial health for ancient cities,” he added.
Beyeler-Yvarra was awarded the Tsao Family Rome Prize, part of the east-west intersections discipline, for her research on the spatial politics of the largest non-state landholder in the world: the Roman Catholic Church. Focusing on the Asia-Pacific, a region key to the future of global Catholicism and global climate change, her dissertation interrogates how Catholic property systems multiplied in majority-Catholic capitals from 1945 to the present. From this transnational perspective, she analyzes how the spatial economies of Catholic institutions constitute the religious regimes of ownership that regulate concentrations of urban power. She focuses on archdiocesan proprietorship to argue that the Church’s consecration and investment in corporate monopolies sustains conditions of extreme wealth disparity and environmental degradation.
“Lisa’s research is brave and difficult. Through archival financial research and collaborative ethnography in three capital cities, she finds decolonization movements accelerated the expansion of Catholic proprietorship across the Pacific,” said Kathryn Lofton, Lex Hixon Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale and Beyeler-Yvarra’s adviser.
“During her time at Yale, she has approached every part of her education, training, and community with integrity and ethical purpose, forging a new path as the first student to achieve a combined degree from the School of Architecture and a humanities department,” Lofton added.
“The American Academy in Rome has fostered creativity and intellectual rigor at the highest level for more than 130 years now. Each class of fellows represents a special chapter in that history, yet together, they form a lineage that spans generations,” said Calvin Tsao, chair of the Board of Trustees. “It’s a great privilege to welcome this year’s Rome Prize Winners who will carry forward a long tradition of artistic and scholarly excellence.”
Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries composed of distinguished artists and scholars. This year’s competition drew 958 applicants from across the United States and U.S. citizens living abroad, with an acceptance rate of 3.03 percent.