Aliza Wong is director of the American Academy in Rome and professor of History and Honors at Texas Tech University. Her research focus is modern Italy and the Mediterranean with a particular concentration in race, nation, culture, and identity. A dedicated educator, she has taught for two decades at Texas Tech University where she has won numerous teaching and research awards. Her current research examines Italian constructions of the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the realm of public and engaged scholarship, Wong is director of the Texas Liberators Project, a multimedia educational initiative that includes an app, educational resources, interactive maps, museum and digital exhibits, and a book. She is also the producer of the documentary film, Narratives of Modern Genocide (dir. Paul Allen Hunton, 2021) and curator of the corresponding museum exhibition, both funded by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission.
Kristina Marie Darling: First of all, thank you so much for honoring our magazine with an interview. I’d like to begin with a discussion of your scholarship. You write in the introduction to your recent book, Spaghetti Westerns: A Viewers Guide, “Italian westerns captivated their audience with images of an idealized myth of the American West, yet they were so much more...they reinvented the western morality tales that grounded American national identity and adapted them for a new culture and a new time.” I admire the way in your work film becomes a point of entry to larger questions about identity, mythologies, and cross-cultural exchange. What initially drew you to this material?
Aliza Wong: I didn’t begin as a scholar of Italian visions of the American West, but I very happily—accidentally—fell into certain projects. And this is another project that I very happily—accidentally—fell into because, as fate would have it, and as things happen in the academic world, you go where you are offered the job. My husband and I were offered two positions in the history department at Texas Tech University. And for 22 years, we lived in Lubbock, Texas.
And for 22 years, Texas has been our adopted home. So my research is, in many ways, a thank you to the state of Texas for having welcomed us for 22 years. It is a way for me to understand the place where my son grew up for 22 years. Because I think that the reality of Texas, the reality of the West is not necessarily what is lived. I think that realities can exist on very different levels. And the reality of the Texas that I lived, the West that I lived is not the reality that other people lived.
I came into this project with a certain understanding of having to explain my life in Texas in very different ways to very different people. So this was in some ways also an explanation to Italians for how we live in Texas. Why we live in Texas. Does that make sense?
KMD: Absolutely. It actually reminds me of something that you said in a recent lecture at the American Academy—where you were speaking about taking inspiration from the places you are. It seems that place has been a powerful grounding force for your scholarship.
You’re also an accomplished educator, serving as Professor of History and having served as Interim Dean of the Honors College at Texas Tech University.
What is teaching and mentoring others opened up within your practice as a writer and an academic?
AW: Teaching, mentoring, guiding has been at the center of my existence. I am a scholar because I am a teacher. I am the director of the American Academy in Rome because I am an educator. I am the director of the American Academy in Rome because I’m a student. So I don’t think that I can pick apart that aspect of my identity—because in writing, I am a student. In writing, I am the teacher. In writing, I am constantly being educated.
I think that in order to be a good teacher, I have to love your students and in order to be a good director, I have to love my fellows. I have to believe in them. I have to believe in their potential. I have to believe in what they will bring, whatever it is that they might bring, however they may bring it and whatever perspectives they might bring into it. And my job as a teacher and an educator is to help create the space by which they can do that work. Teaching, pedagogy, drawing inspiration from my students, learning from my students. In fact, I think I’ve learned more from them than they have from me.
KMD: Beautifully said. I wanted to also talk more in depth about your role at the American Academy in Rome. So in 2022, you took the helm as the 25th director of the American Academy. I have long admired the way that the Academy fosters interdisciplinary inquiry, collaboration, and innovation in the arts and humanities. Can you speak to the importance of collaboration and cross-disciplinary exchange for your own work as a scholar, which you’ve already touched on a little bit. But I’m wondering if you could just say more about collaboration in terms of your work as an academic and a scholar.
AW: Being a historian, you are naturally collaborative in your work, right? In most history departments, we have scholars who literally span the globe in terms of what their interests are, in terms of what the chronological periods are, in terms of the areas of study, in terms of vocabularies and grammars.
Yet there is a common language and common lexicon that you use across the discipline which—regardless of the time period, regardless of the field, regardless of the perspective, regardless of the lens—you find a way to talk to one another. In a history department, whether you are looking at Kenya or whether you’re looking at Argentina or whether you are looking at Vietnam or whether you are looking at Canada, you find ways to connect and have conversations with one another based off of the historical method, based off of historical theory, etc. So that’s always been my training. Even as a graduate student, I took courses on nationalism, where we were looking at theories of nationalism in the Middle East to South America, and Creole language, and the creation of post-Revolution France. We looked at all of those things together in a class and everybody had different perspectives and different entry points into it. So naturally, I was predisposed to doing that as a historian.
Then being in the Honors College, where 80% of the students are in the STEM fields and many of my students, the vast majority, were pre-med or in engineering or in business. Yet these students choice to be in an honors college where we celebrated and honored the breadth of the liberal arts – and the liberal arts not just as a study of the arts and the humanities, but of the Greek trivium and quadrivium that brings together math and logic with music, grammar, rhetoric. Science, arts, humanities in conversation with one another. I tried to inspire my students to learn how to speak across disciplines, to speak between disciplines—I had to help them find those spaces.
And so, for me, it came naturally in trying to bring people together. And here I am – where I find myself at the American Academy in Rome where we say “arts and the humanities,” but we speak across a multiplicity of disciplines.
For instance, creative writing is one of the fields that we have represented here. But—what does creative writing encompass? Is it fiction? Is it nonfiction? Is it creative nonfiction? Is it biographical? Is it autobiographical? Is it prose? Is it poetry? Is it prose poetry? Can it be all of these things and none of these things? There are all these things that are wrapped up in it, and while so many people keep trying to categorize things, what I think the Academy does so well is we often try to uncategorize them, de-categorize them, throw out these types of categories, and give you the time and space to reimagine what it can be. I think that is the beauty of what we have been able to do here.
You’re sitting there in the Cortile, at the dining table, and you make conversation with whoever is sitting next to you, right? And you find that it’s not expertise necessarily that inspires you, but innovation, creativity, curiosity – curiosity – natural human curiosity and you give yourself the patience to actually learn this person sitting next to you who you will join you on this intellectual and creative adventure for the five or ten months.
KMD: I admire the work that you’re doing at the Academy to break down those categories of genre and discipline. I’ve long believed that the most exciting work happens in the space between genres and disciplines. With that in mind, I appreciate your leadership at the AAR and particularly the way that you have fostered so much conversation across lines of difference. I’m reminded of the Director Emeritus Kimberly Bowes and her desire to bring women, young people, people from rural places to the academy so that they could then go back and enrich their respective communities.
So I would love to ask, who are some of your role models in terms of leadership within the arts and humanities?
Aliza Wong: There are too many to name. You have the recent people like Kim Bowes, the people like the Avinoam Shalem, John Ochsendorf, Caroline Bruzelius, Lester Little, Carmela Franklin, Chris Celenza, Joe Connors, Elizabeth Rodini, and then you have all the former directors of the American Academy, each of whom brought a different voice, a different perspective in their time.
So many incredible people who are dedicated to this place. Adele Chatfield Taylor, the incredible president, brilliant, a force-of-nature, who built such a strong foundation upon which we continue to build and rebuild the Academy. Her work allowed us to create the Villa Aurelia that exists today, to ensure the continuation of fellowships through generous endowments. She ensured that this this place, this project would continue to move on, to grow. She brought people like Alice Waters who believed that the work of the Academy not only happened in the studios, in the studies, in the Library and Archives, but at the Cortile table. And she challenged us to create a revolution in our kitchen so that we would have delicious enough, nutritious enough, sustainable enough, regenerative enough meals from the Rome Sustainable Food Project in order to inspire people to come to the table.
Presidents like Mark Robbins and our new president, Peter N. Miller, who may have different visions of what this place can be but share a common belief in the promise of this place. Mark helped us to open our doors and embrace who could and should and would be a part of this amazing community. He believed in an inclusive arts and humanities that ensured that artists and humanists globally knew they could find a home in Rome. Peter brings a new vision of the Academy that asserts the seriousness of the work that we do as an institution. And he posits the Academy in some ways as a Fellow itself, that has a voice and a seat at the table. He seeks to bring visionaries to Rome, not just to find solutions to the most pressing issues of our time but to craft the questions themselves, to issue the challenges.
But some of my greatest role models, the greatest inspirations for me have been the American Academy in Rome Fellows themselves. And not just because they have won amazing prizes and awards – because certainly we have been fortunate to host some of the biggest names in the field – but I have learned so much by nature of their generosity, their willingness to share, their participation in a conversation, their openness to the experience. They show this by going on walks and talks, by going on the spring or fall trip, by opening up their studio, by sharing their work with the other fellows of the national academies.
We are so fortunate because the Academy has been home to the big bold leaders who have won not only the Rome Prize but awards like Guggenheim and the MacArthur and the Pulitzer and the Nobel and the Academy Award and the Grammys... But we have also been home to those fellows who fell in love with Rome and decided to stay and teach. People like the Richard Trythalls of the world, who was not only an innovative and award-winning composer but who taught a new generation of people here in Rome and inspired thousands of high school students to find their voice and sing.
Then there are our staff members – I am just in awe of our wonderful staff. My executive assistant has worked at the Academy for 39 years and seen nearly a dozen different directors and believed in each and every single one of us enough to introduce us to the right people, to help us understand the context of where we work, to help us help the Fellows find their way here in Rome . Or Luana, a housekeeper who lost a son while a staff member here. The Academy staff all went to the funeral, gathered around her, mourned with her. She still continues to come to work every single day because she lost a son but gained a family at the American Academy in Rome.
So there are the heroes that have the titles and then there are the leaders who guide by showing up every single day, by believing that in scrubbing a toilet, in changing the sheets, in mowing the lawn, in washing the plates, they are helping the next generation of artists and scholars to create a better world. And so when you ask me who my leaders are, those are my leaders too. Those are my leaders too.
KMD: On a related note, it’s been thrilling to see the Academy become an even more innovative institution under your leadership. I was wondering if you could speak to the future of the Academy and where you see its programming heading.
AW: I think that that’s a million dollar question, right? 2025 is our 131st anniversary. And we have done so many things really, really well. And we have a new president now who is really thinking about vision and thinking about mission and thinking about what the next 130 years might bring. I think that part of the discussion that we’re having now is about impact, the ways in which we can make the arts and humanities central to the conversation again. Very clearly, if you look at our political situation, if you look at our economic situation, if you look at our technological situation, if you look at the conversations about AI, if you look at the conversations about world leadership, if you look at the conversations about governance, the piece that has been frustrating us, and I think the piece that we now recognize has been missing, is a faith, a confidence, a belief in the fundamentalness of the arts and the humanities.
We have all said right from the very beginning that the key to a strong democracy and a strong republic is an educated democracy. And that education involves reading history, knowing art, believing in music, seeing beauty in the world and not just focusing on the length of life but the quality of living.
So we have to make the arts and the humanities fundamental to the conversation again. And I think that’s where the American Academy in Rome really has an opportunity to not only dream big about the individual projects that an artist and a scholar might bring, but the larger impact of the conversation we as an institution itself can bring, we as the voice of an institution will bring to not only an American dialogue but an international dialogue.