Middlebury Alum Wins Prestigious Rome Prize
Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, a Middlebury College Posse alum, has been awarded the 2026–2027 Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome, one of the most prestigious fellowships for artists and scholars in the United States. In September, she began a year-long residency at the Academy, where she is living and working alongside a select cohort of scholars, artists and writers.
"This residency will give me the space to really think expansively," Barbara says.
A Ph.D. candidate in romance studies at Duke University, Barbara studies Black feminist thought, Black Italian literature and questions of belonging in contemporary Italy. The Rome Prize will support the completion of her dissertation, Reimagining Italianità: Black Feminist Forms and the Politics of Belonging.
Her connection to Italy is personal. Members of her family emigrated there from Ghana, and their experiences helped spark her early interest in the country. At Middlebury, she studied Italian and spent a semester abroad in Florence, experiences that sharpened her focus on the lives of Black people in Italy and shaped the questions at the heart of her scholarship today.
Barbara’s research traces how Black feminist ideas have traveled to Italy and taken on new life there through translation and other forms of cultural production. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, she documents the vital role Black Italian feminists have played in national conversations about citizenship, migration and belonging. Her work also examines how Italy’s colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary understandings of race and national identity.
Each year, the Rome Prize supports interdisciplinary work by a small group of scholars and artists, giving them time, dedicated workspace and a residential community in which to advance their projects and exchange ideas across disciplines. For Barbara, the fellowship marks an opportunity to carry years of research into its next stage, in the very country her work seeks to illuminate.
