Visiting Scholar Residency

The Visiting Scholar Residency is designed for faculty members, researchers, and independent scholars who wish to spend a focused period in Italy for research, writing, fieldwork, or sabbatical study. Rural Futures supports visiting scholars not as a cohort-based teaching program, but as an enabling framework: a practical and intellectual infrastructure that helps scholars settle quickly, access research contexts, and translate questions into field-based inquiry.

Our work sits at the intersection of architecture, planning, landscape studies, ecology, and cultural heritage. Visiting scholars are encouraged to pursue projects that investigate how human settlement interacts with environmental systems and historical layers—whether through territorial analysis, archival work, design research, ethnographic observation, or comparative studies across regions and periods.

What the residency can support

 

  • Accommodation facilitation: guidance in identifying suitable housing options for short or extended stays (according to budget, duration, and research needs)

  • Research itinerary design: planning field visits, site access, and interviews in relation to your research topic

  • Local introductions: connections with municipalities, cultural institutions, archives, practitioners, and community organizations when relevant

  • Context briefings: orientation to regional histories, governance frameworks, and socio-ecological conditions shaping the territory

  • Logistical coordination: local mobility planning, scheduling support, and practical troubleshooting during the stay

  • Optional academic engagement: opportunities to offer a lecture, seminar, or critique session (when aligned with ongoing activities and calendars)

Residencies can be configured as short research intensives (e.g., one to three weeks), seasonal stays, or multi-month periods supporting deeper fieldwork and writing. The emphasis is on scholarly continuity: creating the conditions for sustained attention, reliable access to sites and interlocutors, and a cadence of work that balances immersion with reflection.

For scholars interested in rural transformation, the residency offers a vantage point from which to study re-inhabitation, adaptive reuse, landscape stewardship, and the cultural economies of small villages—and to consider what cities might learn from rural logics of resource management, maintenance, and long-term coexistence with place.

If you are planning a research stay or sabbatical in Italy and would benefit from grounded local support, we invite you to contact Rural Futures with a brief project description, preferred dates, and practical needs.