In this episode, we sit down with Darcy Tuttle, a 2025–26 Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome. Darcy’s research moves through ancient Roman religion, law, burial, and funerary practice, asking questions about death, community, and who gets to belong, even after death.
Darcy and T.J. were also Shop Talk partners at the Academy, and early in our time in Rome, Darcy took a group of us on a tour of an ancient burial site that also happened to be full of stray cats. It was one of those wonderfully wild early Rome experiences, and an early indication that Darcy was definitely someone we wanted to talk with more.
In this episode, we talked about writing a dissertation while living at the Academy, loving your research, getting the work done, and also trying to find some balance and actually live your life while you’re doing it. We talked about the privilege of being an academic, the strange and fascinating stories that emerge from studying burial and belonging, and what it means to genuinely care about the questions you’ve chosen to spend years pursuing.
We also talked about teaching and what Darcy calls bringing “big cringe energy” into the classroom: being authentic about her enthusiasm for the work and wanting to transmit some of that energy, curiosity, and excitement to the people she teaches.
It’s a conversation about scholarship, teaching, balance, and being unapologetically excited by the work you get to do, while remembering that there is also a whole life happening around it.