This week we sit down with Margo Weitzman, Rome Prize Fellow and PhD candidate at Rutgers University, whose research traces a sixteenth-century merchant moving between India and Italy—translating worlds through trade, language, and desire.
Margo opens up about her own emergent journey: being adopted, navigating queerness, partnership, travel, and the ongoing search for belonging. We explore how her scholarship and personal history inform one another, and how mining the histories of objects, places, and people parallels the work of assembling identity from fragments, archives, and lived experience. We also talk about the unexpected ways growth shows up in motion—and how Margo's own artistic practice threads through her research and her sense of self.
She speaks beautifully about visiting churches throughout Rome as part of her inquiry into space, meaning, and ritual. Here's to hoping The Emergence Room gets to go "churching" with her soon.
This episode is a thoughtful, vulnerable reflection on connection, curiosity, identity, and finding home at the intersection of the personal and the scholarly.
