April 16, 2016
Rome is where the heart is
By Vicki-Ann Downing
Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Aurelie A. Hagstrom ’85 was living in Rome while studying for a doctor of sacred theology degree at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican university known as the Angelicum.
“If you had asked me then what my dream job would be, I would have said to teach theology at Providence College,” said Hagstrom. “And if you had asked me my dream even beyond that, I would have said to teach theology in Rome for Providence College.”
Hagstrom is completing her third and final year as faculty resident director of the PC Center for Theology and Religious Studies in Rome. During that period, six groups of PC students, 164 in all, have passed through her classroom, studying her course, The New Testament in the Eternal City, and visiting sites significant to Catholicism.
Hagstrom, an associate professor of theology at PC since 2003, was only the second lay woman hired to teach theology full time at the College and the first woman to chair the department. Her specialties are ecclesiology, theology of the laity, and Mariology. She only intended to serve a year as faculty resident director in Rome, but she did such a good job that Adrian G. Beaulieu, dean of the Center for International Studies, asked her to stay for a second — and then a third. She returns to Providence for a sabbatical at the end of this semester.
“The best part of being in Rome is that once I was a student here myself, and now I have students with whom to share my love of Rome and my love of Catholicism,” said Hagstrom. “The students and I bond in a different way than we ever could on campus.”
After earning her doctorate in Rome in 1991, Hagstrom joined the faculty at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Ill. She was a tenured professor and theology department chair there when Dr. Patrick V. Reid, professor of theology at PC, called to say that PC was seeking to hire a new professor in theology and encouraged her to apply. Would she be willing to leave a tenured position to start all over again in Providence?
Hagstrom was — and her decision has made all the difference.
“A faculty resident director is more than a professor,” said Beaulieu. “He or she must be available to students outside the classroom. The director becomes the personification of Providence College for students while they are in Rome. In Aurelie’s case, she was able to take the experiences she had loved as a student and convey them to our own students — and that was the teaching moment.”
