As faculty members, administrators and students start trickling back into Athens for the beginning of the academic year, one couple is leaving town to study religion and history at the American Academy of Rome.

History faculty members Kevin Uhalde and Jaclyn Maxwell, along with their infant son, Oscar, are set to leave Sunday for Italy.

The opportunity came as a result of Uhalde winning the 2007 Rome Prize, which requires recipients to study in Rome for one year, one of the world’s most historical cities.

“There’s a whole bunch of history and interesting stuff all in one place,” Uhalde said.

Fifteen emerging artists and 15 scholars receive the Rome Prize each year. Uhalde is one of the five academic scholars selected in the area of ancient studies.

While in Rome, Uhalde will be studying the history of penance and working on his second book, “The Power of Forgiveness in the Early Christian Church.” His first book, “Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine,” is scheduled to be released in January.

Maxwell will also be working on her second book, which investigates the way the upper class viewed the lower class during the late Roman Empire and the effect of the transition from a pagan to a Christian society on this.

“She is studying snobbery of Ancient Rome,” Uhalde said.

Maxwell’s first book, “Christianization and Communication: John Chrysostom and Lay Christians in Antioch,” is scheduled for release this fall. Maxwell holds a joint-appointment in OU’s history and classics and world religions departments.

Despite their academic work, the couple’s recent weeks have been spent packing and preparing to move their lives and their four-month-old son to a city that is, to some extent, familiar to the couple.

The pair, who met during their graduate studies at Princeton, spent last summer in Rome as part of Maxwell’s summer fellowship at the American Academy of Rome through the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“But this time we will have a baby,” Maxwell said. “We’ll have to trade off between taking care of him and working in the libraries. But he sleeps a lot, so we can get some work done.”

And although the couple has stayed in Rome before, they will have to adapt much more to the culture during their yearlong stay.

“Last summer it was difficult to find people to talk to,” Maxwell said. “You don’t strike conversations with strangers very much. But with the baby, I’m expecting more people to just walk up and talk to us. It’s a very baby-friendly culture.”

Both Maxwell and Uhalde are taking classes to learn Italian. Uhalde also said the yearlong stay will allow for the culture to sink in more.

“We’ll get to know the city and improve our Italian,” Uhalde said. “We’ll be traveling around Italy taking in the culture, visiting big cities, small villages and markets and using Rome’s many libraries.”