This Fellowship is supported through the generosity of the Scott Opler Foundation in Renaissance & Baroque Architecture and Worcester College, University of Oxford.
The Fellowship is named in honour of Scott Opler (1956-1993), whose wide ranging interests and own field of research included the art and architectural history of Renaissance Italy. Scott Opler attended Princeton University (AB 1978), Williams College (MA 1987), and was a PhD candidate in Art History at Harvard University in the field of Italian Renaissance architecture. Shortly before his death of AIDS-related illness, he created the Scott Opler Foundation Inc., to continue his charitable interests. The Foundation supports the charitable and educational activities in three areas: the scholarly study and preservation of art and architecture, the conservation of nature, and the support and provision of Aids-related services and education.
Dr William Aslet
Scott Opler Fellow
William is an architectural historian who specialises on the early eighteenth century in Britain and Europe. His PhD was on the architecture of James Gibbs, the architect of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, St Martin’s-in-the-Fields in London, and a number of other important buildings in Britain. He was also the author of an extremely influential publication, A Book of Architecture of 1728. Gibbs was the first British architect to train in Rome, and it is on his training there under the leading architect Carlo Fontana that William’s research currently focuses. William studied for an undergraduate degree in History at Somerville College, Oxford, and he took both of his postgraduate degrees at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His favourite place in Worcester is the Lower Library, whose collection of British architectural drawings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is second to none.
