The Department of Art History celebrates Ph.D. candidates Claire Spadafora Baes, Rachel Mohl, and Adrienne Rooney as this year’s recipients of the James T. Wagoner '29 Foreign Study Scholarship.
The Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship was founded by Rice alumnus James T. Wagoner ('29) to support strong travel proposals to students who have demonstrated outstanding achievement and promise in their research.
Claire Spadafora Baes will use the scholarship to travel to England and conduct research for her dissertation, "The Early Work of 'Raphael secundus': William Kent in Italy and England, 1709-1724," which considers the training, collecting, and artistic production of 18th-century English artist William Kent in Italy.
Rachel Mohl is a Ph.D. candidate on the Museum Professionals track at Rice University and Assistant Curator of Latin American and Latino Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her current research explores the influence of Jewish immigration on the development of the avant-garde in Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s. She will use the scholarship funds to conduct research in Argentina for her dissertation.
Adrienne Rooney studies twentieth-century art and visual culture in the Americas, with a focus on the Caribbean and the United States. She will travel to Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados with the support of the scholarship to conduct research for her dissertation, tentatively titled "Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-1981," which studies the conceptualization of this monumental, transnational, ongoing festival and the visual culture foregrounded in its first four iterations in Guyana in 1972, Jamaica in 1976, Cuba in 1979, and Barbados in 1981.