The Department of Art History celebrates Ph.D. candidate Giovanna Bassi Cendra as the recipient of the James T. Wagoner '29 Foreign Study Scholarship for the second time. This award will allow Giovanna to travel to Chile and Peru to conduct archival research on the planning, design, and construction of modern university campuses for the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería (Peru), Universidad Técnica del Estado (Chile), and Universidad de Concepción (Chile). Her ongoing dissertation project, "Tectonics of Development: Mineral Extraction and the Architecture of the University-City in South America, 1945–1975," reconstructs the histories of these complexes to argue that the modern university-city in South America functioned as the ultimate technology of extractive development—an intellectual and operative node of complex resource-extraction systems that radically altered our planet’s societies, climate, and ecosystems.
The Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship is given by Rice University's Graduate Council to support strong travel proposals to students who have demonstrated outstanding achievement and promise in their research.
Giovanna Bassi Cendra specializes in modern Latin American art and architecture. She holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of Houston and a master’s degree in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology.