Nikki Moore wins SSRC/Mellon Dissertation Fellowship and Carter Manny Special Citation

February 16, 2016

Nikki Moore

Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship

"The Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) offers nine to twelve months of support to graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled in PhD programs in the United States and conducting dissertation research on non-US topics.”

With this award, Moore will travel to Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica to conduct primary source and site research for her dissertation.  Interrogating the agritecture and ideology of Rockefeller’s Green Revolution, born of the Mexican Agriculture Project, (MAP), the Colombian International Center for Tropical Agriculture, (CIAT), along with the Costa Rican Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences, (IICA) side by side with the cultural agenda funded by Rockefeller, Moore's dissertation asks: To what extent did Rockefeller’s cultural diplomacy, prepared through the Office of Inter-American Affairs in the 1930s and 1940s, and the International Council of the MoMA in the 1950s and 60s, transform the viability of the Green Revolution?  And, how did ideologies of human and nonhuman appropriability, reflected in the genetic experiments conducted within the laboratories of the MAP, CIAT and IICA, inform the architecture of the Green Revolution?  Focusing on the Rockefeller Foundation’s strategic appropriation of the so-called raw materials of the countryside, this dissertation argues that the longest-term implications of Cold War development in the broader Caribbean advanced by converting the rural built environment into the front line of modernization.

Special Citation for The 2016 Carter Manny Award

Moore received a Special Citation for the 2016 Carter Manny Award for her dissertation, titled: Agritectures of the Green Revolution: Architecture, Art and the Agrilogistics of Transnational Aid from the United States to the Caribbean Region, 1930-1978. "The Carter Manny Award supports dissertation research and writing by promising scholars whose projects have architecture as their primary focus and the potential to shape architectural discourse."