The Department of Art History congratulates Ph.D. candidates Aja Martin and Stephen Westich as this year’s recipients of the James T. Wagoner 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. The competitive scholarship provides students and alumni the opportunity to conduct research abroad for a minimum of four weeks to one year with funding of up to to $15,000 per award.
Aja Martin is a doctoral candidate who writes on twentieth-century art and theory with an emphasis on Italy. Her dissertation, Dark Matters: Lucio Fontana’s Grotesque World, calls attention to the conspicuous presence of shadows and voids that appear across Fontana’s oeuvre and enact a dynamic balance with the aspects of light and space for which the artist is more widely known.
Stephen Westich studies the medieval architecture of Europe with a special concentration on the Norwegian stave churches. His dissertation, with the tentative title: The Shrine in the Field: Materiality and Spatiality of Norwegian Stave Churches, will closely examine both the meanings and the techniques of meaning produced by the unique spaces of these buildings rooted in an investigation into the complex set of associations that adheres to the materiality of the Norwegian pine of which they are made.