Ph.D. Alumna Nikki Moore has accepted a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University. While at Wake Forest, Moore will expand her research on the art and architecture of commodity development in Latin America to include the architectural history of the R.J.Reynolds Tobacco Company’s holdings and suppliers in Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean. Carrying her research into her teaching at Wake Forest, Moore will teach a course on Global Architecture History as well as a Latin American Art and Architecture this fall, followed by a course titled Bio-Colonial: Latin American Art + Architectures of Commodity Development for Spring 2020.
Nikki completed her Ph.D. in May 2019 under the direction of Dr. Fabiola López-Durán. Her dissertation, The Aesthetics of the Green Revolution: Art, Architecture and the Agrilogistics of Development between the United States and Latin America, 1930-1972, examines the art, architecture and agricultural aesthetics linking Nelson Rockefeller’s cultural agenda in Latin America to the techno-scientific transformation of food-based commodity production we now know as the Green Revolution. The research and writing of this dissertation were supported by the SSRC IDRF (Social Science Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship), the Rockefeller Archive Center Research Award, and the Society of Architectural Historians Graduate Student Fellowship, as well as the 2016 Graham Foundation Carter Manny Award for Research, Citation of Special Recognition, and the 2017 Graham Foundation Carter Manny Award for Writing, Citation of Special Recognition. From Rice University, Nikki was also awarded the Wagoner Foreign Study Fellowship and the Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship, complimented by the Brown Foundation Dissertation Writing Award and a Brown Foundation Research Fellowship from the Art History Department.
Nikki was a fellow with the University-Based Institute for Advanced Studies’ Intercontinental Academia from 2015 to 2017. More recently she was invited to present her dissertation at Penn Design at the University of Pennsylvania and at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto. This spring, she was one of the ten Ph.D. candidates nationwide invited to present her dissertation at the 2019 Buell Dissertation Colloquium at Columbia University, a “forum for discussing significant new work by emerging scholars." She recently published three peer-reviewed articles in the University of Cambridge's journal Urban History, Architectural Theory Review, and in SEEDS: New Research in Environmental History, NiCHE Network in Canadian History and Environment.
[Image: Nikki Moore at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, in Mexico City. This photo was taken in October of 2016, during Moore's year as a Social Science Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC IDRF) investigating the art and architecture of the Green Revolution in Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico.]