Piergianna Mazzocca

Piergianna Mazzocca is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urban Development program at Cornell University. Her research examines the architectural history of the doctrine of disease eradication from the 1920s to the 1960s across the Americas, exploring its spatial manifestations and connections with capitalist extractivism and colonial relations of race and labor. Focusing on the interconnected history of oil extraction and malaria eradication in Venezuela as a distinct locus of enunciation of these ideas, and seeing to their impact across the hemisphere, her research draws from architectural and medical archives to trace how public health experts sought to improve landscapes and bodies through architectural and infrastructural interventions guided by sanitary engineering. Mazzocca obtained her Bachelor of Architecture from the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, and a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, at the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. She has taught as the 2019–2021 Emerging Scholar in Design Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and as the 2017–2019 Wortham Fellow at Rice University. At Cornell, she is working with María González Pendás (architecture), Suman Seth (STS), and María Fernández (history of art).