In 2016, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) a grant to administer the SAH/Mellon Author Awards. These awards are designed to provide financial relief to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on the history of the built environment and who are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images or for commissioning maps, charts or line drawings in their publications. The publication of a monograph continues to be the most valued demonstration of scholarly competence for career advancement and recognition in the humanities. Unfortunately, many authors today must provide both a fully realized text and the financial resources for its image program. The cost for image rights and licensing, especially for digital publications, can be prohibitively expensive.

Through this grant, SAH will provide awards to scholars to help defray the high costs of image licensing, reproduction, and creation of original drawings and maps for monographs on the history of the built environment. This grant is intended as a seed grant to assist authors to pay for these costs and to secure other applicable grants. Awardees will be selected on the basis of the quality of their project and their demonstrated financial need.

The SAH/Mellon Author Awards jury comprises distinguished mid-career and senior scholars who are members of SAH and whose specializations cover a broad range of scholarship on the built environment. The jury has discretion over the number of awardees and the size of the grant to be awarded, but a typical grant would be $5,000–$6,000. The grants will be made directly to authors to defray the costs of image acquisitions.

Criteria
Applications for the SAH/Mellon Author Awards will be considered only for book-length, scholarly manuscripts on architectural history and the history of the built environment that are currently under contract with a publisher. Awards are made solely in support of image acquisition or creation, such as for reimbursement of costs for the reproduction and licensing of images in print and digital formats or the creation of original artwork such as drawings or maps. This award does not cover new photography.

Additional criteria for making awards include: (1) support will be for emerging scholars who have recently (within the last six years) been awarded a PhD, assistant professors in the tenure track, postdoctoral scholars, early-career independent scholars and/or early career scholars who are publishing a first book; (2) funds are to be used for reimbursement of anticipated expenses for rights and reproductions as well as commissioning special charts, maps and other types of didactic illustrations (not photographs); (3) SAH will award grants to authors for manuscripts only on architectural history and the history of the built environment.

Eligibility

• The author must be a current member of SAH.
• The author will have received a PhD within the past six years (January 2012 – May 31, 2018) and must submit proof and date of PhD and current professional standing.
• Authors must be under contract with a commercial or nonprofit publisher; self-published books are not eligible.
• Books covering all periods and areas in the history of architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, and related subjects are eligible. Publications in art history and visual studies are not eligible and should be submitted to the Millard Meiss Publication Fund administered by College Art Association (CAA). Excavation or other technical reports, articles, previously published works (including collections of previously published essays), or congress proceedings are not eligible.
• Awards are open to authors of all nations; however, applications must be submitted in English.
• A project that has been rejected for an SAH/Mellon Author Awards grant may not be resubmitted.