SAH Announces Winners of the 2013 SAH/Mellon Author Awards

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the SAH/Mellon Author Awards provide emerging scholars with financial resources to acquire image licensing and reproduction for monographs on the history of the built environment.

Francesca Russello Ammon and Lucy M. Maulsby have been named the recipients of the inaugural SAH/Mellon Author Awards by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH). The awards will provide financial assistance for the costs of image licensing and reproduction for their current book projects.

Francesca Russello Ammon is assistant professor of city & regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current book project, Culture of Clearance: Waging War on the Landscape in Postwar America, is the first scholarly history of the bulldozer and an interdisciplinary study of the dramatic transformation of American space in the decades following World War II. Trained in civil engineering, architecture and U.S. history, Ammon explores how and why the nation came to equate destruction with progress during the postwar era. Culture of Clearance is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

“I am delighted to receive an SAH/Mellon Author Award. As photographs, film stills, advertisements and children’s book art are integral to my argument, this support will greatly enhance the visual power of the published work,” said Ammon.

Lucy M. Maulsby is assistant professor of architecture at Northeastern University. Her current book, Fascism, Architecture and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 1922–1943, provides the first extended critical look at how fascism confronted a dynamic urban environment through the example of Milan, which played a central but overlooked role in constructing the movement’s national image and identity. The book is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press.

Maulsby remarked that the SAH/Mellon Author Award is “one of a relatively limited number of awards that recognizes the continued importance of and growing costs associated with including high quality images in scholarly monographs on the built environment.”

The SAH/Mellon Author Awards are made possible by a three-year grant of $51,330 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Through this grant SAH provides awards to scholars who are publishing their first monograph on architectural history and are responsible for paying for rights and permissions for images in their publications. A similar award, the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, is being administered by the College Art Association (CAA) for emerging scholars publishing first monographs on art history and visual studies. Both awards will provide leading authors in the early stages of their career with the financial resources to acquire images or create special maps or illustrations for scholary publications. Visit www.sah.org/fellowships-and-grants for information about applying for an SAH/Mellon Author Award in 2014.

The Society of Architectural Historians is a nonprofit educational organization that promotes the study, interpretation and conservation of architecture, design, landscapes and urbanism worldwide. SAH serves a network of local, national and international institutions and individuals who, by vocation or avocation, focus on the built environment and its role in shaping contemporary life. Headquartered in Chicago’s historic Charnley-Persky House, the Society publishes its quarterly print and online Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) and the Buildings of the United States book series, organizes study tours and hosts the SAH Annual Conference. SAH’s other digital resources include SAH Archipedia, a media-rich online encyclopedia of American architecture, and SAHARA, a shared online image archive for teaching and research. To learn more about SAH or to become a member, visit sah.org.

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