The SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize is a unique collaboration between the Society of Architectural Historians, Places Journal, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts that supports innovative public scholarship on race, architecture, and the built environment. The Prize aims to expand the contemporary discussion on race and the built environment through the production of a significant work of public scholarship to be published in Places and presented as a lecture by SAH. It was envisioned by Charles L. Davis II, an associate professor of architectural history and criticism at the University of Texas at Austin and co-founder of the SAH Race + Architectural History Affiliate Group.
2025 Recipient
Jess Myers is the recipient of the 2025 SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize on Race and the Built Environment. She will receive a $5,000 honorarium to fund archival research and travel, which will begin this year. Her research will culminate in a public lecture presented in Chicago by SAH and the Graham Foundation and the publication of an article in Places.
Myers is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, where she teaches and researches urbanism, sound studies, and the politics of occupancy. Her project, “Disciplining Sound: The Universal Ear Listens to New York’s Public Infrastructure” will create a framework for “listening to listening” by examining the killings of Jordan Neely and Akai Gurley. Each man died because of an unexpected or unpleasant sound in a public or semi-public space.
2023 Recipient
Architectural historian Ginger Nolan received the 2023 SAH | Places Prize. Nolan’s project, “Responding to Racialized Risk: African American Insurance, Churches, and Co-Ops,” examined the strategies that African Americans developed to contend with their exclusion from access to financial capital, affordable housing, and other infrastructures of household risk management.
On October 20, 2023, she delivered the SAH | Places Prize Lecture, “Black Capitalism and the City: African American Insurance and the Actuarial Double-Bind,” at the Graham Foundation. Her essay is available to read online via Places Journal and her lecture available to watch via vimeo.
