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2025 SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize Awarded to Jess Myers

Jul 17, 2025 by SAH News

CHICAGO, JULY 14, — The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce Jess Myers as the recipient of the 2025 SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize on Race and the Built Environment. The prize, a collaboration between the Society of Architectural Historians, Places Journal, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, supports original public scholarship that considers race and the built environment through a contemporary lens.

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.  She has worked as an archivist, translator and analyst in New York and Paris. Myers served as a co-steward of the Architecture Lobby’s New York chapter and as the series editor for SEIU’s book series, Taking Freedom. Her research takes many forms including a variety of multimedia platforms, which she uses to explore politics and residency in urban conditions.

"While architecture and urbanism are normally analyzed through the visual, the spatial analysis of sound can reveal intertwined urban histories of public space and the power dynamics of shared space," she wrote in her letter to the selection committee.

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 as a consequence of of an unexpected or unpleasant sound in a public or semi-public space. Neely was killed while riding a subway train. He stepped into the car and began screaming. After minutes of this screaming, another rider rose, knocked him to the ground and placed an arm tightly around his throat until he died. Gurley was killed in the stairwell of the Louis H. Pink Houses, a public housing campus in Brooklyn's East New York neighborhood. A police offer patrolling a dimly-lit stairwell heard a noise and discharged his firearm in its direction, hitting Gurley in the chest and dealing a killing injury.

In her Prize-funded research, Myers will center Neely’s screams on the New York subway and Gurley’s alleged sudden noise in a public housing stairwell in an analysis of their killers' legal defenses. Both cases frame the killings as unfortunate but reasonable given the location of the sounds each defendant heard, thus stitching together sound, reception, and location as hinge points in the outcome of each trial.

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.

Established in 2021, the SAH | Places Prize was envisioned by Charles L. Davis II, associate professor of architectural history and criticism at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and co-chair of the SAH Race + Architectural History Affiliate Group.

SAH, Places Journal, and the Graham Foundation strive to develop an inclusive academic culture that promotes the dissemination of pioneering research produced by both new entrants and senior scholars in the field. The goals of the SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize are threefold: to create a platform for existing and new scholarship in the field; to reach new publics for this work; and to develop mentorships and networking opportunities for graduate students and junior scholars.

 

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About the Society of Architectural Historians
Founded in 1940, the Society of Architectural Historians is an international nonprofit membership 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 profession or interest, focus on the built environment and its role in shaping contemporary life. SAH promotes meaningful public engagement with the history of the built environment through advocacy efforts, print and online publications, and local, national and international programs.

About the SAH Race + Architectural History Affiliate Group
The  SAH Race + Architectural History Affiliate Group was established by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in 2019 to promote research activities that analyze the racial discourses of architectural historiography, past and present. Following the scholarly trajectory of interdisciplinary fields such as colonial studies, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and whiteness studies, our activities promote a race-conscious architectural history that analyzes the constitutive role of race thinking in the social construction and representation of cultural differences abroad.

About Places Journal
Founded at MIT and Berkeley in 1983, P laces is an independent, nonprofit journal of public scholarship on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Bridging from the university to the profession to the public, Places features scholars, journalists, designers, and artists who are responding to the profound challenges of our time: environmental health and structural inequity, climate crisis, resource scarcity, human migration, rapid technological innovation, and the erosion of the public sphere.

About the Graham Foundation
Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.

 

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