Meiss/Mellon Author's Book Award
About the Grant
Background
CAA was awarded a one-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award. Awards will be made twice each year in the spring and fall for print and digital publications. The grant is a temporary measure to provide financial relief to early-career scholars in art history and visual studies who are responsible for funding the image programs in their publications. Through this grant CAA will provide awards to emerging scholars (those with PhDs earned during the past six years) to help defray the high costs of image licensing and reproduction for monographs in art history and visual studies. Awardees will be selected on the basis of the quality and demonstrated financial need of their project. CAA anticipates awarding between eight and ten Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Awards in 2013.
A similar award (SAH–Mellon Author Awards) for emerging scholars publishing monographs on architectural history and the built environment is being administered by the Society for Architectural Historians (SAH). For more information, please contact Beth Eifrig, SAH assistant director of programs, at 312-573-1365. Both the CAA and SAH awards will provide leading authors in the early stages of their careers with the financial resources to acquire images for scholarly publications.
The Mellon/Meiss Author’s Book Award will provide authors with the financial resources they need to produce scholarly books in their most desirable form. The publication of a monograph continues to be the most highly 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 high.
In order to capitalize on CAA’s expertise in the funding of art publications, the Mellon/Meiss Author’s Book Award will be administered similarly to the guidelines, jury processes, and award procedures currently in place for CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant. The jury comprises distinguished midcareer or senior scholars who are members of CAA and whose specializations cover a broad range of art scholarship. The jury has discretion over the number of awardees and the size of the grant to be awarded to each. The grants will be made directly to authors to defray the costs of image acquisitions.
Applications for the first round of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award are now being accepted. The deadline for spring submissions is March 15, 2013. Fall applications are due on September 15, 2013. Successful applicants are emerging scholars who are under contract with a publisher for a manuscript on art history or visual studies. For further information, please review the Application Guidelines and the Application Process, Schedule, and Checklist.
Contact
Questions? Please contact Alex Gershuny, CAA editorial associate, at 212-392-4424.
