Call for Proposals: GAHTC Grants

By now you must have heard the buzz about the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC). It is a free, Mellon-funded online platform for cross-disciplinary, teacher-to-teacher exchanges of ideas and course material to promote the teaching of all periods of global architectural history. Although the growing online resource seems almost too good to be true, JSAH Editor Patricia Morton, SAHARA Co-Editor Jacqueline Spafford, and I participated in a two-day GAHTC workshop at USC in September to learn more about the online academic platform’s opportunities and challenges. The ambition of GAHTC is to address the needs of educators in diverse disciplinary contexts by providing practical lecture materials for teaching global architectural history at the survey level. With a first round of funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, GAHTC has succeeded in creating an impressive online platform for sharing course materials, including full, downloadable lectures and courses with syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, notes, tests, and writing prompts. They have created a number of useful tutorials for users to explore the content that has already been custom-developed for the site.

The main challenge that GAHTC faces is that the Co-Project Directors, Mark Jarzombek and Vikram Prakash, authors with Francis D.K. Ching of A Global History of Architecture, are still amassing the content and they would welcome your help. In order to fill this online platform with customized, university-level content, GAHTC will dedicate $500,000 of a second Mellon Foundation grant to commission established and emerging scholars to write survey course lectures on the history of architecture, landscapes and urbanism. They have identified several grant-funded opportunities to round out content in the GAHTC site:

Grants of $2,300 per lecture are available through these funding opportunities:

• RESEARCH TO TEACHING GRANTS for scholars who can adapt their talks delivered at the SAH Annual International Conference into a compelling survey-level lecture suitable for undergraduates.
• EMERGING SCHOLAR GRANTS for pre-tenure scholars who can build upon existing GAHTC material while also producing material for the GAHTC course repository.
• UNTARGETED FIELD –INITIATED GRANTS for educators who are able to innovate and supplement existing teaching materials in GAHTC.
• GLOBAL CONNECTIONS FELLOWSHIPS for groups of scholars interested in expanding the scope of their research as it relates to a specific site or region of study.

Grants of $3,300 per lecture are available through these funding opportunities:

• TARGETED ACQUISITION GRANTS for scholars who will address content gaps in the GAHTC repository, including Sub-Saharan Architecture and Space, Global Islamic Architecture and Culture, Domesticity and Gender Across Space, and seven additional areas.

Grants of $5,000 per lecture will be available through these funding opportunities:

• FIELD SEMINAR TRAVEL GRANTS for GAHTC members who participate in one of the next three international SAH Field Seminars. SAH and GAHTC will promote those opportunities as they become available.

Grants of up to $20,000 are available through these funding opportunities:

• TEACHER-TO-TEACHER WORKSHOPS to provide a forum for educators to engage with issues on pedagogy and teaching protocols that address the challenges and complexities faced when teaching a global architectural survey. Workshop participants will assemble their collaborations within a sharable format for the GAHTC community.

If you do nothing else this week, I urge you to create a free GAHTC account at gahtc.org/accounts/register, log in, and explore its rich subject matter ranging from “The Global History of Architecture and Climate” to “Coffeehouses and Teahouses: A Global Architectural History.” This resource is being built for the benefit of architectural historians and a wide variety of other scholars across the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences. Learn more about the GAHTC but—better yet—apply for a grant to develop a single lecture or an entire course. Your intellectual legacy can find a welcome home in this online academic resource which will help shape teaching and scholarship for generations to come.