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Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Names Cohort of IDEAS Research Fellows
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 SAH IDEAS Research Fellowship: Sayali Athale, Kelsey Blignaut, and Laura Leppink. The award advances research that challenges existing paradigms and represents previously under-recognized or unsupported directions for architectural history. Part of the SAH IDEAS Initiative, this fellowship supports emerging scholars who self-identify as members of marginalized groups.
The $1,000 fellowship award includes one year of close mentorship from a senior colleague from the SAH community as well as guided lateral interaction across the cohort to encourage peer support. The SAH IDEAS Committee is deeply grateful to the senior scholars who have generously agreed to contribute their time to support each of the fellowship recipients.
Since its inception in 2022, the IDEAS Research Fellowship has supported 14 scholars from around the world whose research projects have examined the processes of urbanization beyond cities, landscapes of extraction, immigration, gardens and violence, religious cultural heritage, and slave-built architecture.
The 2026 SAH IDEAS Research Fellowship recipients are listed below along with the names of their mentors.
Sayali Athale (she/her) is an architect and heritage researcher, and co-founder of the architectural studio Design Equate. With over a decade of professional experience across architectural projects and documentation, she has over the past two years focused on academic inquiry into traditional building craftwork. Her research is grounded in qualitative methods and examines material practices, knowledge transmission, and the relationship between work and identity.
Her IDEAS Fellowship project investigates gendered practices of traditional crafts(wo)manship, care, and the synthesis of space in the Middle Himalayan region. Through ethnographic fieldwork, she will study women’s everyday world-making practices that contribute to the making and maintenance of settlements and surrounding forest landscapes. These practices are understood as forms of care and repair that sustain both social life and ecological systems and offer alternative ways of understanding vernacular architecture.
Sayali holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Pune University and a Master’s degree in World Heritage Studies from Brandenburgische Technische Universität, Germany. She is also a trained woodworker and a Bharatanatyam dancer.
She will be mentored by Melissa Kerin, Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University.
Kelsey Blignaut (she/her) is a South African urban designer, writer, and trained architect whose research is grounded in spatial justice, memory, and the experiences of marginalized communities. Her work examines how race, erasure, and access shape the built environment, informed by an ongoing focus on civic absence and belonging. She approaches architectural history not as a static canon, but as a field of contestation where silences and erasures must be reckoned with.
Kelsey’s current research centers on North End, a former mixed residential neighborhood in East London, South Africa, demolished under the Group Areas Act of 1950. Often described as the city’s “District Six,” North End was defined not only by its proximity to civic amenities, but by dense social networks, cultural life, and shared histories across faiths and races. The area was entirely erased and subsequently reconstructed and reoccupied, leaving little trace of its former life. The project emerges from a secondary lived experience: Blignaut’s paternal family was forcibly removed from the area, situating the research at the intersection of personal history and broader patterns of spatial erasure replicated across South Africa.
A central outcome of her IDEAS Fellowship project is the creation of a North End archive. Combining spatial, ritual, and visual records, the archive seeks to preserve both tangible and intangible histories using photography, mapping, archival reconstruction, and public interventions, while also allowing for speculative and imaginative forms of archival practice. Intended for academic and public engagement, the project positions memory as an active tool for justice, repair, and collective reimagining.
She holds a Master of Architecture from Nelson Mandela University. She is currently practicing as an urban designer, with academic research grounded in archival methods and spatial justice, focused on forced removals and the afterlives of erased urban landscapes.
She will be mentored by Professor Ola Uduku, Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool.
Laura Leppink (she/her) is a public and architectural historian dedicated to integrating disability justice into the interpretation and preservation of the built environment. As a founding member of REPAIR: Disability Heritage Collective, she collaborates with scholars and advocates to make disability history visible in public policy, design education, and heritage practice. She earned her Master’s in Heritage Studies and Public History from the University of Minnesota in 2020. With Gail Dubrow and Morgan LaCasse, Leppink co-authored the City of Seattle’s first historic context study on disability activism (2025)—the city’s first effort to identify and interpret places significant to disability communities. The project created a replicable model for other municipalities and demonstrated that heritage preservation is an essential, often overlooked component of cultural rights.
Building on this work, her current fellowship project expands the model to a statewide scale, co-leading an initiative with deaf and disability advocacy groups to document places significant to Minnesota’s disability history through archival research, participatory methods, and digital mapping.
She will be mentored by Elizabeth Guffey, Professor of Art History at SUNY Purchase.
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