ACLS Celebrates 2025 Open Access Book Prize Winners

On October 22, 2025, ACLS hosted a public panel and award ceremony honoring the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award winners at The New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The 2025 winners are:

• Environmental Humanities: Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh by Camelia Dewan (University of Washington Press, 2021)
• History: Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (University of California Press, 2022)
• Literary Studies: Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank, edited by Daniel Morgan (University of California Press, 2019)
• Multimodal: Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou (Stanford University Press, 2020)

The event began with remarks from Matt Knutzen, Director, Strategic Initiatives and Advancement, Office of the Andrew W. Mellon Director at The New York Public Library, and Sarah McKee, ACLS Project Manager for Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship. “This collaboration creates a virtuous cycle, where the fruits of scholarship, these new open access publications, enrich the ecosystem of information and knowledge available not only in libraries but also to anybody with an internet connection,” Knutzen remarked.

“Bringing together scholars from Australia to Sweden and publishers from Chicago, IL to Seattle, WA, the celebration of the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize winners at The New York Public Library offered an incredible opportunity to share critical and accessible humanistic scholarship to an expanded audience,” McKee said.

Moderated by Beth Daley, Executive Editor of The Conversation US, the panel brought together the winning authors and publishers for an engaging discussion of their work. The authors reflected on their research in environmental humanities, history, and literary studies, while the publishers shared insights into the collaborative efforts and innovation required to make high-quality scholarship accessible.

“Whereas before we’d see traditional monograph sales reach perhaps 300 to 500 copies over the course of the life of the book, with open access these works are traveling around the globe and we’re seeing download rates in the thousands, which is really exciting and demonstrates the impact level of this kind of work,” explained Raina Polivka, Senior Editor of Music, Film, Media Studies at University of California Press.

Following the panel, the celebration continued at an award ceremony with remarks from Peter Baldwin, co-founder of Arcadia – a family philanthropy; Anthony Marx, President of The New York Public Library; and Joy Connolly, President of ACLS. Their remarks underscored the shared commitment to open access, making peer-reviewed scholarship freely available, and recognized the impact of this year’s winning books.