ACLS Announces Finalists for 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce 20 finalists for the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards. The five finalists in each of four categories—environmental humanities, history, literary studies, and multimodal works—were selected by distinguished panels of scholars, librarians, digital humanities experts, and accessibility specialists. Supported by Arcadia, these prizes recognize and reward the authors and publishers of exceptional, innovative, and open humanities books published from 2018 to 2023.

One open access monograph in each of the four categories will receive dual awards. The authors of the winning titles will receive the $20,000 ACLS Open Access Book Prize, and the publishers will receive the $30,000 Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award to support forthcoming open access books. The prizes, among the largest for scholarly books, will be announced in fall 2025.

“ACLS congratulates the authors and publishers of the terrific finalists for the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards,” said ACLS Vice President James Shulman. “Having made these books available for free and without barriers, these authors and publishers share knowledge with the world. By seeing these works celebrated, scholars across the sector will be encouraged to write and publish in ways that reach far beyond the gates of campus.”

Environmental Humanities Finalists

• The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life by Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa (University of California Press, 2023)
• Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art by Joanna Page (Open Book Publishers, 2023)
• Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh by Camelia Dewan (University of Washington Press, 2022)
• The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World by Peder Anker (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
• Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire by Mauro José Caraccioli (University Press of Florida, 2021)

History Finalists

• Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (University of California Press, 2022)
• Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China by Yan Liu (University of Washington Press, 2021)
• Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain by Cesar D. Favila (Oxford University Press, 2023)
• Music of a Thousand Years: A New History of Persian Musical Traditions by Ann E. Lucas (University of California Press, 2019)
• Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile by Elizabeth Quay Hutchison (Duke University Press, 2022)

Literary Studies Finalists

• At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators by Jean Ma (University of California Press, 2022)
• Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk (Duke University Press, 2022)
• Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank, edited by Daniel Morgan (University of California Press, 2019)
• Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print by Kathryn M. Rudy (Open Book Publishers, 2019)
• The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity by Jan M. Ziolkowski (Open Book Publishers, 2018)

Multimodal Finalists

• Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema by Abé Markus Nornes (University of Michigan Press, 2021)
• Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature by Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Stanford University Press, 2023)
• Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou (Stanford University Press, 2020)
• Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves by Jacob Smith (University of Michigan Press, 2021)
• Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay by Samhita Sunya (University of California Press, 2022)

For more than 100 years ACLS has supported the creation and circulation of knowledge that advances our understanding of humanity and human endeavors. Amplifying humanistic scholarship through initiatives such as the ACLS Open Books Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards helps cultivate a twenty-first-century ecosystem in which humanistic publications can thrive.