Thirty Titles Advance to Final Round for Six $50,000 Prizes for Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences

NEW YORK, May 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce 30 finalists for the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards. The five finalists in each of six categories—anthropology, environmental humanities, history, literary/media studies, multimodal works, and political science—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 2019 to 2024.

One open access monograph in each of the six categories will receive dual awards, among the largest for scholarly books. 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 winning titles will be announced in fall 2026.

"ACLS is proud to announce these outstanding finalists for the third year of the ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards," said Sarah McKee, ACLS Project Manager for Amplifying Humanities Scholarship. "We applaud these authors and presses for their efforts in sharing rigorous, peer-reviewed scholarship in the humanities and social sciences openly and freely. Their work brings overlooked archival sources to light, invites readers to engage new questions across an array of disciplines, and provides rich opportunities for digital engagement with humanistic research."

Anthropology Finalists

• The Diagrammatics of "Race": Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020 by Marianne Sommer (Open Book Publishers, 2024)
• A Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam's Age of Anxiety by Allen L. Tran (University of California Press, 2023)
• Making Sense: Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal by E. Mara Green (University of California Press, 2024)
• Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm by Emily Yates-Doerr (University of California Press, 2024)
• Upland Geopolitics: Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush by Michael B. Dwyer (University of Washington Press, 2022)

Environmental Humanities Finalists

• Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art by Joanna Page (Open Book Publishers, 2023)
• Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China by Jesse Rodenbiker (Cornell University Press, 2023)
• Kernels of Resistance: Maize, Food Sovereignty, and Collective Power by Liza Grandia (University of Washington Press, 2024)
• Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta: A Call for Reclamation by Ned Randolph (University of California Press, 2024)
• 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

• Abortion Pills: US History and Politics by Carrie Baker (Amherst College Press, 2024)
• Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria by Joseph A. Seeley (Cornell University Press, 2024)
• Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History by Michelle Lynn Kahn (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles by Joachim J. Savelsberg (University of California Press, 2021)
• States-in-Waiting: A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization by Lydia Walker (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Literary/Media Studies Finalists

• At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators by Jean Ma (University of California Press, 2022)
• Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print by Kathryn M. Rudy (Open Book Publishers, 2019)
• Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China by Thomas J. Mazanec (Cornell University Press, 2024)
• Sex Sounds: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music by Danielle Shlomit Sofer (The MIT Press, 2022)
• Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives by Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop (Amherst College Press, 2021)

Multimodal Finalists

• Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers by Matthew F. Delmont (Stanford University Press, 2019)
• Deaf Mobility Studies: Exploring International Networks, Tourism, and Migration by Annelies Kusters, Erin Moriarty, Amandine le Maire, Sanchayeeta Iyer, and Steven Emery (Gallaudet University Press, 2024)
• Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 by Stephen Robertson (Stanford University Press, 2024)
• Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual by Kimberly Juanita Brown (The MIT Press, 2024)
• Owning My Masters (Mastered): The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions by A.D. Carson (University of Michigan Press, 2024)

Political Science Finalists

• Abortion Pills: US History and Politics by Carrie Baker (Amherst College Press, 2024)
• Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism by Inés Valdez (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
• Economic Diversification in Nigeria: The Politics of Building a Post-Oil Economy by Zainab Usman (Bloomsbury / Zed Books, 2022)
• Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox by Naila Kabeer (LSE Press, 2024)
• A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture by Carlos Alberto Sánchez (Amherst College Press, 2020)

In 2026 ACLS proudly celebrates 100 years of grantmaking to individual scholars. Throughout the past century, 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 Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards helps cultivate a twenty-first-century ecosystem in which humanities and social sciences publications can thrive.

Formed a century ago, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 86 scholarly organizations. As the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, ACLS upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. In supporting its member organizations, ACLS expands the forms, content, and flow of scholarly knowledge, reflecting our commitment to diversity of identity and experience. ACLS collaborates with institutions, associations, and individuals to strengthen the evolving infrastructure for scholarship.

Arcadia helps people to record cultural heritage, to conserve and restore nature, and to promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002 Arcadia has awarded more than $1.3 billion to organizations around the world.

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SOURCE American Council of Learned Societies