ACLS Names Finalists for 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce 10 finalists for the 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards. The finalists, five history titles and five multimodal works, were selected by a distinguished panel 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 2017 to 2022.

In the initial competition, one open access monograph in each category will receive dual awards: authors receive the $20,000 ACLS Open Access Book Prize, and publishers of the winning titles receive the $30,000 Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award to support forthcoming books that would not otherwise be published open access. The prizes, among the largest for scholarly books, will be presented in May 2024 at the ACLS Annual Meeting.

The five finalists in the history category are:

• Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk (Duke University Press, 2022) 
• Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions by Susan Burch (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) 
• Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London by Simon P. Newman (University of London Press, 2022) 
• The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea by Hwisang Cho (University of Washington Press, 2020) 
• Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India by Mytheli Sreenivas (University of Washington Press, 2021) 

The five finalists in the multimodal, born-digital category are:

• As I Remember It: Teachings (ʔəms tɑʔɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder by Elsie Paul with Davis McKenzie, Paige Raibmon, and Harmony Johnson (University of British Columbia Press / RavenSpace, 2019)
• Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork by Whitney Trettien (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) 
• i used to love to dream by A.D. Carson (University of Michigan Press, 2020) 
• Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World by Massimo Riva (Stanford University Press, 2022) 
• Vidding: A History by Francesca Coppa (University of Michigan Press, 2022) 

Honorable Mention: Constructing the Sacred: Visibility and Ritual Landscape at the Egyptian Necropolis of Saqqara by Elaine A. Sullivan (Stanford University Press, 2020)

“ACLS applauds the authors and publishers of these exceptional books,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “They’ve shown a commitment to making their scholarship available freely to the world, moving away from ‘cloister’d virtue,’ sharing their insights into the human experience with fellow scholars and communities worldwide.”

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 helps cultivate a twenty-first-century ecosystem in which humanistic publications can thrive.