The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a United States-based scholarly federation, has named six winners of the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards.
Supported by Arcadia, the awards recognize authors and publishers of open access humanities books published from 2019 to 2024. Each winning author receives $20,000, and each winning publisher receives a $30,000 grant to fund the immediate open access publication of at least two new books. The combined award is $50,000 per winning title.
2026 Winners#
- Anthropology: Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm by Emily Yates-Doerr (University of California Press, 2024)
- Environmental Humanities: Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China by Jesse Rodenbiker (Cornell University Press, 2023)
- History: Abortion Pills: US History and Politics by Carrie Baker (Amherst College Press, 2024)
- Literary/Media Studies: Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives by Anastasia Salter and Stuart Moulthrop (Amherst College Press, 2021)
- Multimodal: 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)
- Political Science: Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox by Naila Kabeer (LSE Press, 2024)
A panel of judges selected the winners from a shortlist of five finalists in each category.
Awards and Ceremony#
The prizes, among the largest for scholarly books, will be presented at The New York Public Library on Wednesday, November 4, 2026. The event includes a public panel discussion.
Sarah McKee, ACLS Program Officer for Amplifying Humanistic Scholarship, said:
“The 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prize awardees exemplify innovative, impactful, and open humanistic scholarship that is accessible in multiple registers. Beyond dropping the paywall, the authors and publishers of these six books offer clear prose that nonspecialist audiences can understand. They integrate technical affordances that meet a variety of reader needs, including multiple file formats, alt-text, video captioning, and screen reader compatibility. They combine high visibility with seamless navigation on publishing platforms, ensuring that students, policy makers, and interested communities around the world can discover and benefit from the research. ACLS is delighted to celebrate the accomplishments of these six honorees.”
ACLS Centennial and Arcadia#
In 2026, ACLS marks 100 years of grantmaking to individual scholars. The organization, formed more than a century ago, is a nonprofit federation of 85 scholarly organizations. It supports member organizations and works to expand the forms, content, and flow of scholarly knowledge, reflecting a commitment to diversity of identity and experience. ACLS collaborates with institutions, associations, and individuals to strengthen the evolving infrastructure for scholarship.
Arcadia is a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage, and promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $1.2 billion to organizations around the world.
