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First Two Titles in Brown University Digital Publications–MIT Press Book Series Garner Prestigious Prizes
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Awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Studies Association recognize excellence and innovation.
Providence, R.I. [Brown University] Major prizes spotlight the first two titles in the On Seeing series, a joint venture by Brown University Digital Publications and the MIT Press. Devoted to visual literacy, publications in the series foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. Centering underrepresented perspectives and understudied questions, these books articulate complex ideas about how we see, comprehend, and participate in the visual world.
Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual
Mortvevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (2024) by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, is a finalist for the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the multimodal category. The awards are among the largest for peer-reviewed open access monographs in the humanities, with $20,000 for authors and $30,000 for publishers to support future open access projects.
In addition to demonstrating an original and compelling disciplinary contribution, impact to the wider scholarly conversation and/or to nonacademic audiences, and inclusive design and technology, multimodal submissions are evaluated for:
- innovative and judicious use of digital components that serve to advance the work’s core argument or narrative;
- intuitive navigation and seamless integration of text and digital content; and
- attention to preservation concerns.
The multimodal edition of Mortevivum employs a Consentful Tech framework, or the intentional development and use of technology to create safety, to prioritize care, and to foreground consent to mitigate trauma. In an interview with ACLS, the author explains:
Exploring a space between evidence and erasure, the Brown University Digital Publications design team deeply considered how to transform [challenging] images for various audiences. An icon indicates that viewers may opt to see more of an altered image, but only if they choose to do so. By including images that do the work without doing the damage, the multimodal edition introduces a new form of visual literacy that comes through agency.
Multimodal projects engage the senses at different registers, allowing the greatest measure of immersion to take place. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I have moved between literature and visual culture in my writing and pedagogy, and this has allowed readers and students to engage where they feel most comfortable. We live in a multimodal world. Our research and writing should reflect this.
Landing page for Mortevivum digital publication Mortevivum is the second work developed by Brown University Digital Publications to be shortlisted for the ACLS–Arcadia prizes. In 2024, Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022), by Brown University Professor of Italian Studies Massimo Riva, also advanced in the multimodal category. For the 2026 competition, the winning book will receive dual awards, presented in October during International Open Access Week.
Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning
Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. Courtesy of Getty Images. Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning, also by Kimberly Juanita Brown, has been named the winner of the 2026 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize by the American Studies Association. The prize honors the most outstanding book published in the field of American studies. The award ceremony will take place in October at the annual meeting of the Association.
Whereas Mortevivum studies the relationship between documentary photography and histories of antiblackness, Black Elegies examines the form of the elegy and its unique capacity to convey the elongated grief of sustained racial violence. Structured around the sensorial, the book moves through sight, sound, and touch, offering a framework of mourning while black, within the parameters of contemporary artistic production. Brown explains:
Multimodal projects engage the senses at different registers, allowing the greatest measure of immersion to take place. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I have moved between literature and visual culture in my writing and pedagogy, and this has allowed readers and students to engage where they feel most comfortable. We live in a multimodal world. Our research and writing should reflect this.
Cover of Community Engagement Toolkit for Black Elegies. Brown University Digital Publications
Award-Winning Publications
Other award-winning publications in the Brown portfolio include Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), awarded the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize in Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association; Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022), finalist for the ACLS–Arcadia multimodal prize and category winner for Best E-Product for the 47th Annual PROSE Awards juried by the Association of American Publishers; and A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), shortlisted for the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan International Book Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy.
Contact
Questions about Brown University Digital Publications can be addressed to Director Allison Levy (allison_levy@brown.edu).
About
Brown University Digital Publications — generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation in 2015 with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge by advancing scholarly arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional print format, whether through multimedia enhancements or interactive engagement with research materials. Brown partners with leading scholarly presses to bring peer reviewed, open access, multimodal content to global audiences. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel approach to born-digital monograph publishing is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship.
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New Multimodal Book Project by Tamara T. Chin Selected for Development with Brown University Digital Publications
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The University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, together with the Brown University Digital Publications Editorial Board, are pleased to announce the selection of the next scholarly work to be developed by Brown University Digital Publications.
Tamara T. Chin Stop Motion Philology, by Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Tamara T. Chin, is an experiment in audio-visually enhanced close reading that animates, through sound and moving image, aspects of a text that cannot be grasped through silent reading. This hybrid essay-animation book uses phonetically precise sound recordings and commissioned medical imaging (MRI film) to expand our understanding of Silk Road loan phenomena — that is, the literary and linguistic borrowing or translation of words, sounds, rhythms, scripts, and other cultural forms across first millennium Afro-Eurasia.
Philology is understood today as “making sense of texts.” In the past it also provided the classificatory basis for dividing the world into static and isolated national traditions. This multimodal book focuses on overlooked aspects of key texts that resulted from movement across traditions. One cannot explain in writing the efforts by speakers of tonal Chinese and atonal Sanskrit, or writers of alphabetic and logographic texts to emulate, outdo, or reject each other. Stop Motion Philology borrows animation’s principle of motion as both a medium and a critical theme through which to better see, hear, and explain the intercultural and translingual liveliness of the distant past and its dialog with the present.
The multimodal publication will include MRI recordings of a speaking mouth and throat so that readers can “see” and “hear” the otherwise undetectable experiment to make Chinese sound into a Sanskrit-like alphabet. Brown University Digital Publications
Brown University Digital Publications — generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation in 2015 with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge by advancing scholarly arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional print format, whether through multimedia enhancements or interactive engagement with research materials. Brown partners with leading scholarly presses to bring peer reviewed, open access, multimodal content to global audiences. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel approach to born-digital monograph publishing is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship.
Landmark publications include:
- Tara Nummedal’s Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), awarded the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize in Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association;
- Massimo Riva’s Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022), winner of a 2023 PROSE Award for best e-product by the Association of American Publishers and shortlisted for the 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Publishing Award;
- Shahzad Bashir’s A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), shortlisted for The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy;
- Kimberly Juanita Brown’s Mortvevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (MIT Press, 2024), the inaugural title in the BUDP-MITP book series On Seeing, currently a finalist for the 2026 ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Publishing Award; and from the same series
- Kimberly Juanita Brown’s Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning (MIT Press, 2025), awarded the 2026 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best book in American studies by the American Studies Association.
Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s Grounds for Reclamation: Fascism and Postfascism in the Marshes is forthcoming with Fordham University Press; Sheila Bonde’s The Sensory Monastery is forthcoming with Penn State University Press; and ten additional works are currently in development, four of which are under review with leading university presses:
- Rebecca Schneider’s Standing Still Moving: Arts of Gesture in Lateral Time;
- Sawako Nakayasu’s Poet Sagawa Chika: Late Gathering;
- Kevin Escudero’s Imperial Unsettling: Indigenous and Immigrant Activism Toward Collective Liberation;
- Laurel Bestock’s Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt;
- Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar’s Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive: Notes on Art, Repair, and the Writing of Indian History;
- Yannis Hamilakis’ Border Assemblages: Re-collecting Moria;
- Rebecca Louise Carter’s Going through the Motions: Animations of Black Being in the Breaks;
- John Cayley’s In Networked and Programmable Media: Language Art with Personal Computation;
- Michelle Clayton’s Dancing across Modernities; and
- Eleni Sikelianos’ Rehearsal is at Dawn.
In addition, Brown University Digital Publications has produced University projects such as the revised and expanded edition of Brown’s Slavery and Justice Report; the 13-volume Race &…in America digital series; and The Brown-Tougaloo Partnership: Profound Collaboration and Change in the History of American Higher Education (forthcoming, fall 2026).
To learn more about Brown University Digital Publications, contact Director Allison Levy (allison_levy@brown.edu).
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Remedy & Risk: Patent Bottle Medicine Collection
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STRABMULLER’S ELIXIR, reprod., c.1970. Discover medical history by examining glass bottles produced for various medicinal purposes.
Driven by fear of illness, high medical costs, and an unregulated market, 19th- and early 20th-century patent medicines thrived through bold advertising claims and unique glassware. Before federal labeling laws passed in 1906 and 1912, manufacturers could conceal ingredients and make untested health claims.
Assembled by former Brown University Medical Dean Dr. David S. Greer, this collection features over 200 mid-1800s to early 1900s medicine bottles—most molded with product names—alongside historical sales artifacts. The exhibit mirrors modern over-the-counter medicine complexities through the lens of early healthcare, marketing, and culture.
This exhibit is a reprisal of a 1975 Brown Library exhibition.
Dates: September 8, 2026 – June 4, 2027
Time: John Hay Library Hours
Location: Willis Reading Room, John Hay Library, 20 Prospect Street, Providence