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.

Stop Motion Philology, by Associate Professor of Comparative Literature Tamara T. Chin, is an experiment in audiovisually-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.

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).