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.
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
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.
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.
