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The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announced that Brushed in Light: Calligraphy in East Asian Cinema by Abé Markus Nornes and Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves by Jacob Smith have been named a finalist for the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the Multimodal category.

The five finalists in each of four categories—environmental humanities, history, literary studies, and multimodal works—were selected by distinguished panels 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 2018 to 2023.

One open access monograph in each of the four categories will receive dual awards. The authors of the winning titles will receive the $20,000 ACLS Open Access Book Prize, and the publishers will receive the $30,000 Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award to support forthcoming open access books. The prizes, among the largest for scholarly books, will be announced in fall 2025.

Brushed in Light examines how the brushed word appears in films and in film cultures of Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and PRC cinemas. Drawing on a millennia of calligraphy theory and history, the book explores the cinematization of the handwritten word and how calligraphers understand their own work.

Lightning Birds is a multi-media project that consists of a five-episode, podcast-style audiobook, a curatorial essay, and a bibliography. It tells a new story about radio, describes important scientific discoveries about bird migration through interviews with key researchers, and explores a mode of ecocriticism that combines traditional forms of text-based scholarship with sound art, music, and audio storytelling.

“ACLS congratulates the authors and publishers of the terrific finalists for the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards,” said ACLS Vice President James Shulman. “Having made these books available for free and without barriers, these authors and publishers share knowledge with the world. By seeing these works celebrated, scholars across the sector will be encouraged to write and publish in ways that reach far beyond the gates of campus.”

View the official ACLS announcement at www.acls.org/news/acls-announces-finalists-for-2025-acls-open-access-book-prizes-and-arcadia-open-access-publishing-awards/