We are thrilled to share that Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh by Camelia Dewan has been awarded the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award in the Environmental Humanities category.
We’re also delighted to celebrate Yan Liu’s Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China, named a finalist in the History category. A big congratulations as well to our friends at Stanford University Press and the University of California Press! You can find the full list of awardees on the ACLS website.
The ACLS Open Access Book Prizes, supported by the Arcadia fund and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), recognize and support authors and publishers of open access humanities books.
“These authors and publishers exemplify the promise of open access: top-notch scholarship with global impact that circulates freely.“
Joy Connolly, ACLS President
The University of Washington Press, along with the other winning publishers, will receive a grant for $30,000 to support the immediate open access publication of at least two new books. In addition, Dewan and the winning authors will each be awarded $20,000. The prizes, among the largest for scholarly books, will be presented at the New York Public Library on October 22, 2025.
Misreading the Bengal Delta offers a timely critique of development narratives of Bangladesh as a “climate change victim.” Dewan shows how development actors repackage colonial-era modernizing projects, which have caused severe environmental effects, as climate-adaption solutions. Such misreadings, she argues, risk exacerbating climatic threats and structural inequalities.
“As a former development professional, I wrote Misreading the Bengal Delta accessibly for those working in Bangladesh, as well as students in development, anthropology, and South Asian studies,“ said Dewan. “I also wrote it to provide a space for my Bangladeshi colleagues’ concerns about the future of waterways and the environment, so the book’s empirical findings might help shape future policy and development interventions.”
Misreading the Bengal Delta is freely available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
