May 2025 Newsletter

Welcome to our May Newsletter!

We hope this newsletter finds you well and that you have been enjoying some May sunshine. We write with publication announcements, several exciting prize nominations, author blog posts and a listing in the European Diamond Capacity Hub.

Here's what happened this month:

We published six new books

• Improvising Otherwise: A Decolonial Feminist Approach to Improvisation in Early Modern English Culture by Fatima Lahham. Dr Lahham also wrote a blog post about her experience of publishing with us.
• Imagery of Hate Online by Matthias J. Becker, Marcus Scheiber and Uffa Jensen (eds)
• A Field Guide to Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning by Sheina Lew-Levy and Stephen Asatsa (eds)
• Bioethics: A Coursebook by COMPOST Collective
• Qur’an Translations in the Eastern Bloc and Beyond by Elvira Kulieva, Johanna Pink and Mykhaylo Yakubovych
• Oral Poetry by Ruth Finnegan
  

All of our titles are free to read and download. Explore our complete catalogue.

Three of our authors were shortlisted for the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards

We're thrilled that three of our authors have been shortlisted for the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards in the Environmental Humanities and Literary Studies categories!

This is a fantastic acknowledgement of their work and their decision to publish open access. The shortlisted authors are:

• Kathryn M. Rudy, Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print traces the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500, dismembered in the nineteenth century & now reconstructed via Rudy's research.
• Joanna Page, Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art shows how contemporary artists in Latin America reinvent older methods of collecting and displaying nature to create new aesthetic and political perspectives.
• Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, a 6-volume study exploring a single, electrifying story from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem to its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Enormous congratulations to them and to the other nominees for this wonderful recognition of their fine research and writing. We're also delighted that through these nominations we're flying the flag for independent open access presses: we're hugely proud to represent this growing community.

Find out more about the awards and the other nominees.

Our author Michael Hughes is shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

We're delighted that our author, Michael Hughes, has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the Biography category for his book, Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life.

Huge congratulations to Michael and to the other nominees!

Find out more about these awards and the other shortlisted books.

Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: download milestone and an updated blog post

Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-West Namibia, edited by Sian Sullivan, Ute Dieckmann and Selma Lendelvo has now received over 2,000 full-text downloads! Congratulations to the editors and all of the contributors.

You can also read a highly informative blog post packed full of images and photographs about the book and featuring many of the contributors.

We are now listed in the European Diamond Capacity Hub

OBP now appears in the European Diamond Capacity Hub registry: a dynamic, free and comprehensive resource designed to foster collaborations within the Diamond Open Access landscape in the European Research Area.

NEW BOOK DISCOUNT:Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies) at OBP! The discount will be applied automatically at checkout.

That's all for this month!