CELJ Award Winners

Winners and Judges’ Comments for 2024

Best Special Issue

Leviathan 25:3—25th anniversary issue on “Melville in Public”

Judges’ comments

This year’s Best Special Issue winner breached a crowded pool to surprise, fascinate, and delight the CELJ’s awards judges. Leviathan’s 25th Anniversary Issue (25:3, Oct. 2025), “Melville in Public,” included scholarly essays on classic Melville works and multimedia celebrations thereof, a dialogue featuring active participants in the robust “Melville Twitter”-verse, interviews and reflections from creative writers, book reviews, and more. In its expansive, dynamic presentation of what Melville Studies means in the 21st century, Leviathan 25.3 reminded our judges, and will continue to illustrate for readers, just how inviting Melville’s works remain for the myriad forms, styles, and discourses of contemporary culture far beyond the limits of textual study or English-language readerships.

Best New Journal

DMJournal–Architecture and Representation

Judges’ comments

DMJournal–Architecture and Representation is a new publication dedicated to the exploration of practices, histories and material cultures of drawing in architecture and related fields. The journal has both digital and print forms, which are each beautiful and beautifully distinct. Judges praised issues “that delve into unusual corners of a specific field, yet are interesting for a general reader,” like the connection of “architecture and art with matters of the earth” or the entanglements between drawing + storytelling. In published form, the journal offers “an innovative approach to publishing results in both a compact and efficient digital version and a luxurious print edition. Both versions do justice to the centrality of images to the journal's topic, giving drawings, diagrams, and photos pride of place.”

Best Digital Feature

paideia section of positionspolitics.org

Judges’ comments

Last year’s Distinguished Editor Tina Barlow of positions: Asia critique continues to illustrate the exciting and innovative opportunities for editorial achievement as part of the positionspolitics.org editorial collective. This year, the 10-person editorial collective behind the journal’s online web presence, positionspolitics.org, have won best digital feature for the “paideia” section. Judges echoed the website’s call for urgent, “direct interaction among scholars and readers,” praising the timeliness of content, the visually interesting layout, and the thoughtful use of “rich media” in “leveraging the affordances of the digital.” With its specific emphasis on pedagogy, the paideia section “engages the unthought through evocative approaches to the transmission of knowledge, to materials to be tried out, and to work designed by students.” 

Phoenix Award

American Book Review

Judges’ comments

Finding American Book Review to be “substantially transformed,” judges awarded the journal and its accepting editor, Jeffrey Di Leo, CELJ’s Phoenix Award. Celebrating transformation and revitalization of even the most storied journals, the Phoenix Award judging panel appreciated “both content and material revisions that really highlight the quality of the work therein” and that present the journal in its brightest light, as “more elegant and substantive” than its previous form suggested. As a well-respected journal publishing since 1977, American Book Review’s redesign rejuvenates its important mission to review of “frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and women's presses.” Readers will welcome the updated publication schedule as well; since 2022, the inviting new platform publishes four times a year.

Distinguished Editor

Arien Mack of Social Research: An International Quarterly

Judges’ comments

Dr. Mack served as editor of Social Research for an astonishing 54 years, retiring in 2024. She worked closely with a large, active editorial board to develop issue topics and commission contributions from leading voices in social research. In 1988, she established the Social Research Conferences under the Center for Public Scholarship, a Center she also founded and directed. Conversations from these conferences fill the journal’s pages. Its layout offers a simple, no-frills style; the essays, which are highly readable and interconnected, are largely jargon-free, consistent with Mack’s desire to bridge academic and public discourse. One recommender writes, “Arien is probably the longest serving Editor of an American scholarly journal of whom I am aware. In this period, Social Research has consolidated its role as an interdisciplinary flagship, noted for its remarkable impact on the social sciences, but also on critical theory, social philosophy, law and more.” Some of the determining factors for this award are Dr. Mack’s long service as editor and her broad vision to elevate the journal from an academic publication to a wide-ranging forum for public discourse. Her hands-on, collaborative management style successfully brought together an editorial board and many contributors in the service of this vision.