University of Delaware Press Receives NEH Grant to Support Open Access Publishing

The University of Delaware Press was recently awarded a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to publish an open access digital version of Bruce Hayes’ acclaimed book Hostile Humor in Renaissance France under a Creative Commons license.

The grant was awarded through NEH’s Fellowships Open Book Program, which is designed to make outstanding humanities books digitally available to a wide audience through open access publication.

Published by the UD Press in April 2020, Hostile Humor in Renaissance France investigates the emergence of a deliberately harmful and destructive form of satire in 16th-century France, leading up to the Wars of Religion.

The grant funding will support the publication of the title as an open access e-book and its distribution through major open access distribution channels, such as Project MUSE, JSTOR and EBSCO. The book will also be made available through the University of Delaware’s institutional repository, UDSpace.

“We at the University of Delaware Press are thrilled to receive this grant from the NEH, as we believe it represents the importance of our work in opening high-quality scholarship in the humanities to all scholars and interested readers, removing barriers of cost and geography,” explained Julia Oestreich, director of the UD Press. “As a small press, we are proud to count ourselves among much larger presses, such as UNC Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, as recipients of this prestigious award.”

The UD Press plans to have the open access version of Hostile Humor in Renaissance France available later in 2024.