Bøker utgitt av University of Pennsylvania Press

Exploring the poetic interplay between human ideas and the plant, animal, and mineral forms through which they are mediated, The Nature of the Page tells the story of handmade paper in Renaissance England and prompts readers to reconsider the role of the natural world in everything from old books to new smartphones.

Examining the crucial relationship between sexuality, race, and class, Beyond the Politics of the Closet highlights the impact gay rights politics and activism have had on the wider American political landscape since the rights revolutions of the 1960s.

How did we come to endanger the very future of life on Earth in our heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness? Laid Waste! answers that question with a 350-year review of the roots of an American culture of exploitation that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this came to be.

From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the inebriating cannabis that East Indies merchants sold in coffeehouses, drugs have been entangled with science and commodification for five centuries. The Age of Intoxication explores the origins, and continuing impact, of the first global era of drugs.

William H. Meyer defines global governance as the management of global issues within a political space that has no single centralized authority. Employing a combination of historical, quantitative, normative, and policy analyses, he presents a series of case studies at the intersection of power politics and international justice.

In Beyond the New Deal Order, contributors bring fresh perspectives to the historic meaning and significance of the New Deal coalition from the standpoint of the early twenty-first century. The volume asks if a new order will emerge from the economic, ideological, institutional, and electoral currents shaping politics today.

Michael Davis explores the "musical" quality of thinking in the work of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Plato, revealing the complex and profound ways in which they each plumbed the depths of reason's prerational foundations.

The Black Republic explores the critical but overlooked place of Haiti in black thought in the post-Civil War era. Following emancipation, African American leaders considered Haiti a singular example of black self-governance whose fate was inextricably linked to that of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination.

Examining how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, Captives of Liberty reveals a cycle of violence, retaliation, and revenge that spiraled out of control, transforming a struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war.

In Pure Filth, Noah D. Guynn argues that the superficial crudeness and predictability of late medieval French farce conceal finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics, and religion.

In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker argues that rhetoric and theology establish blackness and whiteness as metaphors for sin and purity in medieval English and European writing. Whitaker shows how these metaphors came to guide the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed.

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, Erik Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead, from Elizabethan England to the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Through prodigious research and careful analysis, he boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.

In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and vernacular language as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics.

Richard Stonley, the earliest known purchaser of Shakespeare's first publication, Venus and Adonis, has hitherto been the merest of footnotes in literary history. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader tells a compelling story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a rebel camp located deep in the Congo forest, Anna Hedlund explores the micropolitics and practices of everyday life in a community of Hutu rebel fighters and their families and attempts to understand why they continue to fight in what appears to be an endless conflict.

Jamie Mayerfeld defends international human rights law as an extension of domestic checks and balances and therefore necessary to constitutional government. The book combines theoretical reflections on democracy and constitutionalism with a case study of the contrasting human rights policies of Europe and the United States.

In Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting contends that Frankenstein is a profound work of speculative fiction designed to engage a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

Covering decades that included the last major crusades, the birth of the Inquisition, and the unexpected invasion of the Mongols, The Two Powers shows how Popes Gregory and Innocent's battles with Emperor Frederick shaped the political circumstances of the thirteenth-century papacy and its role in the public life of medieval Christendom.

To secure the general welfare in a new century, the future of American unity lies not in monolithic nationalism. Rather, Samuel Goldman suggests we move in the opposite direction: go small, embrace difference as the driving characteristic of American society, and support political projects grounded in local communities.

Free and Natural is a cultural history of nudity offering an in-depth account of how the naked body came to be closely tied to modern ideas about nature and authenticity. Sarah Schrank explores how the "free and natural" lifestyle emerged from the history of the nudist movement, sexual and environmental politics, and consumer capitalism.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult, revealing how merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates influenced contentious paths of independence in the United States and Brazil.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at two community centers in Osaka, Japan, Making Meaningful Lives provides an intimate anthropological account of the existential concerns of elderly Japanese women and men.

Fighting for Dignity explores the impact of a mass deportation campaign on African and Asian migrant workers in Tel Aviv and their Israeli-born children. In this vivid ethnography, Sarah Willen shows how undocumented migrants struggle to craft meaningful, flourishing lives despite the exclusion and vulnerability they endure.

In Paper Monsters, Samuel Fallon charts the striking rise in the 1590's of a new species of textual being: the serial, semifictional persona. He argues that their status as collective fictions, passed among writers, publishers, and readers, positioned personae as the animating figures of what we have come to call "print culture."

Richard M. Freeland reviews how Northeastern University in Boston, historically an access-oriented, private urban university serving commuter students from modest backgrounds and characterized by limited academic ambitions and local reach, transformed itself into a selective, national, and residential research university.