Bøker utgitt av University of Pennsylvania Press

"Although the rabbis of the first two centuries CE divided the world into men and women, they recognized that some people are born with characteristics that do not fit these categories. Through an examination of early rabbinic sources, this book explores seven different approaches that the rabbis took towards intersex persons in their legal texts"--

In 1921, New York newspapers declared artist Ethel Wallace (1886-1968) a pioneer a batik portraits, the ¿newest rage in art,¿ and Vogue Paris described her portraits as ¿personal and original¿ and ¿modern and unexpected¿ in its July issue. Wallace also created designs for fashion, and her adaptation of batik, a Javanese method of dyeing cloth, became a coveted trend among New York¿s elite in the 1910s and ¿20s. Her clothing designs and batik paintings aligned with the feminism of the New Woman and resonated with the Roaring Twenties obsession with wealth and opulence. After the onset of the Great Depression, Wallace returned to her hometown of Lambertville, New Jersey, near the artistic community of New Hope, Pennsylvania, where she immersed herself in modernist art circles but struggled to maintain her career¿s momentum amid economic upheaval. Since her death in 1968, Wallace¿s body of work has remained behind the closed doors of private collections. Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel marks the first comprehensive study of the artist¿s career and is published in conjunction with the first exhibition of her work in decades, curated by Tara Kaufman and held at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. With essays by fashion historians Kaufman and Dr. Michael Mamp, this book investigates how Wallace¿s work¿from her writings to her paintings and clothing designs¿traces the development of two centers of modernism in the United States, New Hope, and New York, and the progression and reception of feminism in the early twentieth century. Contributors: Tara Kaufman, Michael E. Mamp, Jeniah Johnson.

"In this book, political philosopher Adam Lovett combines empirical research and original philosophical analysis to reveal the failings of American democracy and examine their ethical consequences. He argues that these failings undermine the ethics of democracy and in turn, transform or even negate the rights and duties of ordinary citizens"--

"In this book, historian Avinoam Yuval-Naeh investigates how and why eighteenth-century English society projected anxieties regarding the parallel development of the modern economy and of the re-establishment of the Jewish population upon the other, thus offering new insights into the interface of religious ideas and economic life"--

"By reading Mary Shelley's pandemic novel The Last Man and gothic romance "The Invisible Girl" against the background of plague literature and international thought from ancient Greece to Covid-19, this book reveals how she shaped the classics of modern existentialism and dystopian political science fiction from H. G. Wells to Emily St. John Mandel. It is this Shelleyan literary tradition that has generated modern postapocalyptic political thought, which uses writing and other art to reflect upon the global existential question: What is to be done after a massive, human-made disaster?"--

"In Black Elders, Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, including slave narratives, plantation records, letters, diaries, meeting minutes, and state and federal archives, Knight also examines how blacks and whites, men and women, and the young and the old developed competing ideas about age and aging, differences that shaped social relations in coastal West and West Central Africa, the Atlantic and domestic slave trades, colonial and antebellum Southern slave societies, and emancipation in the North and South. Black Elders offers a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged around their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom"--

"This book examines the significance of mutual aid societies to the Caribbean immigrant experience in the twentieth century. These societies paved the way for immigration to the U.S. through their system of networks, provided various forms of support, fostered a shared West Indian ethnic identity, and strengthened kinship networks with those back home"--

"In this book, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies. Most histories of the early years of the field search for unifying origins of literature as a discipline and object of study. Turning to the decades around 1800, Uhlig reveals that the inception of the literary field was instead defined by intellectual diversity and contestation. He draws on an array of European writers to show how three schools of literary study-rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history-emerged and clashed during this time, offering near-contemporaneous, yet divergent, visions of how to understand literature. Rhetoric and poetics thwarted criticism, to different ends, while literary historiography proved institutionally reassuring, yet less useful as a tool for textual understanding. This book traces current debates in literary studies back to this formative moment, serving as a guide to past and present controversies"--

"Today the history of ancient Egypt is known around the world, recognizable in precious museum collections and countless retellings from popular culture. Yet for hundreds of years, from the late Roman Empire to the 19th century, the wonders of this ancient civilization were frozen in time, locked in artifacts that could not be understood due to the loss of the ancient Egyptian language. In 1799 the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a slab inscribed in three scripts, hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, changed the course of history, unlocking thousands of years of ancient culture and eventually becoming one of the world's most famous museum artifacts. Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt tells the story of the Rosetta Stone and of countless other objects that were central to efforts to decode the hieroglyphs dating back to the Islamic Golden Age. Featuring fascinating objects from the British Museum and international lenders, the book shows how the presence of a written language was crucial to understanding life in ancient Egypt, from everyday business affairs to the sacred secrets of the afterlife. Interweaving the story of decipherment with colonial history, the book takes readers up to the present day, revealing what researchers are doing now to tell us more about one of the world's longest surviving civilizations through the understanding of their writing. Published to coincide with the bicentenary of Jean-Fraçnois Champollion's breakthrough in decipherment, this beautifully illustrated book shows how an unassuming gray stone was the key to the secrets of ancient Egypt and led to one of the most significant code breaking moments in history"--Publisher's description.

In the early nineteenth century, the American commercial marketplace was a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knock-offs and outright frauds thrived. Appearances could be deceiving, and entrepreneurs often relied on their personal reputations to close deals and make sales. Rapid industrialization and expanding trade routes opened new markets with enormous potential, but how could distant merchants convince potential customers, whom they had never met, that they could be trusted? Through wide-ranging visual and textual evidence, including a robust selection of early advertisements, Branding Trust tells the story of how advertising evolved to meet these challenges, tracing the themes of character and class as they intertwined with and influenced graphic design, trademark law, and ideas about ethical business practice in the United States.As early as the 1830s, printers, advertising agents, and manufacturers collaborated to devise new ways to advertise goods. They used eye-catching designs and fonts to grab viewers' attention and wove together meaningful images and prose to gain the public's trust. At the same time, manufacturers took legal steps to safeguard their intellectual property, formulating new ways to protect their brands by taking legal action against counterfeits and frauds. By the end of the nineteenth century, these advertising and legal strategies came together to form the primary components of modern branding: demonstrating character, protecting goodwill, entertaining viewers to build rapport, and deploying the latest graphic innovations in print. Trademarks became the symbols that embodied these ideas-in print, in the law, and to the public.Branding Trust thus identifies and explains the visual rhetoric of trust and legitimacy that has come to reign over American capitalism. Though the 1920s has often been held up as the birth of modern advertising, Jennifer M. Black argues that advertising professionals had in fact learned how to navigate public relations over the previous century by adapting the language, imagery, and ideas of the American middle class.

Daniel O'Quinn investigates the complex interpersonal, political, and aesthetic relationships between Europeans and Ottomans in the long eighteenth century. Bookmarking his analysis with the conflict leading to the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz on one end and the 1815 bid for Greek independence on the other, he follows the fortunes of notable British, Dutch, and French diplomats to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire as they lived and worked according to the capitulations surrendered to the Sultan.Closely reading a mixed archive of drawings, maps, letters, dispatches, memoirs, travel narratives, engraved books, paintings, poems, and architecture, O'Quinn demonstrates the extent to which the Ottoman state was not only the subject of historical curiosity in Europe but also a key foil against which Western theories of governance were articulated. Juxtaposing narrative accounts of diplomatic life in Constantinople, such as those contained in the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the English ambassador, with visual depictions such as those of the costumes of the Ottoman elite produced by the French-Flemish painter Jean Baptiste Vanmour, he traces the dissemination of European representations and interpretations of the Ottoman Empire throughout eighteenth-century material culture.In a series of eight interlocking chapters, O'Quinn presents sustained and detailed case studies of particular objects, personalities, and historical contexts, framing intercultural encounters between East and West through a set of key concerns: translation, mediation, sociability, and hospitality. Richly illustrated and provocatively argued, Engaging the Ottoman Empire demonstrates that study of the Ottoman world is vital to understanding European modernity.

"Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania"--Series title page.

"As officials scrambled in 2020 to manage the spread of COVID, the reverberations of the crisis reached well beyond immediate public health concerns. The governance problems that emerged in the pandemic would be problems in other climate-related disasters too. Many of these governance problems wound up in court. Businesses filed claims with their insurance for lost commerce; when they were denied, some sued. Defense attorneys tried to get people released from prison, where people lived in dangerous conditions. As state governments ordered closures and otherwise tried to adapt, interest organizations that had long sought to limit government authority challenged them in court. Political officials railed against litigation they argued would stop businesses from reopening. The United States, like other countries, governs partly through litigation, and litigation is one way of seeing the multiple governance failures during the pandemic. Drawing on databases of cases filed, news reports, and the websites of advocacy groups and law firms, Susan Sterett argues that governing during the pandemic, or in any disaster, must include the human institutions intertwined with the virus. Those institutions reveal problems well beyond the reach of technical expertise. Failures in private insurance as a way of governing risk, conflicts about the primacy of religion, government authority, and health, are problems that predated the pandemic and will persist in future disasters"--

"This book traces rabbinic thought on the near-universal phenomenon of legal circumventions, finding licit ways to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. Rabbinic literature does not fully reject or accept loopholing, but instead determine acceptability based on whether their outcome and their process maintain the values and the integrity of the law"--

In 2009, Gregory McCoy, a noted New Jersey Andy Warhol Collector discovered while searching online, four remarkable and unknown silk screen prints of Marilyn Monroe, what struck McCoy immediately was the remarkable resemblance to Andy Warhol's iconic 1962 silkscreen portrait of the actor. After investigating the origins of the Marilyns, he purchased four proof copies from a Swedish art dealer. Through his painstaking research, McCoy has discovered that the screen prints were, most likely, made in Sweden in 1968 at the time of Warhol's first international exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Excited by his discovery, McCoy has spent the past twelve years acquiring over three hundred multicolored Marilyns. Not used in the Stockholm exhibition, it appears that the screen prints went underground and were gifted to a circle of Swedes who were associated with Pontus Hultén, the controversial Director of the Moderna Museet. In 2016, McCoy was introduced to Penn Libraries Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library; after examining a sample of the Marilyn silkscreens, McCoy and Penn Libraries formed a partnership to exhibit a selection of the Marilyns. Why Penn? It seemed obvious. Penn had played a significant role in launching Warhol's career when the recently founded Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) mounted Warhol's first institutional retrospective of his work in 1965. The ICA exhibit is legendary. Given Penn's role in Warhol's Pop Art career, Penn seemed to McCoy to be the obvious venue to unveil his important discovery to the art world. To date the question of Andy Warhol's role in the production of this collection of Marilyn's remains unanswered, which is part of the intellectual challenge of defining these art objects within the context of Pontus Hultén curatorial vision and Andy Warhol's ethos and aesthetic. The catalogue includes an interview with the collector, essays by noted Warhol scholars: Reva Wolf and Kenneth Goldsmith; an essay on the 1965 ICA exhibition by Art Librarian Hannah Bennett; and an essay on the iconography of Marilyn Monroe by David McKnight, editor and curator of the show. The volume concludes with a Catalogue Raisonné of the McCoy Marilyns collection, prepared by Maureen McCormick, former Chief Registrar at the Princeton University Art Gallery. There will be 1,968 catalogues printed, commemorating the year in which the prints were made.

In the decades following the era of decolonization, global Christianity experienced a seismic shift. While Catholicism and Protestantism have declined in their historic European strongholds, they have sustained explosive growth in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. This demographic change has established Christians from the Global South as an increasingly dominant presence in modern Christian thought, culture, and politics.Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity unearths the roots of this development, charting the metamorphosis of Christian practice and institutions across five continents throughout the pivotal years of decolonization. The essays in this collection illustrate the diverse new ideas, rituals, and organizations created in the wake of Western imperialism's formal collapse and investigate how religious leaders, politicians, theologians, and lay people debated and shaped a new Christianity for a postcolonial world.Contributors argue that the collapse of colonialism and broader cultural challenges to Western power fostered new organizations, theologies, and political engagements across the world, ultimately setting Christianity on its current trajectory away from its colonial heritage. These essays interrogate decolonization's varied and conflicting impacts on global Christianity, while also providing a novel framework for rethinking decolonization's modern legacies. Taken together, this book charts the relationship between decolonization and Christianity on a truly global scale.Contributors: Joel Cabrita, Darcie Fontaine, Elizabeth A. Foster, Udi Greenberg, David Kirkpatrick, Eric Morier-Genoud, Phi-Vân Nguyen, Justin Reynolds, Sarah Shortall, Lydia Walker, Charlotte Walker-Said, Albert Wu, Gene Zubovich.

"This book chronicles the "mania" for land speculation that swept the new United States, as the nation's elite founders rushed to profit off Native American dispossession. A story of statecraft, capitalism, ambition, and corruption, it offers a new account of the consequences of U.S. independence, revealing how the American Revolution produced a republican "empire of liberty" with financial speculation at its core"--

Stephen Porter's Benevolent Empire examines political-refugee aid initiatives and related humanitarian endeavors led by American people and institutions from World War I through the Cold War, opening an important window onto the "short American century." Chronicling both international relief efforts and domestic resettlement programs aimed at dispossessed people from Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, Porter asks how, why, and with what effects American actors took responsibility for millions of victims of war, persecution, and political upheaval during these decades. Diverse forces within the American state and civil society directed these endeavors through public-private governing arrangements, a dynamic yielding both benefits and liabilities. Motivated by a variety of geopolitical, ethical, and cultural reasons, these advocates for humanitarian action typically shared a desire to portray the United States, to the American people and international audiences, as an exceptional, benevolent world power whose objects of concern might potentially include any vulnerable people across the globe. And though reality almost always fell short of that idealized vision, Porter argues that this omnivorous philanthropic energy helped propel and steer the ascendance of the United States to its position of elite global power.The messaging and administration of refugee aid initiatives informed key dimensions of American and international history during this period, including U.S. foreign relations, international humanitarianism and human rights, global migration and citizenship, and American political development and social relations at home. Benevolent Empire is thus simultaneously a history of the United States and the world beyond.

Capitalism and the Senses is the first edited volume to explore how the forces of capitalism are entangled with everyday sensory experience. If the senses have a history, as Karl Marx wrote, then that history is inseparable from the development of capitalism, which has both taken advantage of the senses and influenced how sensory experience has changed over time. This pioneering collection shows how seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching have both shaped and been shaped by commercial interests from the turn of the twentieth century to our own time. From the manipulation of taste and texture in the food industry to the careful engineering of the feel of artificial fabrics, capitalist enterprises have worked to commodify the senses in a wide variety of ways. Drawing on history, anthropology, geography, and other fields, the volume's essays analyze not only where this effort has succeeded but also where the senses have resisted control and the logic of markets. The result is an innovative ensemble that demonstrates how the drive to exploit sensorial experience for profit became a defining feature of capitalist modernity and establishes the senses as an important dimension of the history of capitalism. Contributors: Nicholas Anderman, Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Jessica P. Clark, Ai Hisano, Lisa Jacobson, Sven Kube, Grace Lees-Maffei, Ingemar Pettersson, David Suisman, Ana María Ulloa, Nicole Welk-Joerger.

The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one's last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible.A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity clarifies the world of late ancient Judaism through the versatile and powerful lens of the Psalter. It asks a simple set of questions: Where did late ancient Jews encounter the Psalms? How did they engage with the work? And what meanings did they produce? A. J. Berkovitz answers these queries by reconstructing and contextualizing a diverse set of religious practices performed with and on the Psalter, such as handling a physical copy, reading from it, interpreting it exegetically, singing it as liturgy, invoking it as magic and reciting it as an act of piety. His book draws from and contributes to the fields of ancient Judaism, biblical reception, book history and the history of reading.

The Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature--what early moderns termed poesie--in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude. Revealing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Sarkar offers a defense of poiesis, or literary making, as a vital philosophical endeavor. Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes "possible knowledge" as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the "possible," defined by Philip Sidney as what "may be and should be," to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. These early modern thinkers mobilized the imaginative habits of thought constitutive to major genres of literary writing--including epic, tragedy, romance, lyric, and utopia--in order to produce knowledge divorced from historical truth and empirical fact by envisioning states of being untethered from "nature" or reality. Approaching imaginative modes such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, and counterfactuals as instruments of possible knowledge, Sarkar exposes how the speculative allure of the "possible" lurks within scientific experiment, induction, and theories of probability. In showing how early modern literary writing sought to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world, Possible Knowledge also highlights its most audacious intellectual ambition: its claim that while natural philosophy, or what we today term science, might explain the physical world, literature could remake reality. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we have termed a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.

Toward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her "best story" to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett's range. Known primarily for her vignettes, Jewett accomplished in these pages a truly great novel. Undoubtedly, another reason lies in the novel's themes of queer kinship and same-sex domesticity, as enjoyed by the flamboyant protagonist Dick Dale. Written a few years into Jewett's decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, A Marsh Island echoes Jewett's determination to split time between her family home in Maine and Fields's place on Charles Street in Boston. The novel follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts and envisions the latter region's saltmarsh as a figure for dynamic selfhood: the ever-shifting boundaries between land and sea a model for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others.Jewett's works played a major role in popularizing the genre of American regionalism and have garnered praise, both in her time and ours, for her skill in rendering the local landscapes and fishing villages along or near the coasts of New England. Just as Jewett brought attention to the unique beauty and value of the Great marsh region, editor Don James McLaughlin reveals a convergence of regionalism and sexuality in Jewett's work in his introduction. A Marsh Island reminds us that queer kinship has a long tradition of being extended to incorporate queer ecological belonging, and that the meaning of "companionship" itself is enriched when we acknowledge its indebtedness to environment.

"In Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World, contributors explore the role of landscape in the articulation and expression of imperial identity and the mediation of relationships between the court and its many audiences in the early modern world. Nine focused studies from East andSouth Asia, the Islamic world, and Europe illuminate how early modern courts and societies shaped, and were shaped by, the landscape, including both physical sites, such as gardens, palaces, cities and hunting parks, and conceptual ones, such as those of frontiers, idealized polities, and the cosmos"--

In the decades following England's 1655 conquest of Spanish Jamaica, the western Caribbean became the site of overlapping and competing claims--to land, maritime spaces, and people. English Jamaica, located in the midst of Spanish American port towns and shipping lanes, was central to numerous projects of varying legality, aimed at acquiring Spanish American wealth. Those projects were backdrop to a wide-ranging movement of people who made their own claims to political membership in developing colonial societies, and by extension, in Atlantic empires. Boundaries of Belonging follows the stories of these individuals--licensed traders, smugglers, freedom seekers, religious refugees, pirates, and interlopers--who moved through the contested spaces of the western Caribbean. Though some were English and Spanish, many others were Sephardic, Tule, French, Kalabari, Scottish, Dutch, or Brandenberg. They also included creole people who identified themselves by their local place of origin or residence--as Jamaican, Cuban, or Panamanian. As they crossed into and out of rival imperial jurisdictions, many either sought or rejected Spanish or English subjecthood, citing their place of birth, their nation or ethnicity, their religion, their loyalty, or their economic or military contributions to colony or empire. Colonial and metropolitan officials weighed those claims as they tried to impose sovereignty over diverse and mobile people in a region of disputed and shifting jurisdictions. These contests over who belonged in what empire and why, and over what protections such belonging conferred, in turn helped to determine who would be included within a developing law of nations.