Founded in 1956, Penn State University Press publishes rigorously reviewed, high-quality works of scholarship and books of regional and contemporary interest, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. The publishing arm of the Pennsylvania State University and a division of the Penn State University Libraries, the Press promotes the advance of scholarship by disseminating knowledge—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—widely in books, journals, and digital publications.
Scholarly publishing has faced monumental challenges over the past few decades. The Press takes its place among those institutions moving the enterprise forward. Its innovative projects continue to identify and embrace the technological advances and business models that ensure scholarly publishing will remain feasible, and widely accessible, well into the future.
A collection of essays examining colonial Philadelphia and its surroundings as a zone of cultural and linguistic interchange. Documents everyday multilingualism and intercultural negotiations with special attention to themes of religion, education, race and the abolitionist movement, and material culture and architecture.
Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance
A collection of essays exploring how biocultural and literary dynamics acted together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Essays envision sleep states as a means of defining the human, both literally and metaphorically.
This volume brings together five essays that represent the latest directions in the study of geography in classical antiquity. Arranged chronologically, these contributions cover several hundred years of ancient geographical scholarship, ranging from ancient Mesopotamia and the prehistoric New World to the Roman Empire, and deal with topics ......
Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774-1839
In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant ......
The history of biblical Israel, as it is told in the Hebrew Bible, differs substantially from the history of ancient Israel as it can be reconstructed using ancient Near Eastern texts and archaeological evidence. In A Brief History of Ancient Israel, Bernd U. Schipper uses this evidence to present a critical revision of the history of ......
Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction
Love in a Time of Slaughtersexamines a diverse array of creative narratives in which genocide and extinction blur species lines in order to show how such stories can promote the preservation of biological and cultural diversity in a time of man-made threats to species ......
The astrologer-physician Richard Napier (1559-1634) was not only a man of practical science and medicine but also a master of occult arts and a devout parish rector who purportedly held conversations with angels. This new interpretation of Napier reveals him to be a coherent and methodical man whose burning desire for certain, true knowledge ......
As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions of rape and incest and to shift the dominant narrative of violence against women. In this dynamic book, Vivien Green Fryd charts this decades-long radical intervention through an ......
This collection looks beyond the literary, religious, and philosophical aspects of Chaucer's texts to a new mode of interdisciplinary scholarship: one that celebrates the richness of Chaucer's visual poetics. The twelve illustrated essays make connections between Chaucer's texts and various forms of visual data, both medieval and ......
