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.
Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory
Explores tensions in aesthetics and art theory between antique figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations. Examines the work and thought of Goethe, Winckelmann, Hegel, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and others.
A study of Catholic perceptions of Jews, Judaism, and Israel, offering an exploration of biographical narratives and reflections on Holocaust trauma, conversion, Zionism, and religious identity.
Stereotyping and Electrotyping in Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture
Invented in the late eighteenth century, stereotyping-the creation of solid printing plates cast from movable type-fundamentally changed the way in which books were printed. Publishing Plates chronicles the technological and cultural shifts that resulted from the introduction of this technology in the United States. The commissioning of plates ......
This is an examination, in 30 chapters, of all aspects of the ancient Assyrian empire and its relationship to "empire theory" and the study of empires in general, explicating Assyria as the first of the genuine empires. The discussion also examines how ancient empires contribute to our understanding, despite differences, of modern empires.
A collection of essays exploring the variety and complexity of biblical interpretation and practice among early awakened Protestants, providing insight into the history of the Bible and the entangled religious cultures of the eighteenth-century North Atlantic world.
Examines the paradoxes inherent in the search for symbolic immortality, arguing that there is only one truly serious literary problem: the transmission of texts to posterity.
A novel treatment of a group of early Christian authors, demonstrating that their behavior and self-presentation were shaped by the norms of Roman intellectual culture, and not simply by factors internal to Christianity.
In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. ......
