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.
Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from early modern England in order to understand how people in that era thought about-and with-insect and arachnid life. Designed for the classroom, the book comprises two volumes-Insects and Concepts-that can be used together or independently. Each addresses the collaborative, ......
Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from early modern England in order to understand how people in that era thought about-and with-insect and arachnid life. The conversations in this two-volume set address the collaborative, multigenerational research that produced early modern natural history and provide new insights into ......
This volume addresses a vital point of intersection between images in the Middle Ages and those in the modern world: the potential of medieval works of art to convey messages of power and resistance. Provoked by the misuse of medieval imagery in modern discussions, the contributors to this volume assess how medieval images connect to discourses of ......
In this provocative and intensely personal new book of essays about love and language, desire and drama, reminiscence, change, and fandom, William J. Simmons takes up Eve Sedgwick's reparative reading as a challenge to empirical and taxonomical approaches to art, music, and film and instead promotes new ways of discussing them that create ......
Paper and Canvas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Naples
The seventeenth-century Valencian artist Jusepe de Ribera spent most of his career in Spanish Viceregal Naples, where he was known as "Lo Spagnoletto," or "the Little Spaniard." Working under the patronage of Spanish viceroys, Ribera held a special position bridging two worlds. In Ribera's Repetitions, art historian Todd P. Olson sheds new light ......
From call and response chants to the noise of pots and pans, protests are often defined by their sounds. In this book, Justin Eckstein argues that this is not merely the result of catchy slogans; it is due to sound's ability to hold those in power accountable. Sound Tactics highlights how, in a world grappling with the uncertainty of emergent ......
From call and response chants to the noise of pots and pans, protests are often defined by their sounds. In this book, Justin Eckstein argues that this is not merely the result of catchy slogans; it is due to sound's ability to hold those in power accountable. Sound Tactics highlights how, in a world grappling with the uncertainty of emergent ......
The Babylonian Theodicy is a lengthy dialogue between two learned men, the “Sufferer” and the “Friend,” taking the form of an acrostic poem divided into 27 stanzas. Each stanza is exactly 11 lines long and represents a speech by one of the two speakers mainly on social injustice and piety, those of the Sufferer ......
There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes's works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author's compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value ......
