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.
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Georg Forster (1754-1794) was famous during his lifetime, notorious after his death, and largely forgotten by the later nineteenth century. Remembered today as the young man who sailed around the world with Captain Cook and as one of the leading figures in the revolutionary Republic of Mainz, Forster was also a prolific writer and translator who ......
The early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and ......
Jewish and Christian Women's Work in Medieval Catalan Cities
In the thriving urban economies of late thirteenth-century Catalonia, Jewish and Christian women labored to support their families and their communities. The Fruit of Her Hands examines how gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity shaped how these women lived and worked. Sarah Ifft Decker draws on thousands of notarial contracts as ......
Moving Beyond Authority and Mastery in Higher Education
In recent decades, public higher education has faced perpetual crises. As states slash investment in postsecondary education and for-profit entities seek to supplant public colleges and universities, these public institutions have tried to compete by maximizing efficiency, namely, by downplaying and outsourcing the labor of teachers. Responsible ......
Police in Paris arrested thousands of men for sodomy or pederasty in the eighteenth century. In the mid-1780s, they recorded depositions in which prisoners recounted their own sexual histories. Curated and translated into English here, these remarkable documents allow us to hear the voices of men who desired men and to explore complex questions ......
Stereotyping and Electrotyping in Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture
First realized commercially in the late eighteenth century, stereotyping-the creation of solid printing plates cast from moveable 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 ......
Once referred to by the New York Times as the "Israeli Faulkner," A. B. Yehoshua's fiction invites an assessment of Israel's Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds ......
Examines the image networks of St. George in the eastern Mediterranean, revealing how the different portrayals became central to Crusader, East Christian, and Islamic visual cultures.
The Jawad Adra Cuneiform Collection in the Nabu Museum, El Heri, Lebanon
This volume presents critical editions of tablets from the Early Dynastic, Sargonic, Ur III, Old Babylonian, and Middle Babylonian periods, housed in the Jawad Adra Cuneiform Collection in the Nabu Museum in El Heri, Lebanon. Bringing together a wide range of administrative, literary, historical, and lexical texts, From Mesopotamia to Lebanon ......
