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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A collection of essays analyzing ecohorror motifs in literature, manga, film, and television, illuminating ambiguities that arise from human encounters with nonhuman nature and examining the scale and effect of ecohorror in, and of, the Anthropocene.
Following the Communist Revolution of 1949, missionaries were kicked out of China and proselytizing was outlawed. However, since the beginning of the reform era, China has witnessed a massive return of missionary workers. Today there are more Christians in church on a given Sunday in China than anywhere else on the globe. This book investigates ......
Smell loomed large in cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the midcentury fear of miasma, the drive for sanitation reform, and the rise in artificial perfumery. Meanwhile, the science of olfaction remained largely mysterious, prompting an impulse to "see smell" and inspiring some artists to picture scent in order to better ......
A uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. This innovative multidisciplinary volume critically examines olfaction in Asian societies ......
Is Byzantine Studies a colonialist discipline? Rather than provide a definitive answer to this question, this book defines the parameters of the debate and proposes ways of thinking about what it would mean to engage seriously with the field's political and intellectual genealogies, hierarchies, and forms of exclusion. In this volume, scholars ......
Tell el-Hesi is located near the modern city of Qiryat Gat in the Southern District of Israel, 23 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea. The site, which covers 35-40 acres, includes both an acropolis and a lower city. Occupation of the site began as early as the Neolithic period, and the city grew significantly during the Early Bronze Age before ......
In 1777, Congress labeled Quakers who would not take up arms in support of the War of Independence as "the most Dangerous Enemies America knows" and ordered Pennsylvania and Delaware to apprehend them. In response, Keystone State officials sent twenty men-seventeen of whom were Quakers-into exile, banishing them to Virginia, where they were held ......
On October 24, 1588, Paolo Barbieri murdered his wife, Isabella Caccianemici, stabbing her to death with his sword. Later, Pablo would claim to have acted in a fit of madness-but was he criminally insane or merely pretending to be? In this riveting book, Monica Calabritto addresses this controversy by reconstructing Paolo's life, prosecution, and ......
