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 critical study of the history of public art museums in Austria-Hungary, examining their place in the wider history of European museums and collecting, their role as public institutions, and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg state.
George Washington and the Invention of the Republic
“Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month.”
A critical analysis of the art and career of African American painter Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998). Examines Jones’s engagement with African and Afrodiasporic themes as well as the challenges she faced as a black woman artist.
Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood
The Play World chronicles the history and evolution of the concept of play as a universal part of childhood. Examining texts and toys coming out of Europe between 1631 and 1914, Patricia Anne Simpson argues that German material, literary, and pedagogical cultures were central to the construction of the modern ideas and realities of play ......
Known as “La Chièvre de Reims,” Robert de Reims was among the earliest trouvères—poet-composers who were contemporaries of the troubadours, but who wrote their works in the northern dialects of France. This critical edition provides new translations into English and Modern French of all the songs and motets ......
An unparalleled encyclopedic collaboration between award-winning Mexican-American scholar Ilan Stavans and illustrator Eko, A Pre-Columbian Bestiary features lively and informative descriptions of forty-six religious, mythical, and ......
Field Language presents the work of an extraordinary couple who together left the rural lifeways of their Mennonite upbringing to go “into the world” to create forms of modern art that reflected on the places and culture they came from. Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition devoted to the working ......
Acoustic Creatures explores the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in art and performance practices. Focusing on the work of artists that get into the spaces between species, Austin McQuinn discovers that sounding animality secures a vital connection to the creatural.
