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.
Conceived in the era of eugenics as a solution to what was termed the problem of the feeble-minded, state-operated institutions subjected people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to a life of compulsory incarceration. One of nearly 300 such facilities in the United States, Pennhurst State School and Hospital was initially ......
Inspired by Machiavelli, modern philosophers held that the tension between the goals of biblical piety and the goals of political life needed to be resolved in favor of the political, and so they attempted to recast and delimit traditional Christian teaching to serve and stabilize political life accordingly. This volume examines the thought ......
Culturally powerful ideas of normalcy and deviation, individual responsibility, and what is medically feasible shape the ways in which we live with illness and disability. The essays in this volume show how illness narratives expressed in a variety of formsbiographical essays, fictional texts, cartoons, graphic novels, and comicsreflect on ......
Judging from the sheer amount of textual material left to us, the rulers of ancient Ur were above all else concerned with keeping track of their poorest subjects, who made up the majority of the population under their jurisdiction. Year after year, administrators recorded, in frightening detail, the whereabouts of the poorest individuals in ......
The radiocarbon revolutionhas profoundly altered traditionalhistorical frameworks inthe Near East. Addressing theramifications of the new, higherradiometric (14C) chronology,as well as the impact of newexcavations and expandeddata sets on third-millenniumBCE studies, this volumebrings together twenty-threeessays covering a diverse arrayof topics, ......
Egyptological, Archaeological, and Biblical Studies in Honor of James K. Hoffmeier
James Hoffmeier is a giant in the field of Egyptology. Among his many publications are two volumes of archaeological reports from Tell el-Borg, where he headed up excavations from 1999 to 2008. He is also well known for his interest in how ancient Egypt and the biblical world intersected, having edited and written several books on the subject, ......
This volume brings together five essays that represent the latest directions in the study of geography in classical antiquity. Arranged chronologically, these contributions cover several hundred years of ancient geographical scholarship, ranging from ancient Mesopotamia and the prehistoric New World to the Roman Empire, and deal with topics ......
Diese Studie untersucht die inter-, hyper- und architextuelle („transtextuelle„) Poetik im Korpus der assyrischen herrschaftlich-narrativen Texte. Der erste Teil stellt eine auf assyrische Königstexte zurechtgeschneiderte Methode transtextueller Analyse vor, die auf strukturell orientierten Modellen moderner Literaturtheorien ......
Though the terms queer and Mennonite rarely come into theoretical or cultural contact, over the last several decades writers and scholars in the United States and Canada have built a body of queer Mennonite literature that shifts these identities into conversation. In this volume, Daniel Shank Cruz brings this growing genre into a critical ......
