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.
Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century
Examines the eighteenth-century crisis in the Moravian Church known as the Sifting Time, and the church's subsequent shift from radical beliefs and practices to conservative mainstream Protestantism.
John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siecle Art
Explores the art of John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture. Argues that the artist was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism.
The Mahāratnakūta Sūtra is one of the five major sutra groups in the Mahāyāna canon. Of the two great schools of Buddhism, Mahāyāna has the greatest number of adherents worldwide—it prevails among the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Tibetans, and Vietnamese—and contains within it a number of movements, ......
American Quakerism changed dramatically in the antebellum era owing to both internal and external forces, including schism, industrialization, western migration, and reform activism. With the "Great Separation" of the 1820s and subsequent divisions during the 1840s and 1850s, new Quaker sects emerged. Some maintained the quietism of the previous ......
The past fifty years have seen a strong interest in the shape and the message of the book of Psalms. In A Voice Without End, Andrew Carl Witt evaluates the significance of Psalms 3-14, and in particular, the presence and function of the figure of David. Using representative interpreters and canonical and literary approaches, Witt uncovers how the ......
Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London
William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver-Poet and the Plague's microhistorical approach uses Muggins's life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a commonwealth founded on labor and ......
Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London
William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses Muggins’s life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a ......
Explores the question of how an art history of all cultures could be written or if it is even possible to do so. Examines the political and moral issues raised by the consideration of a multicultural art history.
Examines the rhetorical practices that generate and sustain discrimination against disabled people. Demonstrates how ableist values, knowledge, and ways of seeing pervade Western culture and influence social institutions such as law, sport, and religion.
