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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As discrete fields of inquiry, rhetoric and mathematics have long been considered antithetical to each other. That is, if mathematics explains or describes the phenomena it studies with certainty, persuasion is not needed. This volume calls into question the view that mathematics is free of rhetoric. Through nine studies of the intersections ......
Studies in the Jihad and the Arab-Byzantine Frontier
This book discusses the relationship between the idea of Holy War in early Islamic societies and the competition for resources and legitimacy among Muslims who lived on the Arab-Byzantine frontier, providing a fresh perspective on the history of that region during the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods.
Between February 2011 and February 2012, Senator Arlen Specter sat down before the cameras of the Pennsylvania Cable Network (PCN) to record his oral history. The result was a fifteen-hour television series, which ran on cable systems across Pennsylvania over five nights in May 2012. This book is drawn from the transcripts of those interviews, ......
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 ......
In this volume, Heather McPherson examines the connections among portraiture, theater, the visual arts, and fame to shed light on the emergence of modern celebrity culture in eighteenth-century England.
Popular actors in Georgian London, such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and John Philip Kemble, gave ......
This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement's significance to art history today.
In this examination of the rise of formalism in the visual arts, Sam Rose uses a close contextual study of Roger Fry and British art writing from 1900 to 1939 to rethink how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement's significance to art history today.
Brings together historians, philosophers, critics, postcolonial theorists, and curators to ask how contemporary global art is conceptualized. Issues discussed include globalism and globalization, internationalism and nationality, empire and capitalism.