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.
Moving Beyond Authority and Mastery in Higher Education
In recent decades, public higher education has faced perpetual crises. As states slash investment in postsecondary education and for-profit entities seek to supplant public colleges and universities, these public institutions have tried to compete by maximizing efficiency, namely, by relying more on technology and less on the teacher. ......
Historical Perspectives on Carl Schmitt's Neglected Exception
Over the last one hundred years, the term "sovereignty" has come to be associated with the capacity of leaders to declare emergencies and to unleash harmful and often violent powers. Friendly Sovereignty explores the blind spots of this prevailing perspective. In this book, Ted H. Miller challenges the view of sovereignty propounded by Carl ......
Written by preeminent Fitzgerald biographer and literary critic, Scott Donaldson, this book presents a fresh, insightful exploration of the war between the sexes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional and autobiographical writings. The volume opens with a close reading of Tender Is the Night, in which Donaldson argues that the key theme of the ......
Explores the relationship between Imperial Germany and its empire in Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), and how Africans confronted foreign rule and altered German national identity between 1842 and 1915.
As a reader of her literary predecessors, and as a writer who herself contributed to the emerging literary tradition, Margaret Cavendish is an extraordinary figure whose role in early modern literary history has yet to be fully acknowledged. In this study, Lara Dodds reassesses the literary invention of Cavendish-the use she makes of other ......
An account, in graphic novel format, of a young Syrian refugee and how war forced him to leave everything behind, including his family, his friends, his home, and his business. This narrative follows his travels from Turkey to Greece.
A collection of critical and creative essays exploring pataphysics, a late nineteenth-century French absurdist precursor to Dadaism, surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd. Reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century.
With its selection as the court of the Spanish Habsburgs, Madrid became the de facto capital of a global empire, a place from which momentous decisions were made whose implications were felt in all corners of a vast domain. By the seventeenth century, however, political theory produced in the Monarquia Hispanica dealt primarily with the concept of ......
The Evolution of Intermarriage Law in the Hebrew Bible
The Torah Unabridged is a detailed examination of legal reasoning in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the exegetical operations by which biblical laws related to intermarriage were applied to circumstances and persons that lie outside the sphere of their explicit content, this book reconstructs the ways in which laws regarding intermarriage evolved, ......
