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.
Proceedings of the 62nd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Philadelphia, July 11-15, 2016
Papers presented at the 62nd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, held in Philadelphia on July 11-15, 2016, examining archaeological, artistic, cultural, economic, historical, and textual matters related to the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq.
In many ways, Ella Kate Ewing was an ordinary girl. While growing up on a farm in the 1880s, she learned to sew and cook, help take care of the livestock, hunt rabbits, and tend the garden. But in one way, Ella was anything but ordinary. She was extraordinarily tall. By the time she was finished growing, Ella was 8'4" tall. Ella toured the country ......
Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance
A collection of essays exploring how biocultural and literary dynamics acted together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Essays envision sleep states as a means of defining the human, both literally and metaphorically.
According to a popular maxim, a nation at war reveals its true character. In this incisive work, Christopher Gilbert examines the long history of US war politics through the lens of political cartoons to provide new, unique insight into American cultural makeup and identity. Tracing the comic representation of American values from the First ......
"Science in fiction," "geek novels," "lab-lit"-whatever one calls them, novels about science open a creative space in which the reading public can experience and think critically about the powers of science to illuminate and transform nature and to create and mitigate social risks. The essays in Under the Literary Microscope examine the ......
Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, John Oliver-these comedians are household names whose satirical takes on politics, the news, and current events receive some of the highest ratings on television. In this book, James E. Caron examines satirists such as these through the lenses of political and social philosophy, arriving at a new ......
Explores the relationship between people, street animals, and rabies in urban India. Incorporates epidemiological goals within anthropological frameworks to investigate the ways in which people come into contact with animals and create favorable conditions for the rabies virus to flourish.
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 ......
German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation, 1811-1946
The fields of comparative and world literature tend to have a unidirectional, Eurocentric focus, with attention to concepts of "origin" and "arrival." DisOrientations challenges this viewpoint. Kristin Dickinson employs a unique multilingual archive of German and Turkish translated texts from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. ......
