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.
In this book, Carl Niekerk probes the origins of modern anthropology in the European Enlightenment, foregrounding how the knowledge transfer between an international array of natural historians and public intellectuals-including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon; Voltaire; Denis Diderot; Immanuel Kant; and Johann Gottfried Herder-shaped the ......
First published in 1653, The Compleat Angler is one of the most influential environmental texts ever written. Addressing a politically and religiously polarized nation devastated by warfare, disease, ecological degradation, and climate change, Izaak Walton's famous fishing treatise stages a radical thought experiment: how might humanity's enhanced ......
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Japan sent its first diplomatic delegations to visit the popes and dignitaries of Europe. European artists portrayed these historic ambassadors-the Tensho embassy (1582-90) and the Keicho embassy (1613-20)-in numerous oil paintings, frescoes, drawings, and prints. Envisioning Diplomacy ......
Conceptual and Practical Obstacles to Improving Judicial Performance in Latin America
Judicial reform became an important part of the agenda for development in Latin America early in the 1980s, when countries in the region started the process of democratization. Connections began to be made between judicial performance and market-based growth, and development specialists turned their attention to “second generation” ......
To many, the life of Ernest Hemingway has taken on mythic proportions. From his romantic entanglements to his legendary bravado, the elements of Papa's persona have fascinated readers, turning Hemingway into such an outsized figure that it is almost impossible to imagine him as a real person. James Hutchisson's biography reclaims Hemingway ......
Human beings are restless souls, ever driven by an insistent inner force not only to have more but to be more—to be infinitely more. Various philosophers have emphasized this type of ceaseless striving in their accounts of humanity, as in Spinoza’s notion of conatus and Hobbes’s ......
Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788) was Thomas Reid’s last major work. It was conceived as part of one large work, intended as a final synoptic statement of his overall philosophy. The first and larger part was published three years earlier as Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (edited as volume 3 of the ......
Using narrative devices such as allusions and free associations, multivalent expressions, and irony, the author of Esther wrote a story that is about a Jewish woman, Esther, during the time of the Persian exile of Yehudites, and the Persian king, Ahasuerus, who was in power at the time. At various junctures, the author also used secret writing, ......
Examines the writing of Sofia Samatar, Samuel R. Delany, Casey Plett, Miriam Toews, and others to theorize theapoetics, a queer feminist decolonial reading strategy.
