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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A Small Radius of Light maps the territory artist G. Daniel Massad has explored for almost four decades. After earning degrees in English at Princeton and the University of Chicago and working for a time as a psychotherapist, Massad made the decision to pursue graduate work in painting in 1979. Two years later, while working on his MFA ......
In this volume, Kioumars Ghereghlou presents an edition, with preface and indexes, of a previously unpublished sixteenth-century Persian chronicle. Written by Qāsim Beg Ḥayātī, a court scribe to Shah Ṭahmāsp (r. 1524–76), it covers Safavid history beginning with the early part of the fourteenth century and ......
Major religious themes of the Bible, such as election and covenant, are not mentioned in the book of Proverbs. Furthermore, self-interest underlies its motivational system (you shall behave well, because it will be good for you). These selfish and secular features have posed serious ethical and theological challenges for some ......
A collection of new studies dedicated to Professor Beno Rothenberg, focused on copper in antiquity in the Near East, the eastern Mediterranean, and the British Isles.
A collection of essays exploring prominent African American artists’ engagement with Christian themes. Essays examine the ways in which an artist’s engagement with religious symbols can be an expression of concerns related to racial, political, and socio-economic identity.
In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the ......
In this volume, Tanya Sheehan takes humor seriously in order to trace how photographic comedy was used in America and transnationally to express evolving ideas about race, black emancipation, and civil rights in the mid-1800s and into the twentieth century.
Sheehan employs a trove of understudied materials to write a new history of ......
Antonio (Nee Maria) Yta's Transgressive, Transatlantic Life in the Twilight of the Spanish Empire
In 1803 in the colonial South American city of La Plata, Doña Martina Vilvado y Balverde presented herself to church and crown officials to denounce her husband of more than four years, Don Antonio Yta, as a “woman in disguise.” Forced to submit to a medical inspection that revealed a woman’s body, Don Antonio confessed ......
Explores significant interpretations of the human spirit in Western culture, with sources ranging from the Hebrew Bible and the apostle Paul to the theologians Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin and the natural philosopher and physician William Harvey.
