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.
A Tale of Two Surrogates explores the complicated emotional, medical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding assisted reproduction. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research conducted by a sociologist and an anthropologist, this book presents, in an accessible graphic novel format, the intertwined stories of two fictional women who ......
A Tale of Two Surrogates explores the complicated emotional, medical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding assisted reproduction. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research conducted by a sociologist and an anthropologist, this book presents, in an accessible graphic novel format, the intertwined stories of two fictional women who ......
Trauma is an inescapable condition of Chaucer's works. From the ravaging of Troy and the abandonment of Dido to the devastating aftereffects of sexual assault, Chaucer portrayed the most unsettling, searing aspects of human experience. While the term "trauma" was not part of Chaucer's vocabulary, the author was assuredly aware of its causes and ......
A Study of Biblical Hebrew Terms for Writing Materials and Implements
In this book, Philip Zhakevich examines the technology of writing as it existed in the southern Levant during the Iron Age II period, after the alphabetic writing system had fully taken root in the region. Using the Hebrew Bible as its corpus and focusing on a set of Hebrew terms that designated writing surfaces and instruments, this study ......
In 1510, nine men were tried in the Archbishops Court in York for attempting to find and extract a treasure on the moor near Mixindale through necromantic magic.
On May 4, 1380, Cecily Chaumpaigne filed a quitclaim with the Chancery in Westminster, releasing the poet Geoffrey Chaucer from any prosecution de raptu meo (on account of my rape). This legal document, lost for centuries, has haunted Chaucer studies since its rediscovery in 1873.
Over the past 150 years since it reemerged, ......
An investigation into one of the largest and most lucrative mineral mining companies in the world, Rio Tinto, Extraction Politics reveals how the company constructs a presence in the places it operates and shapes meanings and orientations toward the environment. Taking readers on a "rhetorical pilgrimage" across the American Southwest, Nicholas ......
The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment is arguably Eugene Delacroix's best-known work from his trip to Morocco in 1832, and the attention scholars have paid to it has obscured a crucial fact about Delacroix's Moroccan subjects: most of his paintings of North Africa depict men rather than women. After serving as a diplomat's companion on a ......
Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In ......
