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.
Explores the role of writer Gwendolyn Bennett as an important contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. Includes Bennett’s published and unpublished poetry, fiction, essays, diaries, letters, and artwork.
A collection of essays exploring the role of textual studies in understanding and editing texts, and in understanding the historical developments and cultural differences in editorial and archival systems.
An iconoclast and best-selling author of both nonfiction and fiction, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and writing about the cultures of animals such as lions, wolves, dogs, deer, and humans. In this compulsively readable book, she provides a plainspoken, big-picture look at the commonality of life on our ......
In From Hysteria to Hormones, Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women's health.
Shortly after Ernest Henry Starling coined the term hormone in 1905, hormones began to provide a ......
Automata, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World
Recounts the histories of German clockwork automata, which were given as gifts and collected in the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Examines U.S. obscenity trials in the early twentieth century and how they framed a wide-ranging debate about the printed word’s power to deprave, offend, and shape behavior.
Explores the contributions of Evan Pugh (1828-1864), founding president of today’s Pennsylvania State University, in quickly building it into America’s first scientifically based agricultural college.
Explores the work of the astrologer-physician and Anglican rector Richard Napier (1559-1634). Examines Napier’s medical and magical practices in their larger context and shows how the physician incorporated both astral and ritual magic into his medicine.
The first complete English translation and annotated study of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s 1552 Confesionario. Explores its history and its guidelines for confessors administering the sacrament of confession to conquistadores, encomenderos, slaveholders, settlers, and others who had harmed indigenous peoples.
