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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American Paintings to 1950 at the Palmer Museum of Art
In a New Light is the first permanent collection catalogue in the Palmer Museum of Art's fifty-two-year history. Made possible by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, this multi-author book studies and celebrates the institution's most significant collection area, American art. The fully illustrated publication features short essays on ......
Proceedings of the 7th and 8th Meetings of the International Association for Comparative Semitics
This volume offers a wealth of perspectives on comparative Semitic linguistics emerging from the seventh and eighth meetings of the International Association for Comparative Semitics (IACS): the Madrid symposium (2016) was devoted to the role of Akkadian in the study of Comparative Semitics, and the Cordoba meeting (2019) focused on Syria at the ......
Reading Environmental Entanglements in Modern Italy
Over the past century, the Italian landscape has undergone exceedingly rapid transformations, shifting from a mostly rural environment to a decidedly modern world. This changing landscape is endowed with a narrative agency that transforms how we understand our surroundings. Situated at the juncture of Italian studies and ecocriticism and following ......
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 ......
What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question by referring to historical evidence about an artists sexual identity or to particular kinds of imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter is mainstream?
Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi Relations Since the Dawn of Zionism
Originally published in Hebrew in 2021, Hillel Cohen's Enemies, A Love Story argues that to understand the ongoing conflict in Palestine/Israel we need to examine the interactions among three identity groups: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, and Arabs. Refusing to treat Jewish society as a monolith, Cohen shows how the ethnic divide between Ashkenazim (Jews ......
Evangelical Literature and the Missionary Movement in Republican China
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, China underwent tumultuous times—from nation building and the New Culture Movement to the Japanese occupation and the renunciations accompanying the Korean War.
In 1792 in rural San Salvador, Juana Aguilar was accused of committing what the authorities called a "heinous" crime. Aguilar was suspected of being a "hermaphrodite," and while this in and of itself was not a crime, determining Aguilar's sex would resolve whether the relationships Aguilar had with women were criminal. Aguilar's possessions were ......
In African literature, Christianity has long been represented as a foreign religion, associated with the history and ongoing legacies of European colonialism and mission. But in recent decades, writers have begun to engage with it in more complex, ambivalent, and at times liberatory ways that are reflective of the religion's tremendous growth and ......
