Summer's winding down, but it's not quite back-to-school season yet. So if you're still looking to squeeze in a few fascinating reads on Human Rights, American History, Religious Studies, and more, then Penn Press has got your number. Read on for our exciting list of June and July releases!
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AMERICAN HISTORY
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"With this fine book, James Alexander Dun joins a burgeoning and important scholarship reassessing the long-ignored impact of the Haitian Revolution on early America. Based on monumental research, it offers the most comprehensive account we have of Philadelphia's newspaper coverage and indeed of a broad spectrum of public opinion on the Haitian Revolution as it unfolded. The result shows us not silence but cacophony: a striking portrait of a rich, multifaceted, and contested range of debate. Dangerous Neighbors will make a lasting contribution to the field."—François Furstenberg, Johns Hopkins University "Dangerous Neighbors elegantly shows how Philadelphians absorbed, debated, and channeled the news of insurrection, emancipation, and independence in the Caribbean. Dun foregrounds the vitality and complexity of print culture as a forum that at once circulated, interpreted, and framed the transformations brought about by the actions of revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue. And he richly shows how engagement with the challenges posed by these events shaped debates about freedom, race, and nation in the United States."—Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History "While offering a deep, nuanced history of the Haitian Revolution, Dangerous Neighbors is first and foremost a study of early American political culture. James Alexander Dun argues the American people defined their own revolution, figured the place of slavery and African-descended people in their new nation, and determined their national identity through the lens of events in the French colony and, later, the black republic."—Matthew J. Clavin, University of Houston "In this eye-blinking demonstration of archival research, Alec Dun has shone a bright light on the vibrant public discourse spawned in Philadelphia in the 1790s by the Haitian Revolution. In this captivating book, Dun reveals something more of great importance: how black insurrection in the hemisphere's most ferocious and profitable slave regime sent shock waves up the Delaware River, obliging Philadelphians to rethink the meaning of their own revolution and to consider whether Haiti-in-flames presaged the advent of the universal rights of mankind."—Gary Nash, University of California, Los Angeles Dangerous Neighbors shows how the Haitian Revolution permeated early American print culture and had a profound impact on the young nation's domestic politics. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 9 illlus. Order Dangerous Neighbors and save 30%. |
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"Destructive Creation is a probing account of the World War II mobilization effort that sheds new light on the sources of big business hostility to government regulation. As Mark Wilson demonstrates in absorbing detail, it was the very success of the wartime state that generated such a furious business backlash. This is revisionist history in the most provocative and illuminating sense."—Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara "Mark Wilson offers the decisive account of how the United States became, in the words of Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest 'arsenal of democracy,' allowing for the Allied victory in World War II. Analytically rich and narratively compelling, Destructive Creation tells the story of how American businessmen fought highly contested political battles on the homefront to privatize production, or at least sell the virtue of private enterprise, even as they mobilized for a war paid with public funds. An outstanding reinterpretation of the role of business in the war effort, this volume is a must read for anyone who wants to understand World War II and the world of private contractors that has come to define our modern military."—Meg Jacobs, author of Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America "Destructive Creation is a truly important, impressive, and extraordinary history of the mobilization of the United States' economy during the Second World War, with a number of fascinating implications for our understanding of the interactions between business, politics, and American society. Mark R. Wilson makes a compelling case for placing the relationship between the military and business at the center of how we think about modern American history."—Jason Scott Smith, University of New Mexico Offering a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of the "arsenal of democracy," Destructive Creation suggests how the struggle to define its heroes and villains has continued to shape economic and political development to the present day. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 392 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. Order Destructive Creation and save 30%. |
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"Republic of Taste plunges readers into the crowded and contested visual culture of the early American republic, from schoolrooms to coffeehouses to museums. With lucid prose and wide-ranging erudition, Catherine E. Kelly invites us literally to see the dazzling multiplicity of the newly United States with fresh eyes."—Jane Kamensky, Harvard University "Republic of Taste introduces a dazzling array of materials, which Catherine Kelly interprets with wonderful flair and great insight. Our sense of culture and politics in the Early American Republic will never be quite the same."—Ann Vincent Fabian, Rutgers University-New Brunswick "Republic of Taste is a provocative exploration of the complex interplay of reading, writing, and looking in the republican culture of taste."—Karen Halttunen, University of Southern California Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Republic of Taste demonstrates how American thinkers upheld the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 312 pages | 7 x 10 | 11 color, 38 b/w illus. Order Republic of Taste and save 30%. |
Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America
Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II
Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early AmericaANTHROPOLOGY
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"No Place for Grief is simply breathtaking. This harrowing ethnography of lives barred from hope and yet seeking an ordinary existence in occupied Palestine is permeated by political urgency and a captivating poetic hesitancy. Lotte Buch Segal's intense listening and probing analysis brings these characters and their demolished households out of obscurity, letting them shatter and recast our understanding of political violence, chronic suffering, and human endurance in the twenty-first century."— João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment "Imaginatively conceived and written with great compassion and grace, No Place for Grief makes a rich contribution to our understanding of social suffering and the folding of violence into everyday life."—Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University "Lotte Buch Segal's No Place for Grief is not just another addition to stories of suffering and trauma among the Palestinians—rather, it shows how the relation between gender and violence is paramount to the way in which political violence might be understood in long, drawn-out conditions of war and occupation. As such, No Place for Grief is relevant not only to psychologists and anthropologists, but also to global and public health readers who seek to understand what life is like in a context of protracted and ongoing exposure to political violence."—Rita Giacaman, Birzeit University, Palestine Through a detailed ethnographic account of the everyday lives of detainees' wives in the occupied Palestinian Territory, No Place for Grief reveals the ways in which the normalization of these women's distress is intrinsically and painfully linked to the collective struggle for freedom from the occupation. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 224 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. Order No Place for Grief and save 30%. |
No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning in Contemporary PalestineLITERATURE
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"Our ideas of history are dependent upon lived temporalities shaped by commercial and material forces, and I have never seen this truth so solidly, aptly, and compellingly explicated as in Timothy Campbell's book."—Erin Mackie, Syracuse University "Original, witty, and very well-researched, Historical Style deftly argues that eighteenth-century British culture became self-consciously periodized through the new phenomenon of fashion trends."—Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia In Historical Style, Timothy Campbell argues that the eighteenth-century fashion press shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past and a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 376 pages | 6 x 9 | 54 illus. Order Historical Style and save 30%. |
Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740-1830MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES
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"Queer Philologies, Jeffrey Masten's brilliant new book, makes the queerness of linguistic relations into the stuff of a genuine page-turner. Doing nothing less than reinventing the field of philology for the twenty-first century, Masten charts striking moments in the two-way traffic between words and world, exploring how accident and error figure in the shaping of sexuality and multiply its significations beyond all scholarly control. To dip into this book is to recognize that it's destined to become a classic, one of the works without which queer theory and early modernism no longer can be thought."—Lee Edelman, Tufts University "A masterpiece as well as a great intellectual joy. Masten finds in philology and in the history of the book a new approach to the analysis of norms and normativities—that is, to practices of standardization, including the standardization of sex and gender. This queer manifesto for the mutual implication of the history of sexuality and the materiality of language is as powerful as it is scrupulous, as original as it is radical. No one who reads this book will ever think of the letter Q in the same way again."—David Halperin, University of Michigan "A brilliant, exacting, original book. Coherently organized, deftly argued, elegant in style, and utterly unique, Queer Philologies is not only full of insights relevant to scholars of early modern literature; it advances paradigm-shattering proposals relevant to queer studies scholars and historians of sexuality more generally."—Valerie Traub, University of Michigan "Jeffrey Masten's witty and searching book will help a new generation of students to recover the philological grounds for the early modern period's sexual relations and gender constructions. Deploying and extending his signature combination of queer theory and textual scholarship, Masten gives us startling new readings of key works, words, and even letters that leave them looking very queer indeed."—William Sherman, Victoria and Albert Museum Beginning with the beguiling queerness of the Renaissance letter Q, Jeffrey Masten's stylishly written and extensively illustrated Queer Philologies demonstrates the intimate relation between the history of sexuality and the history of the language. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 368 pages | 7 x 10 | 51 illus. Order Queer Philologies and save 30%. |
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"Beyond the Cloister is an articulate and well-balanced contribution to a rapidly developing interest in early modern studies: the critical mapping of intersections between histories of the book and manuscript cultures, as well as women's writing and Catholic writing in the post-Reformation period. The work represents a timely and valuable reminder of the critical dividends that a genuinely materialist approach to literary history can produce."—Lowell Gallagher, University of California, Los Angeles Beyond the Cloister reveals the literary significance of manuscripts and printed books written by and about post-Reformation Catholic Englishwomen, offering a reassessment of crucial decades in the development of English literary history. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 256 pages | 6 x 9 Order Beyond the Cloister and save 30%. |
Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time
Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary CulturePOLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"Elegantly written, ethnographically and historically rich, Albahari's book poses new questions about national security and 'crimes of peace' and should be on the shelves of scholars studying state security, international migration, and human rights."—International Migration Review "Indispensable. . . . [Albahari's] descriptive skill, his empathy with individual suffering, and his recognition of local acts of generosity are complemented by a disciplined attention to human rights, secular and Christian humanitarianism, maritime law, statecraft and transnational crime."—Times Literary Supplement "Building on existential experience, Albahari presents a profound reflection, articulated with elegance, on sovereignty as the duty to rescue (salvation) and sovereignty as the anticipation of risks (preemption), and therefore as bureaucratic classification of migrants: an impossible sovereignty, he says, between governing with the saved and governing with the dead."—Cultures et Conflits "Crimes of Peace is a valuable read for anyone interested in the very concept of Europe and of the rule of law. It powerfully addresses the uncomfortable question of how, between the state's monopoly of both violence and of rescue, European publics have as of yet abstained from, but could always start, to advance a sovereignty of responsibility."—CritCom: A Forum for Research and Commentary on Europe "This is a remarkable book—an intellectual treat that is also a political statement, a complex but compelling ethnography of state indifference, and a tribute to the humanity of those few who saw fit to show it when the agents of the state preferred to turn their backs. Written with precision and passion, it moves through personal encounters, media reports, legal documents, and eyewitness accounts to piece together the collective criminality of a state—and, indeed, a superstate, the European Union—that should be held accountable for the thousands of deaths and infinite suffering that should never have occurred, the deaths and suffering of those trying to reach a European haven and found it instead to be a vast, racially motivated, and largely oblivious gated community."—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University In Crimes of Peace, Maurizio Albahari investigates why the Mediterranean Sea is the world's deadliest border, and what alternatives might improve this state of affairs. Albahari transforms abstract statistics into names and narratives that place the responsibility for the Mediterranean migration crisis in the heart of liberal democracy. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. Order Crimes of Peace and save 30%. |
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"Overall, All Necessary Measures is an evocative project, in no small part because it challenges the primacy of place that scholars and policymakers give to material and strategic concerns. . . . This is an important piece of scholarship for all readers interested in conflict and human rights, as it clearly and cogently demonstrates that narratives matter, even in the realm of power politics."—Human Rights Quarterly "Carrie Booth Walling makes a sharp and compelling case for the role of argument in shaping decisions to intervene on humanitarian grounds. From this simple and elegant premise, and drawing adeptly on primary documents, she explains a full range of humanitarian interventions."—Sonia Cardenas, author of Human Rights in Latin America "All Necessary Measures makes an important contribution to the constructivist literature and brings together numerous cases under a simple but telling framework that illuminates the decision processes of the Security Council on issues of humanitarian intervention."—William Burke-White, University of Pennsylvania School of Law Carrie Booth Walling posits that the arguments Security Council members make about the cause and character of conflict and the source of sovereign authority in target states matter: they enable or constrain the use of military force in defense of human rights. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 320 pages | 6 x 9 | 16 illus. Order All Necessary Measures and save 30%. |
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Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2014 Looting and Rape in Wartime examines the causes of the hundred-year gap between the prohibition against wartime looting and that against rape, theorizing the conditions necessary for the emergence of a global prohibition regime in which a particular practice is not tolerated. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 280 pages | 6 x 9 Order Looting and Rape in Wartime and save 30%. |
PUBLIC POLICY
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Rice has become one of Nigeria's leading food staples. And rice consumption has outpaced production, making Nigeria the world's leading importer of rice. As a result, reducing import dependence is now a major goal of Nigerian policymakers. In The Nigerian Rice Economy the authors assess three options for reducing this dependency–tariffs and other trade policies; increasing domestic rice production; and improving post-harvest rice processing and marketing–and identify improved production and postharvest activities as the most promising. These options, however, will require substantially increased public investments in a variety of areas, including research and development, basic infrastructure (for example, irrigation, feeder roads, and electricity), and rice milling technologies. The analysis, methods used, and recommendations provided in The Nigerian Rice Economy will be equally valuable to a broad range of readers including researchers, development specialists, students, and others concerned with applications of food policy analysis and economic development more broadly in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa south of the Sahara. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 320 pages | 6 x 9 | 36 illus. Order The Nigerian Rice Economy and save 30%. |
The Nigerian Rice Economy: Policy Options for Transforming Production, Marketing, and TradeRELIGIOUS AND JEWISH STUDIES
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"Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz . . . displays an excellent use of Jewish and Christian sources, both ancient and medieval, as well as a mastery of contemporary research that deals with both Jewish and Christian European medieval communities. . . . Elisheva Baumgarten . . . provides the reader with an astute gendered analysis in her presentation of piety in the high Middle Ages."—Speculum "Baumgarten argues that as practices changed in Ashkenaz scholarly authorities reacted by seeking out the appropriate ancient texts that supported their decisions to curb or foster these practices. Her approach yields a vivid picture of this medieval Jewish community that makes a great contribution to Medieval studies. It also lends itself more readily to comparison and even understanding by those outside of Jewish studies. I encourage all those interested in high medieval culture, social history, gender, and inter-religious entanglement to read this important book."—The Medieval Review "This fascinating and persuasive book will play an important bridging role as the study of medieval Christianity focuses more on lay piety, and as medievalists seek more and more to integrate material on diverse cultures into their scholarship and teaching."—Ruth Mazo Karras, University of Minnesota "Elisheva Baumgarten assesses the presence, development, and extent of Jewish piety in northern Europe, from the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries. Her emphasis on women's issues and the attempts to isolate the practices of the Jewish layman, rather than the rabbinic elite, are in many ways pioneering."—Ephraim Kanarfogel, Yeshiva University Elisheva Baumgarten offers a fresh assessment of Jewish daily practices in medieval Ashkenaz. The first study to address the practices of men and women together, Baumgarten explores how Jews who were not learned alongside those who were expressed their convictions and reinforced their identities as Jews within a Christian world. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 344 pages | 6 x 9 | 17 illus. Order Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz and save 30%. |
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"The genius of Demacopoulos's book is that it takes an entrenched assumption about Roman papal authority—that the late ancient pope claimed to speak through Peter, Christ's chosen apostle, when asserting matters of doctrine or discipline—and turns it on its head."—Early Medieval Europe "Demacopoulos's meticulous study with helpful appendices should be read carefully by everyone, especially by those who think that they already know well enough the history of the early papacy."—Tarmo Toom, Journal of Theological Studies "The Invention of Peter makes a valuable contribution to two fields that have not yet much affected each other: intellectual history of the papacy and late antique cultural studies. It encourages fresh, innovative scrutiny of a subject too important to languish."—Kevin Uhalde, Ohio University By emphasizing the ways the Bishops of Rome first leveraged the cult of St. Peter to their advantage, George E. Demacopoulos constructs an alternate account of papal history that challenges the dominant narrative of an inevitable and unbroken rise in papal power from late antiquity through the Middle Ages. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 272 pages | 6 x 9 Order The Invention of Peter and save 30%. |
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"Pious Irreverence is a well-conceived and highly original work that asks to what extent and in what way the human may confront divinity, considering the evident imperfections in divinely created reality. Dov Weiss makes a major contribution to the study of rabbinic literature and demonstrates remarkably wide expertise also in early Christian and Patristic texts, contemporary studies of Judaism and Christianity, and literary theory."—Marc Bregman, University of North Carolina, Greensboro "In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss makes numerous important contributions: He traces the existence of an antiprotest tradition in rabbinic Judaism from the tannaitic period to the amoraic; he identifies fascinating differences between the ways Jewish and Christian antiprotestors quarantine biblical protests; and most importantly, he underscores the crucial role of the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu literature in radicalizing the protest tradition."—Tzvi Novick, University of Notre Dame Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Weiss has written the first scholarly study of the premodern roots of this distinctively Jewish theology of protest, examining its origins and development in the rabbinic age (70 CE-800 CE). Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 Order Pious Irreverence and save 30%. |
Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic JudaismBook reviewers: To request a press copy of a Penn Press book, send your name, shipping address, and the title of your publication to glamm@upenn.edu.
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