We're thrilled to announce our 2020 Holiday Sale! Through December 31, U.S. customers can get 40% off all titles from pennpress.org plus free shipping using discount code HOLIDAY20-FM.*
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FEATURED TITLES
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"Botting offers a thoughtful study of modern ethical issues concerning technology in the context of Mary Shelley's novels Frankenstein and The Last Man . . . Botting's literary study succeeds as an impressive and resounding challenge to technology-driven doomsday scenarios, replacing these with a vision of a gentler, kinder future in which humankind preserves both its existence and its best, most humane qualities."—Publishers Weekly Beginning with Mary Shelley's great novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man, Eileen Hunt Botting's Artificial Life After Frankenstein reveals the techno-political stakes of modern political science fiction and brings them to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 306 pages | 6 x 9 | 0 Order Artificial Life After Frankenstein and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
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"American Freethinker is a masterful account of a fascinating but understudied figure. Kirsten Fischer has uncovered a trove of new information about Elihu Palmer and has written a definitive biography that will be of interest to specialists, students, and general readers interested in the religious, cultural, or political history of the early republic."—Seth Cotlar, author of Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Trans-Atlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic In this first biography of Elihu Palmer, Kirsten Fischer depicts a once notorious freethinker who countered Christianity with the idea of an interconnected universe infused with a divine life force. Denounced as "heretical," Palmer's speeches and writings shaped the contest over freedom of religion and of speech in the new United States. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 15 illus. Order American Freethinker and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
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"A work of exemplary scholarship over a number of languages and cultures, The Jewish Body is a summa summarum of the various debates on body history, race, gender, ethnicity, and nationalism."—Sander Gilman, Emory University In The Jewish Body, Jütte has written an encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present, covering everything from traditional body stereotypes—such as the so-called Jewish nose—to matters of gender, sickness, and health to the end of physicality and death. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 416 pages | 6 x 9 | 27 illus Order The Jewish Body and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
ANTHROPOLOGY
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"In its totality, this book is a finely constructed examination of transnational Senegalese marriages . . . The author seamlessly transitions from discussions on socially constructed myths of wealthy migrants to in-depth analyses of surveillance from abroad and the tensions that arise within the domestic sphere. The scope of the book is impressive, as it covers a diverse set of complex issues like gender, class, kinship, economic standing, and cultural understandings of prestige and power, all under the conceptual framework of 'transnational marriages . . . ' This book is an excellent piece of scholarship,"—African Studies Quarterly This multi-sited ethnography provides a rich account of the costs of global neoliberal economic policy for families in the global south. With a focus on Senegalese migrants in Europe and their wives who are left behind, Hannaford illustrates how new understandings of intimacy, gender, and class are forged in a culture of migration. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 180 pages | 6 x 9 Order Marriage Without Borders and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
LITERATURE AND CULTURE
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"This is a beautiful, elegant work: an intimate journey into the poetry of nineteenth-century readers' lives and books and an eloquent defense of libraries and the humanities."—Michael C. Cohen, author of The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer reads nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left behind in their books and defends the value of the physical, circulating collections of nineteenth-century volumes in academic libraries. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 36 illus. Order Book Traces and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
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"Ethel's Love-Life challenges us to try to understand erotic feelings and bodily practices that were understood and socially organized in ways that are now quite alien to us. . . . [It] is a great novel, an extraordinary and compelling literary performance that deserves a new life."—Christopher Looby, from the Introduction "Ethel's Love-Life" and Other Writings presents an annotated edition of what's sometimes called the first American "lesbian" novel, with an introduction by Christopher Looby, as well as a collection of author Margaret J. M. Sweat's poetry and her published essays on Charlotte Brontë, George Sand, the novel, and the friendships of women. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 344 pages | 6 x 9 Order "Ethel's Love-Life" and Other Writings and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES
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"In my work as a court expert and consultant worldwide, I have been involved in more than one discussion with Church apologists who assert that the sexual violation of boys is a new phenomenon. Among the greatest failures of the hierarchical leadership of the Catholic Church has been the abysmal ignorance of the Church's own unrevised history, the unwillingness to entertain the validity of the events of the past when they are presented, and the inability to learn from that past. In The Corrupter of Boys Dyan Elliott shows us the evident parallels between the medieval and modern periods. It is a remarkable and invaluable book."—Thomas P. Doyle, J.C.D., C.A.D.C. Dyan Elliott demonstrates how scandal-averse policies in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy resulted in the widespread sexual abuse of boys from late antiquity through the later Middle Ages, and argues that the same clerical prerogatives and strategies for the cover-up of abuse remain in place today. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 448 pages | 6 x 9 Order The Corrupter of Boys and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
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"Drawing on formidable experience with gathering, editing, teaching, thinking about, and writing about ballads, Patricia Fumerton has produced a comprehensive synthesis of all the scholarly work on broadsides that has been done to date. Her book will be the starting point for all future research on the subject."—Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California Featuring more than 80 illustrations and easy access to related music files, this magisterial work argues that a ballad cannot be read as a fixed artifact, independent of its illustrations, tune, and movement across time and space. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 512 pages | 7 x 10 | 83 illus. Order The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
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"Eric Weiskott saves us from reading the history of English poetry as a narrative in which formal, thematic, and linguistic developments keep step across a progress of periods. Meter, in its own diversity—the asynchronous rise and fall of its many kinds—proves to be an ideal instrument for disaggregating the rates and durations of change across many domains."—Jeff Dolven, Princeton University Eric Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of three metrical forms as markers of literary periodization: alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter. Rejecting the traditional division between medieval and modern, Weiskott's analysis of metrical history renegotiates the trajectories of English literary history between 1350 and 1650. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 6 x 9 Order Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
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"Adrienne Williams Boyarin has written a remarkable exploration of a strain of Jewish-Christian relations often overlooked in scholarship: the instrumental usefulness of seeing Christians and Jews in English writing and history not as different but as the same. Those familiar with psychoanalytic theory may recall the old Lacanian dictum that identity is forged, not only against the Other, but also in (the) terms of the Other. Exercising this logic, Williams Boyarin teases out the implications of 'polemical sameness' between Self and Other, Christian and Jew, and, in the process, makes an important contribution to the large and expanding field of studies on Jewish-Christian relations in medieval England."— Geraldine Heng, author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages In The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess, Adrienne Williams Boyarin explores medieval fantasies of Jewish-Christian indistinguishability. Identifying what she calls "polemics of sameness," an essential part of anti-Jewish materials, she shows how the fine line between "saming" and "othering" reveals stereotypes of the unmarked Jewess. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 12 illus. Order The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"Zoltán I. Búzás successfully demonstrates how states use law to violate norms with reference to the Roma in Europe, and in doing so, shows that we have too often conflated norms and laws, looking only at practices that violate both, while ignoring the ways in which states may nominally comply with laws while violating the norms on which they are based. Evading International Norms is not only a brilliant contribution to our understanding of international law and norms but also an empirical contribution to the literature on race and international relations."—Charli Carpenter, University of Massachusetts-Amherst Providing a novel conceptual framework and rich case studies of the Roma in France and the Czech Republic, Zoltán I. Búzás sheds light on the ways in which states are able to resist unwanted human rights obligations by circumventing international human rights norms without violating the laws designed to protect them. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 13 tables Order Evading International Norms and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
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"A remarkable and virtually unprecedented achievement in Tibetan studies, Building a Religious Empire is an original and substantial contribution to our understanding of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and the role they played in East Asian history."—Gray Tuttle, Columbia University Building a Religious Empire presents an account of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism during its expansion and consolidation of power from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, examining the extraordinary effort Geluk lamas put into establishing institutional frameworks to standardize monastic life. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 halftones, 3 charts, 2 tables Order Building a Religious Empire and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
URBAN STUDIES
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"A welcome contribution to the critical social science of the anthropocene. Disastrous Times not only develops a 'quotidian' understanding of a sometimes abstract and theoretical concept but also demonstrates the importance of Asian research sites for reassessing what has been a primarily Euro-American debate."—Jerome Whitington, author of Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower Disastrous Times explores how people across Asia live through and make sense of environmental transformation and asks how we might analyze this moment of disruption and risk. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. Order Disastrous Times and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
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New Towns for the Twenty-First Century considers the ideals behind new-town development, the practice of building them, and their outcomes. Case studies provide histories of new towns in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe and impart lessons learned from practitioners. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 600 pages | 7 x 10 | 132 illus. Order New Towns for the Twenty-First Century and get 40% off plus free shipping! |
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