It doesn't feel like summer here on the East Coast, but wherever you are, you're probably beginning to put together a summer reading list. Well, Penn Press humbly submits for your consideration our new titles, which span from the history of American cookbooks to pre-WWII German cinema. Below, peruse our titles in early American studies, human rights, religious studies, and more! And here's hoping summer gets here soon.
Jump to: Featured Titles | American History | Ancient Studies | Anthropology | Early American Studies | Jewish Studies | Medieval and Renaissance Studies | Political Science and Human Rights | Religious Studies | World History
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FEATURED TITLES
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"Cookbooks tell us who we are and aspire to be, and in this useful, deeply researched and witty guide to American cooking instruction, Megan Elias illuminates little-known facts and limns the evolution of our tastes—from Amelia Simmons's American Cookery of 1796 to the reality TV chefs and food bloggers of today."—Alex Prud'homme, author of The French Chef in America: Julia Child's Second Act In Food on the Page, the first comprehensive history of American cookbooks, Megan J. Elias chronicles cookbook publishing from the early 1800s to the present day. Examining a wealth of fascinating archival material, Elias explores the role words play in the creation of taste on both a personal and a national level. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. |
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"Few people question the conventional wisdom like Ivan Krastev."—George Soros In this provocative book, renowned public intellectual Ivan Krastev reflects on the future of the European Union—and its potential lack of a future. With far-right nationalist parties on the rise across the continent and the United Kingdom planning for Brexit, the European Union is in disarray and plagued by doubts as never before. Krastev includes chapters devoted to Europe's major problems, the spread of right-wing populism, and the thorny issues facing member states on the eastern flank of the EU. He concludes by reflecting on the ominous political, economic, and geopolitical future that would await the continent if the Union itself begins to disintegrate. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 128 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 |
Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture
After EuropeAMERICAN HISTORY
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"This is a wonderful book that is felicitously written, passionately argued, and full of information that is otherwise difficult to find. Cary Cordova's study fills a major gap in the current literature on Latino arts movements in the United States, as well as in the cultural history of San Francisco and California."—Richard Cándida Smith, University of California, Berkeley The Heart of the Mission is the first in-depth examination of the Latino arts renaissance in San Francisco's Mission District in the latter twentieth century. Using evocative oral histories and archival research, Cordova highlights the rise of a vibrant intellectual community grounded in avant-garde aesthetics and radical politics. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 336 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 14 color, 65 b/w illus. |
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"The Sociable City is an excellent and sophisticated contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of urbanism. It brings a novel and enriched vocabulary to the history of urban thought through reconsideration of classic writers and the introduction of new ones as well."—Samuel Zipp, Brown University The Sociable City chronicles how, as the city's physical and social landscapes evolved over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban intellectuals developed new vocabularies, narratives, and representational forms to explore and advocate for the social configurations made possible by urban living. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 208 pages | 6 x 9 | 13 illus |
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"Deeply researched and impeccably even-handed in its treatment of scientists and evangelicals, Existential Threats fills a large gap in the historical literature about apocalyptic writings in American culture."—Grant Wacker, author of America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation In Existential Threats, Lisa Vox explores the growth of dispensationalist premillennialism alongside scientific understandings of the end of the world and contends that these two allegedly competing visions have converged to create an American apocalyptic imagination. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 288 pages | 6 x 9 |
The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco
The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition
Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological EraANCIENT STUDIES
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"An entirely original book. Becky Martin opens the imagination to a new array of methodological possibilities and a series of important and provocative interpretations of particular works of art and genres of historical objects."—Josephine Crawley Quinn, University of Oxford Explicating the relationship between theory, method, and interpretation, The Art of Contact destabilizes categories such as orientalism and Hellenism and offers fresh perspectives on Greek and Phoenician art history. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 320 pages | 7 x 10 | 38 color, 59 b/w illus. |
The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician ArtANTHROPOLOGY
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"Ann Grodzins Gold's prose is beautiful and often poignant, drawing the reader into public and domestic spaces, and oral histories and everyday conversations of Jahazpur. She lays bare the contingencies and daily decisions of fieldwork itself. Very few ethnographies are so honest."—Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Emory University Ann Grodzins Gold weaves together an integrated series of ethnographic sketches depicting the distinctive nature of non-urban, non-rural places; the impact locality has on belonging; the negotiations of difference required in a pluralistic society; and the ways a changing environment permeates experiences of self and place. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 346 pages | 6 x 9 | 30 illus. |
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"Small Countries is a remarkably fresh and engaging contribution to the anthropology of the nation-state. While such macroanthropology has often been understood to stand in tension with more traditionally localized sorts of ethnographic practice, the authors use the very smallness of the 'small country' to show how ideas and practices of national cultural intimacy disrupt received ideas of scale that still haunt our understandings of what is, and is not, anthropological. Through a fascinating set of cases presented by an impressive set of contributors, this stimulating book arrives at a distinctive and original perspective on the nation-state."—James Ferguson, Stanford University How does smallness shape a country and its relations with other countries? In comparative case studies that cover a diverse set of regions, Small Countries describes a number of similar problems with which small countries must cope, on domestic levels as well as in their transnational and global encounters. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus. |
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"This is the work of the most important anthropologist working in South India and Tamil-speaking Sri Lanka in the past fifty years."—Martha Ann Selby, University of Texas at Austin Death, Beauty, Struggle contains an original vision of gendered lives, poetry, devotion, and social hierarchy in Tamil Nadu. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 304 pages | 6 x 9 |
Shiptown: Between Rural and Urban North India
Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities
Death, Beauty, Struggle: Untouchable Women Create the WorldEARLY AMERICAN STUDIES
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"An original and timely intervention in the histories of slavery, gender, and labor. In arguing that reproduction played a crucial role across a number of political and social divides, Contested Bodies becomes an excellent window through which we can understand the economies (both moral and financial), culture, intimacies, protests, labor, and power in which the institution of slavery is imbricated."—Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University Contested Bodies explores how the end of the transatlantic trade impacted Jamaican slaves and their children. Examining the struggles for control over biological reproduction, Turner shows how central childbearing was to the organization of plantation work, the care of slaves, and the development of their culture. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 328 pages | 6 x 9 | 10 illus. |
Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in JamaicaJEWISH STUDIES
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"A Remembrance of His Wonders is an excellent achievement that deals with central research questions regarding the understanding of the wondrous in nature by the Jews of Ashkenaz. David I. Shyovitz presents fascinating parallels between the writings of the German Pietists and contemporary Christian texts, showing that their understandings of nature are quite similar."—Israel Yuval, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem In A Remembrance of His Wonders, David I. Shyovitz uncovers the sophisticated ways in which medieval Ashkenazic Jews engaged with the workings and meaning of the natural world, and traces the porous boundaries between medieval science and mysticism, nature and the supernatural, and ultimately, Christians and Jews. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. |
A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval AshkenazMEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES
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"Zachary A. Matus offers new and important insights gleaned from a full and contextualized view of Franciscan alchemy and religiosity. The personalities in question (Bacon, Rupescissa, the Spirituals) are arguably among the most interesting of the later Middle Ages, and Matus's tales of alchemical quest and apocalyptic disaster are not only fine scholarship but also great reading."—Leah DeVun, Rutgers University Franciscans and the Elixir of Life makes new connections between alchemy, ritual life, apocalypticism, and the particular commitment of the Franciscan Order to the natural world. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 216 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 ilus. |
Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle AgesPOLITICAL SCIENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
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"Women's Human Rights and Migration offers an important intervention in feminist theory, social change literature, and reproductive rights literature. Sital Kalantry conducts a sensitive investigation of women's motives and contexts, combined with a sophisticated theoretical call for contextual feminist analysis."—Hila Shamir, Tel Aviv University In Women's Human Rights and Migration, Sital Kalantry examines the laws to ban sex-selective abortion in the United States and India to argue for a transnational feminist legal approach to evaluating prohibitions on the practices of immigrant women that raise human rights concerns. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 272 pages | 6 x 9 | 9 illus. |
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"This is an exciting and much-needed project. The right to accessibility has received relatively little academic attention and this book performs a field-defining role."—Anna Lawson, University of Leeds Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology addresses the global issue of equal access to information and communications technology for persons with disabilities. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 360 pages | 6 x 9 |
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Marc Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist and government counterterrorism consultant whose bestselling books Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad provide a detailed, damning corrective to commonplace yet simplistic notions of Islamist terrorism. In a comprehensive new book, Turning to Political Violence, Sageman examines the history and theory of political violence in the West. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 520 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 |
Women's Human Rights and Migration: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States and India
Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology
Turning to Political Violence: The Emergence of TerrorismRELIGIOUS STUDIES
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"Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals is a highly original work that combines a broad view of patterns and structures with insightful readings of individual texts in their full semantic range. The work engages rigorous studies in rabbinic literature as well as theoretical discourse, balanced by a commitment to allowing the ancient texts to resist and talk back."—Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Northwestern University In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Babylonian Talmud's most scandalous tractate. According to Wasserman, Avoda Zara is where this Talmud joins the humanities in questioning what it means to be a human. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 328 pages | 6 x 9 |
Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the HumanitiesWORLD HISTORY
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"Homo Cinematicus offers brilliant insights into the emergence of a specific form of German modernity through the lens of nonfiction film. Drawing on archival sources, the book shows how cinema helped shape debates about public health and social policies in the first half of the twentieth century. An indispensable book for anyone interested in the ways in which cinema fostered the pursuit of knowledge in the human sciences."—Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley Situated at the intersection of film studies, the history of science and medicine, and the history of modern Germany, Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany connects the emergence of cinema as a social institution to an inquiry into the history of knowledge production in the human sciences. Full Description, Table of Contents, and More 280 pages | 6 x 9 | 22 illus. |
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