Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century
Edited by Francesca Brittan and Carmel Raz
Price: $79.95
ISBN: 9781512829945
Pub Date: September 2026
Format: Hardcover
384 Pages
An exploration of the history of auditory attention between roughly 1800 and 1930, The Attentive Ear probes the origins, key theories, and experimental trajectories of attentional discourses around the globe, demonstrating the central role of audition in shaping our conceptions of focus and distraction.
Edited by Frederick Steiner and Ignacio Bunster-Ossa
Contributions by Chloe Cerwinka, Theodore S. Eisenman, Robert Lundgren, Laurie Olin, Lara A. Roman, Witold Rybczynski, Catherine Seavitt and Susan Weiler
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9781512829563
Pub Date: September 2026
Format: Hardcover
224 Pages
Illustrated by nearly fifty of Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa’s stunning photographs as well as color photographs, archival drawings, blueprints, maps, plans, and diagrams, Penn’s Sylvania not only showcases the critical importance of trees to University of Pennsylvania urban campus but also introduces the people responsible for establishing and conserving its rich botanical heritage.
Robert Cozzolino, William R. Valerio and Robert E. Kohler
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9798993128016
Pub Date: May 2026
Format: Hardcover
216 Pages
Bodies & Souls examines artworks that illuminate the critical role of community among artists active in Philadelphia, Chicago, Massachusetts, San Francisco, and New York, including Luis Cruz Azaceta, Joan Brown, Gladys Nilsson, and others. These works and their stories speak to artists today in search of circles and contexts that help them thrive.
With nearly 200 illustrations, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen particularly significant case studies, including the Beowulf manuscript, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe.
Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, Facsimile shows how reproductions of medieval manuscripts were central to a renewal of interest in the Middle Ages in the public at large; the consolidation and emergence of scholarly disciplines; and the increase in institutions that cared for medieval manuscripts.
Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting traces the history of what was considered a good, normal, or healthy voice in the nineteenth century. From parrots and preachers to stammerers and singers, the book delves not only into changing medical norms and musical ideals but also into the sometimes painful and awkward daily work of having a voice.
Edited by Emily I. Dolan, Emily MacGregor and Arman Schwartz
Price: $64.95
ISBN: 9781512828030
Pub Date: September 2025
Format: Hardcover
336 Pages
Tracing the pathways through which sound traveled across a variety of conceptual and physical domains in the first half of the twentieth century, Sonic Circulations not only proposes a new account of the role of music, sound, and voice in modern knowledge production but also poses urgent questions about technology and empire.
The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States
Michael Leja
Price: $54.95
ISBN: 9781512826807
Pub Date: July 2025
Format: Hardcover
400 Pages
In the three decades before the Civil War, pictures of many kinds assumed essential functions and mediated all sorts of individual and collective experiences for a large segment of the population. In A Flood of Pictures, Michael Leja explores how the widespread circulation of pictures reshaped a culture accustomed to printed and spoken words.
Philadelphia, from the Revolution until at least the 1840s, was at once the most cosmopolitan and most racially embattled city in America. Thomas Sully’s superb portraits, which form the core of this story, include many of the men and women who made the city’s history in those decades.
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.
