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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Explores the nature of time and its implications for questions of politics, ethics, and the self. Shows how a conception of time that breaks with common sense notions of chronological order can help us rethink the understandings of identity, difference, power, resistance, and overcoming.
Examines the relations and obligations of committed individuals working to create social change. Addresses issues involving forms of solidarity, the role of violence in activism, the moral and epistemological privilege of the oppressed, the relation between solidarity and social justice, and the prospects for global ......
Examines the political perspective of French thinker and historian Jacques Rancière. Rancière argues that a democratic politics is one that emerges out of people’s acting under the presupposition of their own equality with those better situated in the social hierarchy. Todd May examines and extends this ......
Examines the political perspective of French thinker and historian Jacques Rancière. Rancière argues that a democratic politics is one that emerges out of people’s acting under the presupposition of their own equality with those better situated in the social hierarchy. Todd May examines and extends this ......
(Im)permanence: Cultures in/out of Time explores the interplay between permanence and impermanence in cultural and artistic practices in the West and elsewhere. This volume engenders questions of the transition from traditional and contemporary takes on permanence in art, the preservation of ephemeral artwork, permanence and ......
Or Valley of Death, Being a Complete and Thrilling Account of the Awful Floods and Their Appalling Ruin
Sensationalized history can be credited with inspiring generations of truth-seeking experts and enthusiasts. The tragedy of the Johnstown Flood was an oft-exploited event as writers and publishers hawked hastily written articles in original form or pirated collections. Where many of the articles lacked fact, they were rife with exaggeration and ......
“Titology,” a term first coined in 1977 by literary critic Harry Levin, is the field of literary studies that focuses on the significance of a title in establishing the thematic developments of the pages that follow. While the term has been used in the literary community for thirty years, this book presents for the first time a ......
Cult of the Will is the first comprehensive study of modernity’s preoccupation with willpower. From Nietzsche’s “will to power” to the fantasy of a “triumph of the will” under Nazism, the will—its pathologies and potential cures—was a topic of urgent debates in European modernity. In this ......
Few pieces of legislation in recent years have caused as much public controversy as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This book analyzes the passage of this law, compares it to other federal education policies of the last fifty years, and shows that No Child Left Behind is an indicator of how and why conservative and liberal ideologies are ......
