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.
Scholarly publishing has faced monumental challenges over the past few decades. The Press takes its place among those institutions moving the enterprise forward. Its innovative projects continue to identify and embrace the technological advances and business models that ensure scholarly publishing will remain feasible, and widely accessible, well into the future.
Women's Movements, State Restructuring, and Global Development in Ecuador
Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s ......
For more than seventy-five years, the Carson Valley School has served the needs of orphaned girls and other dependent children from Philadelphia and neighboring Pennsylvania counties. Its hundred-acre campus is remarkable for its rolling terrain, neo-medieval buildings, and design as a fantasy village.
At some point during the 1990s the size of the Asian Indian population in the United States surpassed the one million mark. Today’s Indians in America are a diverse group. They come from every state in India as well as from around the globe: England, Canada, South Africa, Tanzania, Fiji, Guyana, and Trinidad. They also belong to many ......
This is the first book-length collection in English of the literary works of Lorenzo de’Medici, the major poetic voice of the Florentine Resistance.
Lorenzo de’Medici (1449-92) was the ruler of Florence and the principal statesman of his time. A contemporary of Columbus, Lorenzo is hardly known in the English-speaking ......
Intelligence Analysis and National Security Policy, 1936-1991
This survey of more than fifty years of national security policy juxtaposes declassified U. S. national intelligence estimates with recently released Soviet documents disclosing the views of Soviet leaders and their Communist allies on the same events. Matthias shows that U. S. intelligence estimates were usually correct but that our political ......
While Sartre was committed to liberation struggles around the globe, his writing never directly addressed the oppression of women. Yet there is compatibility between his central ideas and feminist beliefs. In this first feminist collection on Sartre, philosophers reassess the merits of Sartre's radical philosophy of freedom for feminist ......
Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective
In Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, Lyle Massey argues that we can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance artists and theorists interpreted perspective. Combining detailed historical studies with broad theoretical and philosophical investigations, ......
Museums of the Mind is the first book to explore the evolving relationship of collecting and the German literary imagination since the invention of the public museum. This study shows that in addition to redefining categories of art, history, and identity in modernity, the museum transforms the relationship between material objects and ......
From Fiction to Reality in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
Reconstructing Woman explores a scenario common to the works of four major French novelists of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Villiers. In the texts of each author, a “new Pygmalion” (as Balzac calls one of his characters) turns away from a real woman he has loved or desired and prefers instead his ......
