Books published by Cornell University Press

"This book looks at a largely overlooked category of devout laywomen called seroras and examines the ways women and their communities crafted surprisingly powerful religious positions for women outside of the confines of monasticism or marriage, right at the time when which we usually think of the Reformations as effectively limiting and tightly controlling female religious experimentation"--

With a new look at the 1880s financial reforms in Japan, Steven J. Ericson's Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan overturns widely held views of the program carried out by Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi. As Ericson shows, rather than constituting an orthodox financial-stabilization program-a sort of precursor of the "neoliberal" reforms...

Anthropologist Jasmina Praprotnik met Helena Zigon while running. Over the course of an icy Slovenian winter, the two marathon runners got together frequently, and Zigon told Praprotnik about her life. Here, Praprotnik tells Zigon's captivating story in Zigon's own voice. Each chapter is marked by a kilometer of the half-marathon Zigon ran...

During the 872 days of the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 to January 1944), the city's inhabitants were surrounded by the military forces of Nazi Germany. They suffered famine, cold, and darkness, and a million people lost their lives, making the siege one of the most destructive in history. Confinement in the besieged city was a traumatic...

Set against the backdrop of Burma's fractured transition to democracy, this coming-of-age story weaves critiques of "voluntourism" and humanitarian intervention into a young woman's quest for connection across cultural boundaries.

After spending his childhood in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and witnessing the Communist takeover of his country in 1948, a young journalist named Milan Kubic embarked on a career as a Newsweek correspondent that spanned thirty-one years and three continents, reporting on some of the most memorable events in the Middle East. Now, Kubic tells...

Founded by Al O'Connor in 1973, the steelband program at Northern Illinois University was the first of its kind in the United States. Thanks to the talent and dedication of O'Connor, Cliff Alexis, Liam Teague, Yuko Asada, and a plethora of NIU students and staff members, the program has flourished into one of the most important in the world...

Although largely forgotten now, the 1885 trial of German artist Gustav Graef was a seminal event for those who observed it. Graef, a celebrated sixty-four-year-old portraitist, was accused of perjury and sexual impropriety with underage models. On trial alongside him was one of his former models, the twenty-one-year-old Bertha Rother, who...

Paul Gottfried's critical engagement with political correctness is well known. The essays in Revisions and Dissents focus on a range of topics in European intellectual and political history, social theory, and the history of modern political movements. With subjects as varied as Robert Nisbet, Whig history, the European Union election of 2014...

This original study is concerned with the reconciliation of divine providence, grace, and free will. Mark Wiebe explores, develops, and defends Luis de Molina's work in these areas, and bridges the main sixteenth-century conversations surrounding Molina's writings with relevant sets of arguments in contemporary philosophical theology and...

Deep in the landlocked heart of the Midwest, the characters in The Spoils are drowning under the weight of masculinity, paralyzed in the grip of things left unsaid. These men are broken and breaking, struggling to reckon with the decisions they've made and those they have yet to face. Set mostly in and around Kansas, the stories in this...

During Kaiser Wilhelm II's reign, nature gained a role of central importance to the German national experience. Using interpretive methods drawn from the history of science and science studies, the author shows how popular health and hygiene movements shaped German ideas about progress and modernity, nature, health, and the body.

In exchange for the checks, the uncle asks Gideon Anderson to come up with a plan for his life. Gideon, who went to a prestigious university, puts his uncle off and spends the money on alcohol, the horses, and a miscellany of useless purchases partly because he doesn't know what to do, partly because he doesn't want to do anything.

Gabriel Burke is a writer who is alienated from everyone, and loves for exposing a discomforting family secret. Divorced from his wife, estranged from his daughter, and loathed by his alcoholic brother, Burke must confront all of them when he returns to his hometown in Smallwood, Indiana, to chronicle the story of a gruesome mass murder there.

With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considered deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and an analysis of the often-problematic relation between his philosophical writings and the work of literary critics. Culler's book is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding modern critical thought. This edition marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first publication of this landmark work and includes a new preface by the author that surveys deconstruction's history since the 1980s and assesses its place within cultural theory today.

This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community, James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must...

Exploring how the historical memory of Charlemagne was used to shape the institutions of kingship and empire in the High Middle Ages.

Compellingly written, Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to examine Christian perceptions of Islam in the Crusading...

In Defiant Priests, Michelle Armstrong-Partida uses evidence from extraordinary archives in four Catalan dioceses to show that maintaining a family with a domestic partner was not only a custom entrenched in Catalan clerical culture but also an essential component of priestly masculine...

This classic text, first published in 1935, is once again available. Still the standard reference in the English language, Principles of Insect Morphology is considered the author's masterpiece. A talented artist as well as one of the leading entomologists of his day, Robert E. Snodgrass produced a wealth of publications that display an...

The Northern Forest Region lies between the oak forests of the eastern United States and the boreal forests of eastern Canada. It is, collectively, one of the largest and most continuous temperate forests left in the world and, like much of the biosphere, it is at risk. This guide is an essential companion for those interested in stewardship and conservation of the region.With multi-image composite photos that allow for unparalleled depth and clarity, this unique guide illustrates the myriad varied and beautiful¿and often overlooked¿mosses of the Northern Forest.Large, easy-to-use formatEasily characterize and compare over 300 moss speciesHigh-definition composite images, ecological diagrams, habitat keys, and a visual glossaryAccompanying large-scale foldout charts also availableA complete online archive of images and articles, including digital atlases, is available at northernforestatlas.org.

In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of...

"Drawing on a new dataset charting protest events from the 1980s to the present, this book produces a systematic study of the new precarious labor movement that has developed during Japan's post-bubble neoliberal economic transformation"--

"Shows how the Greek Orthodox Church became the most important Greek institution in the United States and the main force that shaped Greek American ethnic identity in the twentieth century"--

"This book is an in-depth analysis of how workers and recipients of home care craft flexibility and security in relation to one another within constraints defined by intersecting social inequalities, state funding, labor market policies and managerial rules"--