Books published by Cornell University Press

Fighting for Virtue investigates how Thailand's judges were tasked by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) in 2006 with helping to solve the country's intractable political problems-and what happened next. Across the last decade of Rama IX's rule, Duncan McCargo examines the world of Thai judges: how they were recruited, trained, and...

Scribes of Space posits that the conception of space-the everyday physical areas we perceive and through which we move-underwent critical transformations between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Matthew Boyd Goldie examines how natural philosophers, theologians, poets, and other thinkers in late medieval Britain altered the ideas about...

During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century...

In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"-a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has...

Frustrated with the flood of news articles and opinion pieces that were skeptical of minority students' "imagined" campus microaggressions, Micere Keels, a professor of comparative human development, set out to provide a detailed account of how racial-ethnic identity structures Black and Latinx students' college transition experiences.Tracking...

A Field in Flux chronicles the extraordinary journey of industrial and labor relations expert Robert McKersie. One of the most important industrial relations scholars and leaders of our time, McKersie pioneered the study of labor negotiations, helping to formulate the concepts of distributive and integrative bargaining that have served as...

Sovereignty Experiments tells the story of how authorities in Korea, Russia, China, and Japan-through diplomatic negotiations, border regulations, legal categorization of subjects and aliens, and cultural policies-competed to control Korean migrants as they suddenly moved abroad by the thousands in the late nineteenth century. Alyssa M. Park...

Reptiles of Costa Rica, the long-awaited companion to Amphibians of Costa Rica, is the first ever comprehensive field guide to the crocodilians, turtles, lizards, and snakes of Costa Rica. A popular destination for tourists and biologists because of its biodiversity, the country is particularly rich in reptile fauna, boasting 245 species. The...

In Rethinking Diabetes, Emily Mendenhall investigates how global and local factors transform how diabetes is perceived, experienced, and embodied from place to place. Mendenhall argues that the link between sugar and diabetes overshadows the ways in which underlying biological processes linking hunger, oppression, trauma, unbridled stress, and...

Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan...

The Racial Politics of Division deconstructs antagonistic discourses that circulated in local Miami media between African Americans, "white" Cubans, and "black" Cubans during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift and the 1994 Balsero Crisis. Monika Gosin challenges exclusionary arguments pitting these groups against one another and depicts instead the...

Hope and History is both a memoir and a call-to-action for the renewal of faith in democracy and America. US Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel presents his most important public speeches and writings, compiled and presented over eight decades of adventure and public service, woven together with anecdotes of his colorful life as a...

Motivated by the lack of scholarly understanding of the substantial gender difference in attitudes toward the use of military force, Richard C. Eichenberg has mined a massive data set of public opinion surveys to draw new and important conclusions. By analyzing hundreds of such surveys across more than sixty countries, Gender, War, and World...

With air pollution now intimately affecting every resident of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko seeks to understand how, as a physical constant throughout the winter months, the murky and obscuring nature of air pollution has become an active part of Mongolian religious and ritual life. Enlightenment and the Gasping...

When Americans declared independence in 1776, they cited King George III "for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us." In Quarters, John Gilbert McCurdy explores the social and political history behind the charge, offering an authoritative account of the housing of British soldiers in America. Providing new interpretations and...

In The Instrumental University, Ethan Schrum provides an illuminating genealogy of the educational environment in which administrators, professors, and students live and work today. After World War II, research universities in the United States underwent a profound mission change. The Instrumental University combines intellectual...

Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll's ethnography is a story about public health...

Since 1990 public political criticism has evolved into a prominent feature of Vietnam's political landscape. So argues Benedict Kerkvliet in his analysis of Communist Party-ruled Vietnam. Speaking Out in Vietnam assesses the rise and diversity of these public displays of disagreement, showing that it has morphed from family whispers to...

At the beginning of the eleventh century, Catalonia was a patchwork of counties, viscounties, and lordships that bordered Islamic al-Andalus to the south. Over the next two centuries, the region underwent a dramatic transformation. The counts of Barcelona secured title to the neighboring kingdom of Aragon through marriage and this newly...

Britain relied upon secret intelligence operations to rule Mandatory Palestine. Statecraft by Stealth sheds light on a time in history when the murky triad of intelligence, policy, and security supported colonial governance. It emphasizes the role of the Anglo-Zionist partnership, which began during World War I and ended in 1939, when Britain...

American communities face serious challenges when military bases close. But affected municipalities and metro regions are not doomed. Taking a long-term, flexible, and incremental approach, Michael Touchton and Amanda J. Ashley make strong recommendations for collaborative models of governance that can improve defense conversion dramatically...

Having been marginalized from the literature-proper sphere of Confucian elite culture, the novel began to transform significantly at turn of the twentieth century in Korea. Selected novels that Jooyeon Rhee investigates in this book include both translated and creative historical novels, domestic novels, and crime novels.

A Yiddish Book Center Translation In these sixteen stories, available in English for the first time, prize-winning author Yenta Mash traces an arc across continents, across upheavals and regime changes, and across the phases of a woman's life. Mash's protagonists are often in transit, poised "on the landing" on their way to or from somewhere...

St. Petersburg's Winter Palace was once the supreme architectural symbol of Russia's autocratic government. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became the architectural symbol of St. Petersburg itself. The story of the palace illuminates the changing relationship between monarchs and their capital city during the...

This provocative book provides a comprehensive interpretation of Montaigne's Essays as a work of political philosophy. David Lewis Schaefer diverges from the prevailing view, which prizes the Essays as an example of authentic literary self-portrayal but holds that the book is not a coherent philosophical work. Arguing for Montaigne's...

John McGowan seeks to identify the goals and strategies of contemporary humanistic intellectuals who strive to shape the politics and culture of their time. In a lively mix of personal reflection and shrewd analysis, McGowan visits the sites of intellectual activity (scholarly publications, professional conferences, the classroom, and the...

'What is the meaning of a word?' In this thought-provoking book, Hagberg demonstrates how this question-which initiated Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of language-is significant for our understanding not only of linguistic meaning but of the meaning of works of art and literature as...

Barrington Moore, Jr., one of the most distinguished thinkers in critical theory and historical sociology, was long concerned with the prospects for freedom and decency in industrial society. The product of decades of reflection on issues of authority, inequality, and injustice, this volume analyzes fluctuating moral beliefs and behavior in...

The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal is an initiative of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University. It annually recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world.Micah Altman and Michael P...

How do modern states emerge from the turmoil of undergoverned spaces? This is the question Reo Matsuzaki ponders in Statebuilding by Imposition. Comparing Taiwan and the Philippines under the colonial rule of Japan and the United States, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he shows similar situations produce different outcomes...