Books published by Harvard University Press

Schooling has become less about learning and more about the scramble for good grades, high test scores, and spotless transcripts. No one is happy about this, least of all students. But what can be done? Off the Mark explains how we got into this predicament, why our reforms haven¿t worked, and how we can reorient our system to advance learning.

Maximus of Tyre's forty-one Philosophical Orations offer a Platonic elucidation of the philosophical life of virtue, and a rich collection of the famous philosophical, literary, and historical figures, events, ideas, successes, and failures that constituted Greek paideia in the so-called Second Sophistic era.

Maximus of Tyre's forty-one Philosophical Orations offer a Platonic elucidation of the philosophical life of virtue, and a rich collection of the famous philosophical, literary, and historical figures, events, ideas, successes, and failures that constituted Greek paideia in the so-called Second Sophistic era.

The State of Housing Design 2023 is the first report in a new series that reviews national trends, ideas, and critical issues related to residential design. This volume addresses issues of affordability, social cohesion, sustainability, aesthetics, density, and urbanism through critical essays, visual content, and a crowdsourced survey.

The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in the region. This second volume explores the period from the final abolition of slavery in Brazil and Cuba through the independence of the Caribbean islands to the present day.

Imagination is thought to be the province of childhood¿the stuff of free play and unrestrained ideas. Then comes the dull routine of adulthood, stifling creativity. In fact, the opposite is true. Andrew Shtulman shows that imagination is not inherited at birth, nor does it diminish with age. It grows as we do, through education and reflection.

Does temperament in childhood shape adult personality? Four psychologists followed thousands of people as they grew up, observing how genes, parenting, and other aspects of young people's experience influence development. This holistic approach offers unprecedented insight into what makes us the adults we become.

The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with humane, doable, and inspiring help for students who want to get the most out of their education. The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. Use these four years to cultivate habits of thought that enable learning, growth, and adaptation throughout life.

Meanings of Antiquity is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic changes that led to new adaptations of Japanese myths.

In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan's engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period, including large-scale analyses of the record of the circulation of Chinese texts in Japan. He also traces the hidden history of Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio) in Japan.

Ariel Fox's The Cornucopian Stage examines a body of influential yet understudied early modern Chinese plays by a circle of Suzhou playwrights. These plays about long-distance traders and small-time peddlers, impossible bargains and broken contracts, place commercial forms not only at center stage but at the center of a new world coming into being.

Leon Battista Alberti was among the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. Biographical and Autobiographical Writings includes On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature, The Life of St. Potitus, My Dog, My Life, and The Fly. It presents the first collected English translations of these works and an authoritative Latin text.

Renowned philosopher of science David Z Albert offers an innovative approach to understanding the fundamental physical underpinnings of quantum mechanics. Albert shows how we can discern all the baffling features of quantum theory in a simple picture of the pushings and pullings of concrete and high-dimensional, fundamental physical "stuff."

David Kennedy and Martti Koskenniemi, two leading critics of law's role in global life, join together to explore the origins and destiny of efforts to build law into the fabric of global life. Erudite, open-minded, and at times personal, Of Law and the World is a poignant conversation about humanity's struggle to live together.

Nazmul Sultan explores Indian contributions to democratic theory, as anticolonial thinkers developed principles of peoplehood and self-rule. Indians contested British claims that the "backwardness" of the Indian people offered a democratic justification for imperial domination.

Moses Chao argues that activity in the peripheral nervous system predicts the onset of neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Parkinson¿s disease, autism, and dementia. Responsible for regulating a range of involuntary bodily processes and for detecting smells, sounds, and touch, the peripheral system may also be a key to better health.

The sense of reading as an intimate act of self-discovery-and of communion between authors and book lovers-has a long history. Lina Bolzoni returns to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso, exploring how Renaissance humanists began to represent reading as a private encounter and a dialogue across barriers of time and space.

The Op-Ed Novel follows a clutch of globally renowned Spanish novelists who swept into the political sphere via the pages of El Pais. Their literary sensibility transformed opinion journalism, and their weekly columns changed their novels, which became venues for speculative historical claims, partisan political projects, and intellectual argument.