Books published by Harvard University Press

The Painter's Fire follows a remarkable cohort of transatlantic artists who risked their lives and reputations to promote the patriot cause during the Revolutionary War. Their experiences, Zara Anishanslin shows, testify to both the promise and the limits of liberty in the founding era.

Sarah Bilston unfolds the story of orchid mania, the nineteenth-century craze among European and North American collectors vying to own the world's most coveted flowers. Focusing the hunt for the so-called lost orchid, an especially vaunted flower native to Brazil, Bilston reveals the enormous human and environmental cost of a colonial obsession.

Whiskerology traces how hair became a significant marker of identity and belonging in nineteenth-century America. Viewed during the colonial period as disposable, to be donned or removed like clothing, hair later became an external sign of internal truths about the self-especially one's gender, race, and nationality.

Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, published in 1959, has been called "the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century." Ellmann's Joyce provides the biography of the biography-an eye-opening account of how Ellmann's book came to be, the intrigue surrounding it, and its enduring impact on the study and making of literary lives.

Children are eager learners, but many find school alienating. How can parents nurture kids' natural curiosity? Educators Ken Bain and Marsha Marshall Bain show that by creating a "learning household" that encourages creativity and resourcefulness, parents can help bring the joy of learning back to the classroom.

Mistaking Paris for a haven of freedom, slaves sought refuge there only to be hunted down, arrested, and deported. Through the biographies of enslaved people who came to Paris from Africa, the West Indies, and the Indian Ocean, Spieler's study reveals the emergence of a new racialized legal culture in the last years of the Old Regime.

Parrots and mynahs have played a unique role in Chinese literature for two millennia. In this wide-ranging thematic study, Wilt L. Idema traces the development of the parrot and the mynah as characters in many forms of poetry and prose of Chinese elite literature, as well as in the long narrative ballads of traditional popular literature.

After liberation in 1945, Koreans erupted with hopes for reform that had been bottled up during forty years of Japanese imperial rule. Arguing that permanent North-South division was far from inevitable, Kornel Chang explores the movement for a unified Korean social democracy and its suppression by anticommunist US military authorities.

Velleius Paterculus, soldier and senator, chronicles in concise fashion the story of Rome and Roman culture from the fall of Troy to the time of his work's publication in AD 30 and provides much valuable information, especially about the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius (30 BC-AD 37), for which no other eyewitness historical depiction survives.

In Lost Tongues of the Red River, John D. Phan uncovers the history of a Sinitic language rooted in the Red River Plain of northern Vietnam, which he calls "Annamese Middle Chinese." The life and death of this language stimulated dramatic speech transformations in the region, giving rise to a new language in the early second millennium-Vietnamese.

Chinese Animation is the first edited book that explores the multiple histories, geographies, industries, technologies, media, and transmediality of Chinese animation. From silent short to CGI, it covers more than a century of animation across different languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Taiwanese.

Ten Indian Classics showcases translations from a vast array of India's literary traditions, Hindi, Kannada, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Telugu, and Urdu, with a foreword by the award-winning poet and translator Ranjit Hoskote. It is an invitation to explore classic literature that continues to shape modern South Asian culture and aesthetics.

Dreaming Reality looks to mystical traditions to challenge orthodoxies of brain science that model consciousness in purely physical terms. Instead of privileging the experience of waking life, the authors study visionary states, ego death, meditation, prayer, and other phenomena that bring us closer to understanding how the mind makes experience.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the most famous philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, urged Christians to save their souls with Jewish mysticism-Kabbalah-offering to debate anyone in Italy. Nine Hundred Conclusions offers a definitive new critical edition and translation of the Latin and commentary on Pico's theses that were denounced by the Pope.

Andrea Navagero (1483-1529), among the principal poets of Venice, pioneered the Renaissance pastoral epigram genre. Marcantonio Flaminio (1498-1550), though now better known for his controversial religious writings, began his career as a poet. Latin Pastoral Poetry is the first volume to combine their poetry alongside authoritative Latin texts.

Lucy Caplan explores the flourishing of Black composers, performers, and critics of opera in America during the early twentieth century. Working outside mainstream opera houses, these artists fostered countercultural forms of expression that reimagined opera as a medium of Black aesthetic and political creativity.

Esteemed scholar, poet, and critic Stephanie Burt anthologizes five decades of verse for and by queer Americans. Interpreted by Burt, the poems of Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, and others trace a flourishing of queer life from Stonewall to today.

How does emotion shape public intellectual debate? In Sentimental Republic, Hang Tu proposes emotion as a new critical framework to approach a post-Mao cultural controversy. Covering forty years (1978-2018) of bitter cultural wars, Tu analyzes how liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists debated Mao's revolutionary legacies.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth pries open the inner workings of professional licensing boards, showing how they erect arbitrary barriers to work, corruptly influence markets for routine services such as hairdressing, and tolerate bad actors in high-stakes arenas like medicine and law. The Licensing Racket is a call for reform and, where needed, abolition.

The crises of American democracy and criminal justice are intimately connected. David A. Sklansky shows how police, courts, and prisons helped to break American democracy and can be reformed to empower equitable self-governance. Seeking durable change, Sklansky urges pragmatic proposals rooted in a strong commitment to pluralism.

Make Your Own Job charts the transformation of the American work ethic in the twentieth century. It is no longer enough to be reliable; now, workers must lead with creative vision. Erik Baker argues that the entrepreneurial ethic has been a Band-Aid for a society in which ever-mounting precarity discredits the old ethics of effort and persistence.