Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

A collection of writings from Dalmatian-Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and radical cultural critic Ivan Illich. Focuses on Illich's shorter writings from his early publications through the rise of his remarkable intellectual career, making available works that had fallen into undue obscurity.

A rhetorical analysis of conventional and unconventional models of homeless advocacy that positions each in relation to perennial anxieties about citizens' abilities to fulfill democratic obligations.

Advocates a conversation around the genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancers that focuses less on choice and more on care. Offers a new set of conceptual starting points for understanding what is at stake with a BRCA diagnosis and what the focus on choice obstructs from view.

A study of select nineteenth-century African American authors and reformers who mobilized the discourses of cosmopolitanism and restraint to expand the meaning of freedom.

Explores the question of how women craft meaningful "belonging" to national, regional, and global communities when belonging as a citizen becomes untenable. Evaluates the rhetorical practices that enable alternative belongings, such as denizenship, cosmopolitan nationalism, and transnational connectivity.

Examines how French Renaissance travelers consumed and represented Italian space through writing and the imagination. Includes writings by Rabelais, Montaigne, and Du Bellay as well as lesser-known French travelers, illustrating how the material and imaginative aspects of travel joined to form a space of desire in the French imagination.

Examines how journalists have portrayed electoral participation in the United States. The authors analyze depictions of voters in print news coverage over the course of eighteen presidential elections (1948-2016), describe people's reactions to those depictions, and share insights from their interviews with more than fifty elite journalists.

Examines commonplace conflicting beliefs that technology will either annihilate humanity or preserve humanity from annihilation. Argues that the paradoxical capacities of weapons influence how humanity understands violent conflict.

Explores the second period of the development of Quakerism, specifically focusing on changes in Quaker theology, authority and institutional structures, and political trajectories.

A historical biography of Don Antonio Yta, denounced in 1803 as a woman masquerading as a man. Examines the sex/gender complex within the Spanish Atlantic empire.

Using case studies from recent American military interventions, examines propaganda as an intertextual process, one in which discourse is recontextualized faithfully by multiple parties over time. Explores how messages are constructed, performed, and recontextualized in new and diverse situations.

Examines art that stands outside the margins of the art world, the critical and cultural conditions that made this exclusion possible, and how recognizing this radically transforms our understanding of contemporary art.

A collection of letters by Mary Penry (1735-1804), who immigrated to America from Wales and lived in Moravian communities for more than forty years. Offers a sustained view of the spiritual and social life of a single woman in early America.

Explores the connections among race, visual humor, and technologies of photography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to the reappropriation of racial humor by contemporary artists.

Charts the rediscovery and rigorous reassessment of the medieval Russo-Byzantine artistic tradition in Russia in the years 1860-1920. Explores the link between Byzantine revivalism and modernist experimentation, which ultimately made a significant and lasting impact on twentieth-century avant-garde movements.

Explores, in poetry and photographs, the effects of the natural gas boom and fracking in the small towns, fields, and forests of Appalachian Pennsylvania.

A photographic essay and narrative documenting the value, ecology, and importance of hemlock and beech trees in eastern North America. Describes the pests and pathogens that are killing them, and addresses solutions that are being sought by scientists and resource stewards.

A collection of essays on various aspects of the position of magic in the modern world. Essays explore the ways in which modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and the ways in which modern proponents of magic have worked to legitimate their practices.

A collection of essays that explore the role of performing animals in literature, theater, art, and other media prior to the twentieth century, and discuss recent theoretical work in animal studies, materialism, and posthumanism.

Among the many religious acts condemned in the Hebrew Bible, child sacrifice stands out as particularly horrifying. The idea that any group of people would willingly sacrifice their own children to their god(s) is so contrary to modern moral sensibilities that it is difficult to imagine that such a practice could have ever existed. Nonetheless, the existence of biblical condemnation of these rites attests to the fact that some ancient Israelites in fact did sacrifice their children. Indeed, a close reading of the evidence-biblical, archaeological, epigraphic, etc.-indicates that there are at least three different types of Israelite child sacrifice, each with its own history, purpose, and function. In addition to examining the historical reality of Israelite child sacrifice, Dewrell's study also explores the biblical rhetoric condemning the practice. While nearly every tradition preserved in the Hebrew Bible rejects child sacrifice as abominable to Yahweh, the rhetorical strategies employed by the biblical writers vary to a surprising degree. Thus, even in arguing against the practice of child sacrifice, the biblical writers themselves often disagreed concerning why Yahweh condemned the rites and why they came to exist in the first place.