Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

Examines the work of artists trained at the Viennese Women's Academy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Explores generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies on art, craft, and design.

A reexamination of the career of Titian, the only Renaissance artist credited by contemporaries with painting a miracle-working image. Argues that a major part of the artist's legacy is to be found in his charismatic entrance into the tradition of Christian icon painting.

Explores the career of Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantai (1922-2008) from his earliest paintings and writings in France in the 1950s through his final abstractions of the 2000s.

Explores the theme of race in nineteenth-century transatlantic culture, focusing on how American concepts of race were intertwined with the ongoing cultural exchanges that Americans had with European artistic traditions.

Examines Gothic architecture and the visual and cultural significance of the adoption of externalized buttressing systems in twelfth-century France. Demonstrates how buttressing frames operated as sites of display, points of transition, and mechanisms of demarcation.

Examines the theoretical framing of "nature" in South Africa and beyond. Analyzes myths and fantasies that have brought the world to a point of climate catastrophe and continue to shape the narratives through which it is understood.

A collection of essays exploring how biocultural and literary dynamics acted together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Essays envision sleep states as a means of defining the human, both literally and metaphorically.

Explores the relationship between people, street animals, and rabies in urban India. Incorporates epidemiological goals within anthropological frameworks to investigate the ways in which people come into contact with animals and create favorable conditions for the rabies virus to flourish.

Examines the concept of metanoia as both a rhetorical figure of speech and a critical tool for the analysis of self-reinventions of all kinds, including conversions related to race, sex, religion, and politics.

Surveys the many different impacts of Ciceronian theories on a diverse array of texts and authors between 1100 and 1550, presenting a counternarrative to the widely accepted belief in the dominance of Aristotelianism in early European political and social thought.

A study of the ladies' garment industry in northeastern Pennsylvania between 1945 and 1995, featuring sixteen selected oral histories conducted with workers, shop owners, and others with knowledge of the industry.

A study of the ladies' garment industry in northeastern Pennsylvania between 1945 and 1995, featuring sixteen selected oral histories conducted with workers, shop owners, and others with knowledge of the industry.

Advances the hypothesis that the ninth-century illustrations in the Utrecht Psalter reflect a late antique illustrated Hebrew version of the psalms, a departure from the commonly accepted view of the origin of the Utrecht images.

A visual survey of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris over the past 850 years. Addresses a series of key themes in the cathedral's history, including the fundraising campaign, the construction of vaults, and the liturgical function of the choir.

Illustrates how the discovery of electromagnetism in 1820 not only led to technological inventions, such as the dynamo and the telegraph, but also legitimized modes of reasoning that manifested a sharper ability to perceive how metonymic relations could reveal the order of things.