Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

An exploration of the religious contexts of Virginia Woolf's life and work, her religious practices, her ideas about God, and the new forms of community she imagined.

A multidisciplinary study of democratic politics that draws on ethnography, political theory, and rhetorical analysis to demonstrate how the rhetorics of democracy have become fetishized.

Drawing from the writings of John Dewey, identifies the core attitudes of fascism, sets forth an idea of democracy as communicative practice, and defines the values and methods of humanistic logic, aesthetics, and rhetoric.

A collection of poetry by 19th-century author Heinrich Heine, focusing on a return to a preoccupation with his Jewish roots, with new English translations alongside the original German.

Explores how superhero comics, with their creative fusions of fantasy and realism, provide a flexible visual form for engaging issues of disability and intersectional identity (race, class, gender, sexuality) as well as for imagining and valuing different physical and cognitive ways of being in the world.

Examines the native group in Pennsylvania known as the Susquehannocks, who were encountered by Europeans when they first entered the Susquehanna Valley. The studies presented draw on recent archaeological excavation and analyses to provide new perspectives on the Susquehannocks.

An interpretation of early modern Paris demonstrating that sound was as important as vision during the reign of Louis XIV. Discloses myriad ways in which sound generated an interpenetration of elite and popular culture, revealing complex acoustic dimensions of class, politics, sexuality, and punishment.

Examines the rhetorical practices that generate and sustain discrimination against disabled people. Demonstrates how ableist values, knowledge, and ways of seeing pervade Western culture and influence social institutions such as law, sport, and religion.

Explores the life, career, and intellectual debates of art historian Meyer Schapiro, who worked at the nexus of artistic and intellectual practice and from there confronted some of the twentieth century's most abiding questions.

A rhetorical study of the American political debate on gun violence and gun policy. Examines the role of public memory in shaping this discourse and its eventual policy outcomes.

Recounts the history of the Netherlands Carillon, given to the United States in the 1950s by the Dutch government, and explores its paradoxical placement in the American memorial landscape.

Explores iconoclasm in American art history, focusing on the destruction of the statue of King George III in New York City in 1776. Argues that the destruction of art and objects has propelled the formation of an American creation story.

Explores how the Fifth Crusade was remembered and commemorated during its triumphs and immediately after its disastrous conclusion. Provides a study of medieval war memory, showing that in the early decades of the thirteenth century, remembering war was an important means of creating and expressing collective and individual belonging.

Explores how the distinctive formal and material qualities of a range of Romanesque sculpture types stimulated multisensory religious experiences. Emphasizes the power of these sculptures to "come alive" in ritual and produce emotional responses for Christians of the time.

Explores early modern Scandinavia as an integral and essential part of Central Europe. Examines the visual arts in all media from the Reformation to the fall of Sweden as a great power in the earlier eighteenth century.

Explores Mary Shelley as an important religious thinker of the Romantic period. Analyzes her creative engagement with contemporary religious controversies and uncovers a belief system that was both influenced by and profoundly different from those of her male Romantic counterparts.

Examines the relationship between photography and citizenship, through a comprehensive account of the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee's lantern slide lecture scheme: a project initiated by the British government at the beginning of the twentieth century that aimed to photograph the entirety of the empire.

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.

Examines the origins of the figure of St. George in Christian, Islamic and Jewish contexts, using primary texts in Arabic, Latin, Ugaritic and other languages. Explores possible connections and continuity with the Canaanite storm god Baal.

A study of the Hebrew term qedesah, meaning "consecrated woman," but translated "prostitute" or "sacred prostitute" in English Bibles. Offers an alternative explanation suggesting a wider participation for women in Israel's early cultic practice.

"This monograph is a revision of my 2007 dissertation, "Philistine Figurines and Figurines in Philistia in the Iron Age"--author's preface.

Taking advantage of the unprecedented access to books and information that has become available in the last few years, this bibliography identifies and traces the history of hundreds of books and articles on Ecclesiastes published in many different languages before 1875. It includes not just scholarly literature but exegetical sermons, homiletic works, and poetic paraphrases of the text in order to offer significantly more comprehensive coverage than in any earlier bibliography. The publication history of each work is outlined in detail, with brief discussions of the background or content where appropriate, cross-references are given to major bibliographies and bibliographical databases, and indexes of authors, publishers, and biblical references are provided. Intended to serve as an important resource not only for students of Ecclesiastes and for bibliographers but for all who are interested in the history of reception or interpretation of the Bible, this bibliography also includes coverage of many more general works on the Megillot, on the Old Testament, and on the Bible as a whole in this period.

An English translation of a Dutch travel account, published in Amsterdam in 1646, that describes the Dutch attempt to establish a foothold in the abandoned Spanish colonial city of Valdivia, Chile, in order to find gold and establish alliances with the indigenous Mapuche people.

Examines a series of powerful artifacts traditionally associated with King Solomon, largely via extra-canonical textual sources--Solomon's ring, bottles to contain evil forces, the so-called Solomon's knot, a shamir, and a flying carpet--and traces their varying cultural resonances.

Demonstrates the crucial role that art-writing played as a tool of historical analysis in the work of the Romantic historian Jules Michelet's work, decisively influencing his most important historical concepts, his idea of history, and his view of the practice of the historian.

Uses Spanish participation at a series of international exhibitions to explore the transnational histories of Spain, the United States, Europe, and America in order to understand how and why the Spanishness of U.S. national identity has been subverted, marginalized, and largely forgotten.

A diachronic and synchronic account of the verb morphology and phonology of Aramaic, a subfamily of Semitic, from its appearance in history early in the first millennium BCE until approximately the second millennium CE.