Books published by Rutgers University Press

In The Memory Sessions, Suzanne Farrell Smith attempts to excavate lost childhood memories. The result is an experimental memoir that upends our understanding of the genre. Rather than recount a childhood, The Memory Sessions attempts to create one from research, archives, imagination, and the memories of others.

Higher education is broken, and we haven't been able to fix it. Even in the face of great and growing dysfunction, it seems resistant to fundamental change. At this point, can anything be done to save it? The Instruction Myth argues that yes, higher education can be reformed and reinvigorated, but it will not be an easy process.

Draws upon a set of different sources, many of them previously untapped, including folklore, music, big data, and material culture, to demonstrate what is still to be achieved in the study of Hasidism. Ultimately, this textbook presents research methods that can decentralize the role community leaders play in the current literature.

Even the most brilliant minds have to eat. And for some scholars, food preparation is more than just a chore; it's a passion. In this unique culinary memoir and cookbook, renowned cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen tells of her lifelong love affair with cooking and demonstrates what she has learned about creating delicious home meals.

Offers an annotated selection of literature from authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. The anthology begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, moves on to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, and concludes with a section on Irish naturalist writers.

Emmanuel Levinas's voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or "otherness", which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness.

Anchoring her work in archival sources in film technology, economy, and education, Naida Garcia-Crespo argues that Puerto Rico's position as a stateless nation allows for a fresh understanding of national cinema based on perceptions of productive cultural contributions rather than on citizenship or state structures.

Argues that Machado de Assis, hailed as one of Latin American literature's greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Had the Brazilian master written not in Portuguese but English, French, or German, he would today be regarded as one of the true exemplars of the modern novel, in expression as well as in theory.

Tells the shocking story of how the United States and its allies intentionally subjected thousands of their own servicemen to poison gas as part of their preparation for chemical warfare. In addition, it reveals the racialized dimension of these mustard gas experiments, as scientists tested whether the effects of toxic exposure might vary between Asian, Hispanic, black, and white Americans.

Missing from debates over what caused the rise in childhood obesity and how to fix it are the children themselves. By investigating how contemporary cultural discourses of childhood obesity are experienced by children, Laura Backstrom illustrates how deeply fat stigma is internalized during the early socialization experiences of children.

An important addition to extant scholarship on the border U.S Southwest, Forging Arizona recovers a forgotten case that reminds readers that the borders that divide nations, identities, and even true from false are only as stable as the narratives that define them.

Examines the significant role that disability plays in shaping the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain.

Offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Samara Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of "feminist orientalism".

Becoming a widow is one of the most traumatic life events that a woman can experience. Yet, as this remarkable new collection reveals, each woman responds to that trauma differently. Here, forty-three widows tell their stories, in their own words.

Examines the tradition of the private eye as it evolves in films, books, and television shows set in Los Angeles from the 1930s to the present. The book takes a closer look at narratives in which detectives travel the streets of LA, uncovering corruption, moral ambiguity, and greed, while always ultimately finding truth and redemption.