Books published by Stanford University Press

Rather than acts of God or random acts of nature, The Social Roots of Risk argues that hazards, disasters, and crises of all sorts are produced by the social order itself-that the routine activities of institutions, organizations, and groups invite risk into our lives and put us in harms way.

Ranging chronologically from the 12th to the 15th centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages.

This is the first scholarly account of the causes of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978. Full of startling revelations from Soviet communist party archives, the study advances the concept of political culture to explain crucial foreign policy decisions.

In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions-from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. A rarity among scholarly books, it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation.

Did the activities of the Western powers prompt changes in Japan that would not otherwise have taken place? Or did they merely hasten a process that had already begun? This book deals with these questions that concerns the role and relative importance of internal and external factors in the pattern of events.

At a time when more people than ever are being constrained to move for political, economic, and environmental reasons, this book provides a new political theory of migration, one based on the social primacy of movement.

Digital Militarism considers how social media has become a crucial site in which the Israeli military occupation is supported and sustained.

This book joins young Saudi women in their daily lives-in the workplace, on the female university campus, at the mall-to show how these women are transforming the country from within and creating their own urban, professional, consumerist lifestyles.

This book explores the history of drug development and testing in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, looking especially at whether slaves were exploited in human medical experiments at the time.

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age examines the nexus of new media and memory practices through an in-depth study of the Shoah Visual History Archive, the world's largest and most widely available collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, to understand how advances in digital technologies impact the practice of Holocaust remembrance.

This book argues for a deconstructive approach to the past by looking at deconstruction's impact on American historians and then presenting an alternative hauntological theory and method of history influenced by, but not beholden to, the work of Jacques Derrida.

WTF?! is an interactive tour of the world's weirdest social practices that uses economic thinking to reveal the solid logic behind their seeming senselessness.

Now in its third edition, this book uses the basic tools of economic theory to depict law as a social institution, aimed at inducing socially desirable behavior. Up-to-date with discussions of recent cases and the latest research, The Economic Approach to Law is optimally organized for courses in Law and Economics.

More than mere whistleblowers, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning are exemplary figures who are inventing new political practices and calling old conceptions of the state and citizenship into question.

This book locates the origins of the modern humanities in the philological practices of late 18th-century British scholars in colonial India, offering a radical reappraisal of a range of disciplines and excavating hiddenpre-colonial practices that might well help the humanities move beyond their current methodological and political impasses.

We abandon our true homeland when we cannot identify with other people.

Men died when women began to read.

This latest collection of texts, which focus on the "mystery" of literature, as well as on language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethical-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power, offer a window onto Giorgio Agamben's most current research.