Books published by The University of Chicago Press

Our breath catches and we jump in fear at the sight of a snake. We pause and marvel at the sublime beauty of a sunrise. These reactions are no accident; in fact, many of our human responses to nature are steeped in our deep evolutionary past. The author explores the role of evolution in human responses to the environment.

Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, the author formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies" - animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism - to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature.

At the height of Maria de Zayas' popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes. This book gathers a representative sample of seven stories, featuring Zayas' signature topics - gender equality and domestic violence.

The disparity between rich and poor countries is the most serious, intractable problem facing the world. The author in this book draws on extensive microeconomic studies of thirteen nations - conducted over twelve years by the Institute itself - to counter virtually all prevailing wisdom about how best to ameliorate economic disparity.

Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic? This book tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade's absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, and its troubled presentation in the country's classrooms.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is among the most important and influential thinkers in the history of political philosophy. This edition brings together translations of three of Rousseau's works: the "Discourse on the Sciences and Arts", the "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men", and "On the Social Contract".

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain. These lectures provide the missing link between Foucault's early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. This book presents these lectures.

This volume gathers together letters of condolence, memorial essays, eulogies and funeral orations, written by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, written as colleagues and friends passed away before him. It captures his thoughts on some important themes - mourning, memory and friendship.

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. This book discusses seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to reconsider the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

In the fall of 1980, Genentech, Inc, a little-known California genetic engineering company, became the overnight darling of Wall Street, raising over $38 million in its initial public stock offering. This title offers portraits of the people significant to Genentech's science and business, including co-founders Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson.

Drawing on historical and scientific accounts, as well as a rich trove of anecdotes, this title shows how scientists, amateur breeders, and countless anonymous farmers and gardeners slowly caused the evolutionary pressures of nature to be supplanted by those of human needs.

Polls suggest that fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe in Darwin's theory of evolution, despite it being one of science's best-established findings. This book sets out to separate the fact from the fantasy in this exploration of the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science.

Offers a critique of the standard approach to social research - namely, assessing the relative importance of causal variables drawn from competing theories. This book proposes the use of set-theoretic methods to find a middle path between quantitative and qualitative research.

Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. This book challenges this long-held view. It reveals that animals exhibit a range of moral behaviors, including fairness, empathy, trust, and reciprocity.

"This is a book about waste transformed, and reuse, repurposing, and recycling -- and how we consume the products of our industry. Through the story of shoddy, Hanna Rose Shell takes up these provocative topics and offers a new way for us to think critically about them. Shoddy is a global potpourri of textile waste manufactured into a saleable commodity: for example, wool that has been sorted, scoured, stuffed into rag-grinding machines, and remade into new clothes and textile and upholstery products. Both of-the-moment and truly historical, the book sends us back to West Yorkshire, 1812 and the birth of the commodification of waste through processing, before pushing us forward again with interviews and images from shoddy towns, waste dumps, textile labs, and rag shredding factories in the US and UK. Along the way we see exposed the political, ethical, environmental, and other ways shoddy has transformed lives and landscapes"--

"Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey is a top selling coursebook designed for entry-level college classes in the history of science and as a single-volume introduction for the general reader. Exploring both the history of science and its influence on modern thought, this general survey chronicles all major developments in scientific thinking, from the revolutionary ideas of the seventeenth century to contemporary issues in genetics, physics, and more. First published fifteen years ago, this revised edition is not only updated to reflect the latest scholarship, it also contains two entirely new chapters: on computing, and empire"--

Papers of the international conference "A Voice as Something More," held at the University of Chicago in November 2015.

"Wow. No one ever told me this!" Wendy Laura Belcher has heard this countless times throughout her years of teaching and advising academics on how to write journal articles. Scholars know they must publish, but few have been told how to do so. So Belcher made it her mission to demystify the writing process. The result was Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, which takes this overwhelming task and breaks it into small, manageable steps. For the past decade, this guide has been the go-to source for those creating articles for peer-reviewed journals. It has enabled thousands to overcome their anxieties and produce the publications that are essential to succeeding in their fields. With this new edition, Belcher expands her advice to reach beginning scholars in even more disciplines. She builds on feedback from professors and graduate students who have successfully used the workbook to complete their articles. A new chapter addresses scholars who are writing from scratch. This edition also includes more targeted exercises and checklists, as well as the latest research on productivity and scholarly writing. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks is the only reference to combine expert guidance with a step-by-step workbook. Each week, readers learn a feature of strong articles and work on revising theirs accordingly. Every day is mapped out, taking the guesswork and worry out of writing. There are tasks, templates, and reminders. At the end of twelve weeks, graduate students, recent PhDs, postdoctoral fellows, adjunct instructors, junior faculty, and international faculty will feel confident they know that the rules of academic publishing and have the tools they need to succeed.

At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701-60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history's most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music--long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening--has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity.             Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks and their owner, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a multifaceted historical subject--at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow--and visit along the way the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, and the family home. David Yearsley explores the notebooks' more idiosyncratic entries--like its charming ditties on illicit love and searching ruminations on mortality--against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany, from status in marriage and widowhood, to fulfilling professional and domestic roles, money, fashion, intimacy and sex, and the ever-present sickness and death of children and spouses. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion--for living and for dying.

A moving collection of intimate portraits of farm animals who somehow escaped the typical fate of their kind and got to experience old age. These photos have so much personality, and Leshko supplements them with accounts of each animal's life and her experience photographing them.

Fully updated for the digital age, this new edition of How to Lie with Maps examines the myriad ways that technology offers new opportunities for cartographic mischief, deception, and propaganda.

In the mid-twentieth century, scientists anxieties about survival and salvation led them to stockpile and freeze materials from communities that seemed to embody potentially valuable biological resources. This has grown into a monumental, tissue-based infrastructure that enables a huge range of contemporary research in the private and public sectors. Preserved tissues have been mined again and again, each time for new constituents, and arguments have been made about the urgency of acquiring ever more high quality specimens. At the same time, concerns about privacy and property have dominated the ethical, legal, and social discussions surrounding what has been referred to as the stored tissue issue. In this book Joanna Radin explains the unique cultural and technical circumstances that created and gave momentum to the phenomenon of life on ice. This is a fascinating inquiry into how and why the question who do I think I am? came to be asked in the language of science and how the practice of accumulating blood samples shaped the emergence of biomedicine at the dawn of the genomic age."

Originally published: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, Ã1955.

While the natural world is often described as organic, it is in fact structured to the very molecule, replete with patterned order that can be decoded with basic mathematical algorithms and principles. In a nautilus shell one can see logarithmic spirals, and the Golden Ratio can be seen in the seed head of the sunflower plant. These patterns and shapes have inspired artists, writers, designers, and musicians for thousands of years. "Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does" illuminates the amazing diversity of pattern in the natural world and takes readers on a visual tour of some of the world s most incredible natural wonders. Featuring awe-inspiring galleries of nature s most ingenious designs, "Patterns in Nature" is a synergy of art and science that will fascinate artists, nature lovers, and mathematicians alike."