Books published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Building the Ivory Tower examines the role of American universities as urban developers and their changing effects on cities in the twentieth century. LaDale C. Winling explores philanthropy, real estate investments, architectural landscapes, and urban politics to reckon with the tensions of university growth in our cities.

U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights explores the integration of American concerns about women's human rights into U.S. policy toward Islamic countries since 1979, reframing U.S.-Islamic relations and challenging assumptions about the drivers of American foreign policy.

The pen was as mighty as the musket during the American Revolution, as poets waged literary war against politicians, journalists, and each other. Drawing on hundreds of poems, Poetry Wars reconstructs the important public role of poetry in the early republic and examines the reciprocal relationship between political conflict and verse.

In Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting contends that Frankenstein is a profound work of speculative fiction designed to engage a radical moral and political question: do children have rights?

In Liquid Landscape, Michele Currie Navakas analyzes the history of Florida's incorporation alongside the development of new ideas of personhood, possession, and political identity within American letters, from early American novels, travel accounts, and geography textbooks, to settlers' guides, maps, natural histories, and land surveys.

In Ruling the Spirit, Claire Taylor Jones revises the narrative of women's involvement in the German Dominican order arguing that Dominican women did not lose their piety and literacy in the fifteenth century, as is commonly believed but, instead, were encouraged to reframe their practice around the observance of the Divine Office.

Reconnecting State and Kinship seeks to overcome the traditional dichotomy between state and kinship, asking whether concepts associated with one sphere surface in the other, tracking the evolution of these concepts through time and space, and exploring how this binary is reinforced within the social sciences.

Writing in beautiful prose and marshalling fascinating evidence, Gary B. Nash constructs a convincing case that Warner Mifflin belongs in the Quaker antislavery pantheon with William Southeby, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet.

In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, as it became increasingly difficult for those outside the world of politics to have frank and open discussions about slavery, Paul D. Naish argues that many Americans displaced their most provocative criticisms and darkest fears about the institution onto Latin America.

Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean depicts the human drama in which enslaved Africans struggled against their enslavers and environment, and one another. The book reorients Atlantic slavery studies by revealing how social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies reflected an unrelenting fight to survive.

By centering the practical and figurative significance of the Ohio River as a political border, a cultural boundary, and an artery of movement and economy that gave form to the region, Matthew Salafia sheds light on peculiarities of labor and economy along the Ohio River.