Books published by University of Washington Press

Gaining prominence as a seaport under the Ottomans in the mid-1500s, the city of Mocha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen pulsed with maritime commerce. This book tells how and why Mocha's urban shape and architecture took the forms they did.

Imagination is unruly. It creates the mind's world, linking the sensory realm to the realm of the intellect by oscillating between mind and body, self and world, ideal and real. This title demonstrates that this ambivalence in conceptions of imagination informs fundamental philosophical and aesthetic projects of European modernity.

Whether painting the human figure, various animal forms, or the changing landscape, each of Catherine Eaton Skinner works represents a unique pilgrimage of mind and spirit connecting with the journeys of those who witness her work. This anthology portrays Catherine's passion for the animals, and her relationship among them.

Robert Bechtold Heilman was a great literary figure of the 20th century. This work includes the letters that follow Heilman's career from the time he was a thirty-six-year-old member of Louisiana State University's English Department, through his tenure at the University of Washington from 1948 to 1975, until a few years before his death in 2004.

Examines the rise and fall, during the rule of Park Chung Hee (1961-79), of the combative labor union at the Korea Shipbuilding and Engineering Corporation (KSEC), which was Korea's largest shipyard until Hyundai appeared on the scene in the early 1970s. This work focuses on the perceptions, attitudes, and discourses of the heavy-industry workers.

In the late 1980s, Vietnam joined the global economy after decades of war and relative isolation, demonstrating how a former socialist government can adapt to global market forces with their neoliberal emphasis on freedom of choice for entrepreneurs and consumers. This book examines an aspect of this new market: commercial sex.

Looks at black women artists and video art. This survey examines an intriguing and unbounded scope of work, including experimental film, projections, and installations. It presents creative projects by established artists who became interested in time-based media such as Camille Billops, Barbara McCullough, Howardena Pindell, and Adrian Piper.

Composed of staggered tercets, this book features poems that track the chaotic rush and swerve of life as we live it. It teems with expertly realized lyrics, monologues, and narratives, as well as poems based on historical figures from Ovid to Janis Joplin.

Offers insight into concepts of linking inside and outside rooms and of combining private and public spaces. This book describes the process through which the authors transformed a steep forested hillside in the heart of Seattle into a deciduous woodland garden with banks of perennials, a dell, and a site for ornamental and food-producing plants.

Discusses how ecology activists in Slovakia generated a social movement that led to political dialogue about freedom, ethnicity, and power. This work explains why Slovakia's ecology movement, so strong under socialism, fell apart so rapidly despite the persistence of serious ecological maladies in the region.

Examines how members of Native American and Canadian First Nation groups situate their art in contemporary global environments, creating a different kind of nexus between the requirements of Native communities and the forms of public display that are of interest to worldwide audiences.

Examines modern and premodern Buddhist monastic education traditions in Laos and Thailand. Through five centuries of adaptation and reinterpretation of sacred texts and commentaries, this title traces curricular variations in Buddhist oral and written education that reflect a wide array of community goals and values.

Explores the influence of Yue opera - a subgenre of Chinese opera that transformed all-male opera into an all-female art form, with women cross-dressing as male characters. This volume details the contributions of opera stars and related professionals and examines the relationships among actresses, patrons, and fans.

Presents a glimpse into Chinese folk literature through translated verses secretly written by the oppressed village women of Hunan, who bravely scribed their stories, in their own words.

Monterey, California is home to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and provided the setting for John Steinbeck's novel "Cannery Row", yet the city's coastline was also the stage for a great shift in the junction of industry and tourism. This book looks at the ways in which Monterey has formed, and been formed by, the tension between labour and leisure.

Features landscape paintings of Michael Dailey balances line and colour to produce paintings about the nuances of space, light, and atmosphere that comprise our memories of time and place.

Presents a collection of essays offering treatment of the development of architecture in the Middle East. This book also demonstrates the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it.

Contains sixteen essays which approach the literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora with insightful results. This book analyzes how the diasporic experience of Puerto Ricans is played out in the context of class, race, gender, and sexuality and how other themes emerging from post-colonialism and post-modernism come into play.

Demonstrates the interweaving of Chinese and European ritual practices at different levels of interaction in seventeenth-century China. This book explores the role of rituals - specifically rites related to death and funerals - in cross-cultural exchange.

The Tsimshian people of coastal British Columbia use a system of hereditary name-titles in which names are treated as objects of inheritable wealth. This book examines the way in which names link members of a lineage to a past and to the places where that past unfolded.

When Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Iran from 1848 to 1896, claimed the title Shadow of God on Earth, his authority rested on pre-modern conceptions of sacred kingship. This title follows Naser al-Din Shah on a tour of Europe in 1873 that led to his importing a new public image of monarchy - an image based on the European late imperial model.

Tells the story of a young woman named Meng Jiang who makes a long, solitary journey to deliver winter clothes to her husband, a drafted labourer on the grandiose Great Wall construction project of the notorious First Emperor of the Qin dynasty (BCE 221-208).