Bold Ideas, Essential Reading since 1936.
Rutgers University Press is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge for a wide range of readers. The Press reflects and extends the University’s core mission of research, instruction, and service. They enhance the work of their authors through exceptional publications that shape critical issues, spark debate, and enrich teaching. Core subjects include: film and media studies, sociology, anthropology, education, history, health, history of medicine, human rights, urban studies, criminal justice, Jewish studies, American studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, LGBTQ, Latino/a, Asian and African studies, as well as books about New York, New Jersey, and the region.
Rutgers also distributes books published by Bucknell University Press.
Latinx Comics Studies
Critical and Creative Crossings
Latinx Comics Studies considers the role of comics and graphic narrative in picturing the rich realities of Latinx communities. It brings together groundbreaking critical essays, practical reflections, original and republished short comics to explore how comics by, for, and about Latinx peoples creatively and conceptually experiment with the very boundaries of “Latinx.”
Hustles for Humanists
Build a Business with Purpose
Discover your full potential.Hustles for Humanists helps you unlock the value of your humanities practice and explore exciting new pathways to achieving economic stability both within and beyond academia.
Faith and the Fragility of Justice
Responses to Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
Faith and the Fragility of Justice illuminates the role of religion in the intersection of race, gender, and power by showing how South African Christian organizations’ responses to apartheid follow a clear path for their attention to gender-based violence in the democracy, arguing that theologies that promote racial justice can facilitate or constrain the pursuit of gender justice.
Crossings
Creative Ecologies of Cruising
A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossing takes queer sex practices seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir.
Contested Curriculum
LGBTQ History Goes to School
Contested Curriculum recounts the fight for LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 history education in the United States. Historian Don Romesburg makes a powerful case for why teaching about LGBTQ lives in schools can help us produce more informed, more thoughtful, and more compassionate citizens.
The Twilight of Rome's Papal Nobility
The Life of Agnese Borghese Boncompagni Ludovisi
The Twilight of Rome’s Nobility provides an intimate look at an illustrious family who grew up surrounded by almost unimaginable wealth and power. A tender elegy to a bygone era, this book offers a first-hand account of late nineteenth-century Italy’s social upheavals as the family’s vast Villa Ludovisi was lost.
The High School
Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024
Taking over a century’s worth of yearbooks from his alma mater, Salinas High School, as a historical archive, acclaimed sociologist Michael A. Messner discovers a not-so-distant time when all the cheerleaders were boys and nearly equal attention was paid to boys’ and girls’ sports. In the process, he explores the changing meanings of high school athletics.
Say Her Name
Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sport
Say Her Name: Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sports offers an in-depth look into the lived experiences of Blackgirlwomen as athletes, activists, and everyday people through a Black feminist lens. With so much research on race centered on Black men and gender research focusing on white women, Say Her Name offers a necessary conversation that places Blackgirlwomen at the center of discussion.
Islamists in a Zionist Coalition
The Political and Religious Origins
Islamists in a Zionist Coalition explores a political drama that shocked Israel and the world in 2021: the decision of an Islamist party to join a Zionist coalition, and its elevation to the position of "king-maker" in Israeli politics. Based on analyses of hundreds of texts and exclusive interviews, it uncovers the religious and political origins of a development that will greatly impact Israeli society in years to come.
Films That Spill
Beyond the Cinema of Transgression
Films That Spill takes up a previously understudied moment in 1980s underground culture in New York City called Cinema of Transgression, offering both a microhistory of the intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes of the time and a glimpse into their afterlives.
At Home with the Holocaust
Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives
Based on analyses of literature and oral histories of children of survivors, At Home with the Holocaust reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as archives of trauma that in turn traumatized the children of Holocaust survivors.
Apocalyptic Crimes
Why Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal and Must Be Abolished
Ronald C. Kramer applies theories from criminology to argue that possession of nuclear weapons is a criminal act and shows how a nuclear apocalypse might be averted, offering a pathway to the abolition of these devastating weapons.
Caribbean Inhospitality
The Poetics of Strangers at Home
Caribbean Inhospitality juxtaposes the Caribbean’s reputation for being hospitable to foreigners with the alienation of the Caribbean citizen-subject from nations they call home. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts, Natalie Lauren Belisle demonstrates that the inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the Caribbean nation/state.
Memorializing Violence
Transnational Feminist Reflections
This volume brings together feminist reflections on the transnational lives of memorializations to colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. It asks what’s at stake in memorializing amidst and against ongoing harm and injustice produced by white supremacist global capitalist empire.
Memorializing Violence
Transnational Feminist Reflections
This volume brings together feminist reflections on the transnational lives of memorializations to colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. It asks what’s at stake in memorializing amidst and against ongoing harm and injustice produced by white supremacist global capitalist empire.
Labs of Our Own
Feminist Tinkerings with Science
Dancing for Their Lives
The Pursuit of Meaningful Aging in Urban China
Dancing for Their Lives delves into the world of retired Chinese “dancing grannies” who seek fulfillment amid broad social transformation. Based on ethnographic research, it challenges conventional narratives of aging by portraying old age as a site of innovation. It examines how retirees navigate changing norms and offers insights on resilience and meaning in later life that resonate globally.
The Dressing Room
Backstage Lives and American Film
A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imagination of audiences for over a century. In the only book-length study of the space, Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed.
Supervillains
The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics
This book provides a savvy investigation of the supervillains that appear in superhero comics. Exploring villainous archetypes and Otherness in relation to the notion of evil, the book investigates how supervillains uphold and solidify but also trouble hegemonic ideals expressed by the heroism of superheroes.
Strength through Diversity
Harlem Prep and the Rise of Multiculturalism
Rewriting Television
Raritan on War
An Anthology
On War gathers together some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan’s wide-ranging sensibility--focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. It is also all too timely.
Public Catastrophes, Private Losses
The essays in this collection expand the definition of catastrophe to include not only events like pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires but also slower-moving phenomena that have equally disastrous long-term consequences—like environmental degradation and structural racism. This book is a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.
Public Catastrophes, Private Losses
The essays in this collection expand the definition of catastrophe to include not only events like pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires but also slower-moving phenomena that have equally disastrous long-term consequences—like environmental degradation and structural racism. This book is a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.
Moving Blackness
Black Circulation, Racism, and Relations of Homespace
Moving Blackness explores the centrality of circulation within the framework of western modernity and the racially structured regulations of mobility. Storytelling emerges as the primary mode through which blackness is conveyed: it serves as a means of circulating the lived experiences of being Black while also functioning as acts of resistance and solidarity performed by blackened individuals who were (once) colonized and enslaved.
Latinas/os in New Jersey
Histories, Communities, and Cultures
Latinas/os in New Jersey
Histories, Communities, and Cultures
Icons Axed, Freedoms Lost
Russian Desecularization and a Ukrainian Alternative
In the years between the Soviet collapse and the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia went from persecuting believers to jailing irreligionists, while Ukraine solidified religious pluralism and tolerance. The book richly documents and explains the development of this contrast while offering an original theoretical and methodological perspective on desecularization (the resurgence of religion’s societal role).
Black Sporting Resistance
Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Internationalism
In this text, the Black Sporting Resistance Framework (BSRF) is introduced to examine how resistance actions in and through sport have contributed to the advancement of local and global racial justice efforts. Key concepts such as African (Black) diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism, sporting resistance typology, and sport activism typology are presented.
Ben Hecht's Theatre of Jewish Protest
Transmedia Geographies
Decoloniality, Democratization, Cultural Citizenship, and Media Convergence
Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders, and how those stories re-emerge as transmediated events.
The Future of Youth Violence Prevention
A Mixtape for Practice, Policy, and Research
The Future of Youth Violence Prevention: A Mixtape for Practice, Policy, and Research focuses on innovative approaches to youth violence prevention that utilize consistent principles found within existing best practices but are dynamic and adaptable across settings – and the socio-historical and cultural realities of those settings.
Reclaiming Haiti's Futures
Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination
Reclaiming Haiti's Futures traces the experiences of two generations of Haitian returned scholars who envisioned and sought to enact new worlds after crisis. An ethnography of the future, the book pursues concerns of home, belonging, and emplacement beyond coloniality’s fractures and displacements. These concerns ever more pressing amid overlapping crises that are displacing and enclosing the prospects of many, especially those living in post-colonial (outer) peripheries like Haiti.
Metagraffiti
Graffiti Art and the Urban Image in Latin America
This innovative visual ethnography examines diverse forms of self-reference and metareference that appear in Latin American graffiti art. Focusing on graffiti scenes from São Paulo, Brazil and Santiago in Chile, Chandra Morrison Ariyo shows how practitioners use metagraffiti features to influence public perceptions about this artform and its effect on the urban environment.
Imprisoned Minds
Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison
Imprisoned Minds tells the stories of men in prison that few people ever hear. Six gripping, first-person narratives of unimaginable childhood trauma and neglect set the men on a pathway for prison or death. We finally hear their stories because the author is in prison alongside them—incarcerated for life at the age of 21.
Hollywood Unions
Who makes films and television shows? How do those people make a living in Hollywood? Hollywood Unions tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized and negotiate on behalf of motion picture and television labor: the DGA, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, and WGA.
Hollywood Unions
Who makes films and television shows? How do those people make a living in Hollywood? Hollywood Unions tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized and negotiate on behalf of motion picture and television labor: the DGA, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, and WGA.
Grieving Pregnancy
Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism
Grieving Pregnancy compares contemporary American Catholic and Japanese Buddhist memorial practices focused on miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion. Maureen L. Walsh demonstrates that while the memorial practices confront the same basic problem—that is, pregnancy loss—they conceive of the problem in different terms, and as a result, propose distinct responses to it.
God's Waiting Room
Racial Reckoning at Life's End
A ghost story rich in mystery and life lessons, God's Waiting Room takes readers on a day-long tour of a tropical nursing home to hear stories of older white people and the younger Black nurses who care for them, showing how people formerly primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.
Becoming an Expert Caregiver
How Structural Flaws Shape Autism Carework and Community
This book features the voices of 50 primary caregivers of autistic and neurodivergent children who illuminate the process through which lay women become expert caregivers to provide the best care for their children. Expert caregiving captures an intensification of traditional family carework – meeting dependents’ financial, emotional, and physical needs – that transcends the walls of one’s private home and family and challenges the strict boundaries between many worlds: lay and professional, family and work, private and public, medical and social, and individual and society.