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.
Genocide Studies
Pathways Ahead
In recent years, the world has been shaken by numerous events that have caused and continue to cause massive human suffering, from the COVID-19 pandemic to intrastate and interstate armed conflicts. These crises confound definition and label, but now is the time to think about current manifestations of genocide and those likely to emerge in the future
Finding God in All the Black Places
Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture
Using a media studies lens of television, film, music, and digital culture, Finding God in All the Black Places argues that Black spirituality and church religiosity bolster audiences' understanding of and cultural competence with Black popular culture.
Embracing Queer Students’ Diverse Identities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
A Primer for Presidents, Administrators, and Faculty
Embracing Queer Students’ Diverse Identities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Primer for Presidents, Administrators, and Faculty serves as a resource for Historically Black College and University (HBCU) stakeholders and highlights fundamental concerns and urgent topics regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) HBCU constituents.
Embracing Queer Students’ Diverse Identities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
A Primer for Presidents, Administrators, and Faculty
Embracing Queer Students’ Diverse Identities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Primer for Presidents, Administrators, and Faculty serves as a resource for Historically Black College and University (HBCU) stakeholders and highlights fundamental concerns and urgent topics regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) HBCU constituents.
Difficult Attachments
Anxieties of Kinship and Care
Anthropologists have long considered kinship as the basis for social solidarity. But, what about when it is not? What about instances when kinship is characterized by neglect, violence, negative affect, or a lack of care? This edited volume, featuring slim and cutting-edge essays from a diverse group of anthropologists at different career stages, explores situations when kinship is experienced as difficult and ambivalent.
Care and Agency
The Andean Community through the Eyes of Children
This book describes the lives of children in rural communities of the Andes Mountains of Peru. It foregrounds the children’s own perceptions and feelings, so far as they can be known by researchers using ethnographic methods. It shows the great variety of Andean childhoods – some happy, others harsh and demanding – and suggests the options children face: follow the many to migrate to the city or risk their hopes on a better future in the rural setting.
Background Artist
The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong
Background Artist tells the inspiring story of Tyrus Wong, a Chinese immigrant who eventually became a best-selling greeting card designer, Warner Bros. sketch artist, and instrumental influence on the beloved Disney animated film, Bambi. Covering his remarkable 106-year life, this book celebrates a multi-talented and pioneering Asian-American artist whose work shaped the American imagination.
Bruce Songs
The Music of Bruce Springsteen, Album-by-Album, Song-by-Song
Bruce Songs: The Music of Bruce Springsteen, Album-by-Album, Song-by-Song is an authoritative guide by Kenneth Womack and Kenneth L. Campbell, delving into Bruce Springsteen's entire musical catalog, offering detailed album analysis, historical context, and song-by-song exploration. Packed with contemporary insights and rich visuals, it's an essential companion for Springsteen fans and music enthusiasts.
We Take Care of Our Own
Faith, Class, and Politics in the Art of Bruce Springsteen
The Bravest Pets of Gotham
Tales of Four-Legged Firefighters of Old New York
Singular Sensations
A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States
Reel Kabbalah
Jewish Mysticism and Neo-Hasidism in Contemporary Cinema
Reel Kabbalah studies representations of esoteric Jewish conceptual traditions known as Kabbalah and Hasidism in five important fictional films from the first decade of the twenty-first century. The book considers how film both stands in continuity with those traditions and modifies them in the New Age, often mystical vein of what is known as neo-Kabbalah and neo-Hasidism.
Performing the News
Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality
Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike, Second Edition
Laboring in the Shadow of Empire
Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal
Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste V. Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, have shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries.
Isle of Rum
Havana Club, Cultural Mediation, and the Fight for Cuban Authenticity
Focusing on Havana Club rum as a case study, Isle of Rum examines the ways in which western cultural producers, working in collaboration with the Cuban state, have assumed responsibility for representing Cuba to the outside world. Christopher Chávez focuses specifically on the role of advertising practitioners, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, who stand to benefit economically by selling an image of Cuba to consumers who desperately crave authentic experiences that exist outside of the purview of the marketplace.
Gender Play
Boys and Girls in School
Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege
Critical Care Ethics Perspectives
This book discusses the ways care ethics contributes to the decentering of dominant epistemologies and to the challenging of privilege, and considers how to decenter care ethics itself via an encounter with non-Western philosophical traditions and alternative epistemologies. Written by scholars from different countries, disciplines and intellectual traditions, the volume offers original care ethics contributions on epistemic injustice, privileged irresponsibility, ecofeminism, settler colonialism, social movements such as BLM, and on various racialized and gendered inequities tied to care work.
Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege
Critical Care Ethics Perspectives
This book discusses the ways care ethics contributes to the decentering of dominant epistemologies and to the challenging of privilege, and considers how to decenter care ethics itself via an encounter with non-Western philosophical traditions and alternative epistemologies. Written by scholars from different countries, disciplines and intellectual traditions, the volume offers original care ethics contributions on epistemic injustice, privileged irresponsibility, ecofeminism, settler colonialism, social movements such as BLM, and on various racialized and gendered inequities tied to care work.
Blessings Beyond the Binary
Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family
Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family brings together leading scholars to analyze and offer commentary on the groundbreaking streaming series Transparent. The book explores the show’s depiction of Jewish life, religion, and history, as well as Transparent’s scandals, criticisms, and how it fits and diverges from today’s transgender and queer politics.
My Race Is My Gender
Portraits of Nonbinary People of Color
My Race is My Gender is the first anthology by nonbinary writers of color to include photography and visual portraits, centering their everyday experiences of negotiating intersectional identities. Bringing together Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian perspectives, its six contributors share their personal stories of working for racial justice and the recognition of queer gender identities.
Locker Room Talk
A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside
Melissa Ludtke offers a compelling account of her courtroom quest to do what her male sportswriter colleagues took for granted: to talk with players in Major League Baseball’s locker rooms. She reveals how, as a 26-year-old woman, she took MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to federal court—and won.
Alien Soil
Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark
The Georgia of the North
Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey
Soviet-Born
The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction
Latin* Students in Engineering
An Intentional Focus on a Growing Population
Latin* Students in Engineering examines the state of Latin* engineering education at present as well as considerations for policy and practice regarding engineering education aimed at enhancing opportunity and better serving Latin* students. The essays in this volume first consider, theoretically and empirically, the experiences of Latin* students in engineering education and then expand beyond the student level to focus on institutional and social structures that challenge Latin* students' success and retention.
Film Noir and the Arts of Lighting
An Ordinary Landscape of Violence
Women Loving Women in Guyana
Smoothing the Jew
"Abie the Agent" and Ethnic Caricature in the Progressive Era
Intelligent Action
A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia
Home Is Where Your Politics Are
Queer Activism in the U.S. South and South Africa
Get Involved!
Stories of Bahamian Civil Society
Feeling Democracy
Emotional Politics in the New Millennium
Cruel Destiny and The White Negress
Two Novels by Cléante Desgraves Valcin
Criminalized Lives
HIV and Legal Violence
Criminalized Lives profiles people charged in Canada with the crime of not disclosing their HIV-positive status to sex partners. Examining how criminalization disproportionately punishes poor, Black and Indigenous people, gay men, and women in Canada, Alexander McClelland investigates the consequences of criminalizing illness, which results in people being subjected to state violence rather than treated with care.
Brotherhood University
Black Men's Friendships and the Transition to Adulthood
American Anti-Pastoral
Brookside, New Jersey and the Garden State of Philip Roth
The Specter and the Speculative
Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora
The Specter and the Speculative
Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora
Wake
Why the Battle over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters
Wake: Why the Battle Over Diverse Public Schools Still Matters tells the story of the aftermath of the 2009 Wake County school board election in favor of "neighborhood schools," including the fierce public debate that ensued during school board meetings and in the pages of the local newspaper, and the groundswell of community support that voted in a pro-diversity school board in 2011. What was at stake in those years was the fundamental direction of the largest school district in North Carolina and the 14th largest in the U.S. Would it maintain a commitment to diverse schools, and if so, how would it balance that commitment with various competing interests and demands? Through hundreds of published opinion articles and several in depth interviews with community leaders, Wake examines the substance of that debate and explores the community’s vision for public education.
The United States and the Armenian Genocide
History, Memory, Politics
The Other Jersey Shore
Life on the Delaware River
Surviving Alex
A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction
Patricia Roos was a professor of sociology at Rutgers University when she lost her 25-year-old son Alex to a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, she began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex tells her moving story while describing a more compassionate approach that would provide proper care to substance users and reduce addiction.