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.
Back to Black
Jules Feiffer’s Noir Trilogy
Back to Black provides the first full-length critical analysis of Jules Feiffer’s late-career graphic novels Kill My Mother (2014), Cousin Joseph (2016), and The Ghost Script (2018), examining how they pay playful homage to the cinematic techniques and iconography of film noir while addressing serious themes like McCarthyism, antisemitism, and gender discrimination.
American Idle
Late-Career Job Loss in a Neoliberal Era
What happens when older workers lose their jobs in a recessionary economy filled with employers who favor hiring younger workers? From hard falls to soft landings, American Idle uses in-depth interviews to detail how these workers simultaneously embrace and resist the pervasive messages of the neoliberal era as they manage the painful mismatch between expectation and reality.
Always an Academic Immigrant
A Collective Memoir
Always an Academic Immigrant is a collective memoir that gives voice to eighty-one academics who immigrated from thirty-seven countries for a career in higher education. It reveals the challenges they faced adapting to new national and institutional cultures and the vital contributions immigrants have made to academia as scholars, teachers, and leaders.
We Can Do Better
Feminist Manifestos for Media and Communication
This book brings together evidence-based, feminist manifestos for media and communication. It offers real, actionable, practical solutions to media problems and deficiencies, and shows how feminist thinking can be usefully and effectively applied to a wide range of journalism, media, and communication practices. The book offers specific, feasible blueprints for restructuring media in ways that make them more equitable and more democratic.
We Can Do Better
Feminist Manifestos for Media and Communication
This book brings together evidence-based, feminist manifestos for media and communication. It offers real, actionable, practical solutions to media problems and deficiencies, and shows how feminist thinking can be usefully and effectively applied to a wide range of journalism, media, and communication practices. The book offers specific, feasible blueprints for restructuring media in ways that make them more equitable and more democratic.
She's the Boss
The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II
Since World War II, women have moved increasingly into business ownership, often outpacing male start-ups and typically seeking to meet a combination of personal and economic needs. She’s the Boss chronicles the history of what drew so many women to entrepreneurship over the past eighty years so that today they own more than forty percent of all US businesses.
Producing Children
Critical Studies in Childhood Creativity
Children’s culture is not only culture for children; it’s culture by children — yet scholars of children’s culture overwhelmingly center work by adults for children. Producing Children acknowledges and theorizes children as cultural producers, underscoring how such creativity empowers children as active participants in their own culture, and helps us to reconceive our understandings of children themselves.
Producing Children
Critical Studies in Childhood Creativity
Children’s culture is not only culture for children; it’s culture by children — yet scholars of children’s culture overwhelmingly center work by adults for children. Producing Children acknowledges and theorizes children as cultural producers, underscoring how such creativity empowers children as active participants in their own culture, and helps us to reconceive our understandings of children themselves.
Organizing Professionals
Academic Employees Negotiating a New Academy
Academic employees are organizing and negotiating for respect for workers, their work, and the public value of higher education. Scholar and labor activist Gary Rhoades analyzes how academic employees are shifting the imbalance of power between labor and management, reducing the internal professional stratification between segments of the academic workforce, and intersecting workplace issues with broader issues of equality, public value, and social justice, and in the process organizing and negotiating for a new, more progressive academy.
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.”