UBC Press

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.

Showing 161-200 of 2,599 items.

Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age

Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary

By Rachel Z. Feldman

Rutgers University Press

In this groundbreaking ethnographic study of the transnational Third Temple and Children of Noah movements, Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age highlights the intimate effects of political theologies in motion, new forms of digital missionizing, and the birth of a new Judaic faith.

Making History Move

Making History Move

Five Principles of the Historical Film

Rutgers University Press

Making History Move builds upon decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture, proposing a methodology of five principles to analyze history in moving images in the digital age, charting a path to understand the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past.

Funny Boy

Funny Boy

The Richard Hunt Biography

By Jessica Max Stein

Rutgers University Press

This biography tells the story of Muppet performer Richard Hunt, who created a colorful range of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock, and crammed an extraordinary career into only 40 years of life. Funny Boy is about a man who used humor, joy and resilience to adapt to life’s surprises while entertaining millions.

Christianity and Comics

Christianity and Comics

Stories We Tell about Heaven and Hell

Rutgers University Press

This book presents an 80-year history of how the comics industry has drawn inspiration from biblical imagery, stories, and themes. Charting how comics have both reflected and influenced Americans’ changing attitudes towards religion, it includes underground comix, books from Christian publishers, and a vast array of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse titles, from Hellboy to Preacher.

Born in the U.S.A.

Born in the U.S.A.

Bruce Springsteen in American Life, 3rd edition, Revised and Expanded

Rutgers University Press

Pioneering the field of Springsteen scholarship when it first appeared in 1997, Born in the U.S.A. remains one of the definitive studies of Springsteen’s work and its impact on American culture. This fully revised third edition addresses Springsteen’s evolving attitudes toward politics, religion, masculinity, and racial justice in the 21st century.

Queer Newark

Queer Newark

Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community

Edited by Whitney Strub; Epilogue by Zenzele Isoke

Rutgers University Press

Queer Newark charts an alternate history of LGBTQ life in America where working-class people of color are the central actors. Uncovering the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches, these essays reveal how violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire.

Queer Newark

Queer Newark

Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community

Edited by Whitney Strub; Epilogue by Zenzele Isoke

Rutgers University Press

Queer Newark charts an alternate history of LGBTQ life in America where working-class people of color are the central actors. Uncovering the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches, these essays reveal how violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire.

Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection

Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection

An Annotated Selection

Edited by Young-mee Yu Cho and Sungmin Park; By William Eilliot Griffis

Rutgers University Press

The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late 19th and 20th century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.

Destroy Them Gradually

Destroy Them Gradually

Displacement as Atrocity

By Andrew R. Basso

Rutgers University Press

Destroy Them Gradually reframes forced displacement as an annihilatory process, rather than as an event that precedes an atrocity. Displacement crimes are defined as the unique fusion of forced displacement with systemic deprivations of vital daily needs to destroy populations.

Designing Gardens with Flora of the American East, Revised and Expanded

Designing Gardens with Flora of the American East, Revised and Expanded

By Carolyn Summers and Kate Brittenham

Rutgers University Press

In this fully revised second edition of the classic guide, mother and daughter landscape designers Carolyn Summers and Kate Brittenham draw upon the most recent research on sustainability to help you plant gardens that are both chic and eco-friendly. Both home gardeners and professionals will appreciate their detailed descriptions of indigenous plants that nurture native insects and birds.

Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence

Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence

By Keja L. Valens

Rutgers University Press

Culinary Colonialism is the first book-length analysis of Caribbean cookbooks, tracing the multitude of ways they represent national identity, creolization, and working-class women’s food culture. Including full recipes from Cuban, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, Barbadian, Haitian, Dominican, and Antillean cookbooks, this groundbreaking work of scholarship doubles as a delicious cookbook.

The Politics of Potential

The Politics of Potential

Global Health and Gendered Futures in South Africa

By Michelle Pentecost

Rutgers University Press

In The Politics of Potential, physician-anthropologist Michelle Pentecost investigates The First 1000 Days, an early life intervention project that seeks to end child malnutrition in South Africa, the ways in which this program has been adopted, and how it impacts child-bearing women in South Africa in powerfully gendered and racialized ways.

Strictly Observant

Strictly Observant

Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Women Negotiating Media

By Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar

Rutgers University Press

Strictly Observant presents a compelling ethnographic study of the complex dynamic between women in both the Pennsylvanian Old Order Amish and Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and contemporary media technologies. These women exhibit a deep awareness of how to manage their usage of media as tools to increase their social and religious capital.

Reflections on the Pandemic

Reflections on the Pandemic

COVID and Social Crises in the Year Everything Changed

Edited by Teresa Politano

Rutgers University Press

Reflections on the Pandemic: COVID and Social Crises in the Year Everything Changed is a collection of essays, poems, and artwork that captures the raw energy and emotion of 2020 from the perspective of the Rutgers University community. This book, through its rich and imaginative storytelling at the intersection of scholarly expertise and personal narrative brings readers into the hearts and minds of not just the Rutgers community, but the world.

Reflections on the Pandemic

Reflections on the Pandemic

COVID and Social Crises in the Year Everything Changed

Edited by Teresa Politano

Rutgers University Press

Reflections on the Pandemic: COVID and Social Crises in the Year Everything Changed is a collection of essays, poems, and artwork that captures the raw energy and emotion of 2020 from the perspective of the Rutgers University community. This book, through its rich and imaginative storytelling at the intersection of scholarly expertise and personal narrative brings readers into the hearts and minds of not just the Rutgers community, but the world.

Happy Days

Happy Days

Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America

By Benjamin L. Alpers

Rutgers University Press

Happy Days investigates how 1970s popular culture was obsessed with America’s past, but offered radically different interpretations of the same historical events and icons. Looking at representations of 1950s teenagers, the noir detective, America’s bicentennial, and neo-slave narratives, Benjamin Alpers examines how American history provoked both nostalgia and deep soul searching.

Forbes Burnham

Forbes Burnham

The Life and Times of the Comrade Leader

By Linden F. Lewis

Rutgers University Press

As Premier of British Guiana, Forbes Burnham led the country to independence in 1966 and spent two decades as its head of state. This biography examines how he rose to power by combining nationalist rhetoric, socialist policies, and Pan-Africanist philosophies, leading to a rule that was frequently dictatorial and corrupt, yet also sometimes surprisingly progressive.

Checkbook Zionism

Checkbook Zionism

Philanthropy and Power in the Israel-Diaspora Relationship

By Eric Fleisch

Rutgers University Press

Through their approximately $2.5 billion in donations each year to Israel, American Jews have profoundly impacted the direction of Israeli society. Checkbook Zionism uncovers how tensions over potential influence have been mediated and offers a new paradigm for evaluating philanthropic power sharing today.

Being Human

Being Human

Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq

By Fazil Moradi

Rutgers University Press

Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq is a unique work of anthropological hospitality that draws on historical sources, eyewitness testimonies, perpetrator testimony, archival documents, trial records, artwork, novels, and poetry, to engage with one of political modernity’s acts of genocide in Iraq under the Iraqi Baʿth state.

Transpacific Cartographies

Transpacific Cartographies

Narrating the Contemporary Chinese Diaspora in the United States

By Melody Yunzi Li

Rutgers University Press

Transpacific Cartographies examines how contemporary Chinese diasporic narratives address the existential loss of home for immigrant communities at a time of global precarity and amid rising Sino-US tensions. Melody Li argues that the characters in these stories create multilayered maps that transcend the territorial boundaries that make finding a home in foreign land a seemingly impossible task.

There She Goes Again

There She Goes Again

Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises

By Aviva Dove-Viebahn

Rutgers University Press

There She Goes Again interrogates the representation of ostensibly powerful women in transmedia franchises, examining how presumed feminine traits—love, empathy, altruism, diplomacy—are alternately lauded and repudiated as possibilities for effecting long-lasting social change. By asking under what terms women protagonists are imagined, envisioned, embodied, and replicated in media, this book challenges how we should define—and whether we need—feminine forms of knowledge and power.

The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps

The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps

Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century

By Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson

Rutgers University Press

The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps explores how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured to respond to shifts in culture and society as well as to new understanding of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual identity through a study of the popular Farm & Wilderness camps. To illustrate this change, Emily Abel and Margaret K. Nelson draw on over forty interviews with former campers, archival materials, and their own memories. This book tells a story of progressive ideals, crisis of leadership, childhood challenges, and social adaptation in the quintessential American summer camp.

Not Alone

LGB Teachers Organizations from 1970 to 1985

By Jason Mayernick

Rutgers University Press

Between 1970 and 1985, lesbian, gay, and bisexual educators (LGB) formed communities and began advocating for a place of openness and safety for LGB people in America's schools. They fought for protection and representation in the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers in New York, Los Angeles and Northern California.

China and the Internet

China and the Internet

Using New Media for Development and Social Change

Rutgers University Press

China and the Internet analyzes how Chinese activists, NGOs, and government offices have used the Internet to fight rural malnutrition, the digital divide, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other urgent problems affecting millions of people. It presents five theoretically-informed case studies of how new media have been used in interventions for development and social change, including how activists battled against COVID-19.

Between Care and Criminality

Between Care and Criminality

Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare

By Helena Zeweri

Rutgers University Press

Between Care and Criminality examines Australian social welfare’s encounter with migration and marriage in an era of intensified border control. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how social welfare practitioners carry out a migrant-targeted social policy designed to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law which criminalized the practice.

When Cowboys Come Home

When Cowboys Come Home

Veterans, Authenticity, and Manhood in Post–World War II America

By Aaron George

Rutgers University Press

When Cowboys Come Home shows how World War II changed the ways men thought about their roles in American society. For three writers who served—James Jones, Stewart Stern, and Edward Field—the war taught that manhood didn’t have to be based on bravery and heroism, but could be defined by authenticity, sensitivity, and male camaraderie. Rebelling against the orthodoxies of their time, these veterans reimagined what roles a man could play and their work set the foundation for the revolutions of the sixties.

Watching While Black Rebooted!

Watching While Black Rebooted!

The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences

Edited by Beretta E. Smith-Shomade; Foreword by Herman S. Gray

Rutgers University Press

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means within an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces (those spaces relying on television structure) to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters.

Watching While Black Rebooted!

Watching While Black Rebooted!

The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences

Edited by Beretta E. Smith-Shomade; Foreword by Herman S. Gray

Rutgers University Press

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means within an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces (those spaces relying on television structure) to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters.

Trailer Park America

Trailer Park America

Reimagining Working-Class Communities

By Leontina Hormel

Rutgers University Press

Challenging the stereotype of trailer parks as magnets for stigmatized people, sociologist Leontina Hormel investigates how the closing of a mobile home park in rural northern Idaho led to community activism among its residents: single-mother households, veterans, recovering addicts, and people with disabilities who fought for their rights and dignity.

The Best Place

The Best Place

Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver

Rutgers University Press

The Best Place examines how overlapping housing, mental-health-and-addictions, and overdose crises, alongside their accompanying public health interventions, and the frenetic pace of urban renewal have shaped forms of life and death among young people who use drugs in the city of Vancouver, Canada.

Suffering Sappho!

Suffering Sappho!

Lesbian Camp in American Popular Culture

By Barbara Jane Brickman

Rutgers University Press

Offering the first major consideration of lesbian camp in American popular culture, Suffering Sappho! examines a larger-than-life lesbian menace in mid-century media embodied in five queer icons—the sicko, the monster, the spinster, the Amazon, and the rebel. Across comics, fiction, television and movies of the era, Barbara Jane Brickman discovers evidence not just of campy sexual deviants but of troubling female performers, whose failures could be epic but whose subversive potential could inspire.

Self-Alteration

Self-Alteration

How People Change Themselves across Cultures

Edited by Jean-Paul Baldacchino and Christopher Houston

Rutgers University Press

Self-Alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures approaches the subject of the self and its becoming through the exploration of modes of its transformation, including through religious and spiritual traditions and innovations; embodied participation in therepeutic prorams like psychoanalysis and gendered care services; and through political activism or relationships with animals. The essays in this collection show that both minor and major modes of self-alteration exist in many places and times, and across very different modern societies.

Scratchin' and Survivin'

Scratchin' and Survivin'

Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions

By Adrien Sebro

Rutgers University Press

Providing a critical history of Tandem Productions, the company behind nearly all the hit Black sitcoms of the 1970s, including Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and Diff’rent Strokes, Adrien Sebro explores how their sitcom plots paralleled what was happening behind the scenes, as talented African-Americans devised strategies to gain creative agency and fair financial compensation.

New Israeli Horror

Local Cinema, Global Genre

By Olga Gershenson

Rutgers University Press

Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception.

Forgotten Bodies

Forgotten Bodies

Imperialism, Chuukese Migration, and Stratified Reproduction in Guam

By Sarah A. Smith

Rutgers University Press

Women from Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia move to Guam, U.S. for several reasons, including access to better healthcare. Yet, they suffer disproportionately poor reproductive health outcomes in Guam. Forgotten Bodies illuminates how benign neglect, imperial citizenship, transnational migration, and gender inequities intersect, cohere, and compound to stratify Chuukese women’s reproductive health.

Bolsonarismo

Bolsonarismo

The Global Origins and Future of Brazil’s Far Right

By Fernando Brancoli

Rutgers University Press

Brazilian public intellectual Fernando Brancoli offers the first comprehensive exploration of Bolsonarismo, the far-right coalition that emerged in Brazil around former President Jair Bolsonaro in 2020. The book delves into how Bolsonarismo, as a far-right movement, developed its political orientation and impacted world politics, providing valuable insights into the rise of far-right groups and their influence on issues such as climate change, democracy, and human rights.

When Things Happen

When Things Happen

A Novel

By Angelo Cannavacciuolo; Translated by Gregory Pell; Foreword by Jay Parini

Rutgers University Press

Michele Campo is a speech pathologist living the high life in Naples. But when he begins to treat a poor foster child, he is forced to confront dark family secrets about his own rise from poverty. The award-winning When Things Happen tells a powerful story about memory, destiny, and class consciousness in one of Italy’s most divided cities.

Ways of Belonging

Ways of Belonging

Undocumented Youth in the Shadow of Illegality

By Francesca Meloni

Rutgers University Press

Ways of Belonging examines the experiences of undocumented young people who are excluded from K–12 education in Canada. Through rich ethnographic descriptions, this book vividly shows how ambivalence and invisibility shape both the lives of young people and institutional attitudes toward them.

The Truth That Never Hurts 25th anniversary edition

The Truth That Never Hurts 25th anniversary edition

Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom

By Barbara Smith

Rutgers University Press

Barbara Smith has been doing groundbreaking work since the early 1970s, describing a Black feminism for Black women. This collection contains some of her major essays on Black women's literature, Black lesbian writing, on racism in the women's movement, Black-Jewish relations, and homophobia in the Black community. Her forays into these areas ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers were addressing at the time, and which, sadly, remain pertinent to this day. This 25th anniversary edition, in a beautiful new package, retains the urgency these essays had when they were first written.

The Sounds of Furious Living

The Sounds of Furious Living

Everyday Unorthodoxies in an Era of AIDS

By Matthew Kelly

Rutgers University Press

The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the 19th and 20th centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the 20th century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the 21st century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.

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