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 181-210 of 2,599 items.

There She Goes Again

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

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.

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The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps

Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century

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.
 

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Not Alone

LGB Teachers Organizations from 1970 to 1985

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.

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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.

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Between Care and Criminality

Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare

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.

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When Cowboys Come Home

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

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.
 

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Watching While Black Rebooted!

The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences

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.

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Watching While Black Rebooted!

The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences

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.

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Trailer Park America

Reimagining Working-Class Communities

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. 

 

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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.

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Suffering Sappho!

Lesbian Camp in American Popular Culture

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.

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Self-Alteration

How People Change Themselves across Cultures

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.
 

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Scratchin' and Survivin'

Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions

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 JeffersonsSanford 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.   
 

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New Israeli Horror

Local Cinema, Global Genre

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.
 

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Forgotten Bodies

Imperialism, Chuukese Migration, and Stratified Reproduction in Guam

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.
 

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Bolsonarismo

The Global Origins and Future of Brazil’s Far Right

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.
 

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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.  

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Ways of Belonging

Undocumented Youth in the Shadow of Illegality

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.

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The Truth That Never Hurts 25th anniversary edition

Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom

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.  

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The Sounds of Furious Living

Everyday Unorthodoxies in an Era of AIDS

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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The Round Dance

A Novel

Rutgers University Press

A tender, poetic coming-of-age tale drawn from author Carmine Abate’s childhood in the village of Carfizzi, The Round Dance transforms southern Italy into a magical realist wonderland that rivals Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo. A multicultural masterpiece inspired by ancient Albanian oral traditions, publisher Mondadori named it among the one hundred greatest Italian novels of the twentieth century.

 

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The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University

Three Decades, 1986-2017

Edited by Ferris Olin
Rutgers University Press

The Brodsky Center at Rutgers: Three Decades, 1986-2017, chronicles the history and artists involved with an internationally acclaimed print and papermaking studio at Rutgers University. Judith K. Brodsky conceived, founded, and directed the atelier, which, from its onset, provided state-of-the-arts technology and expertise for under-represented contemporary artists — women, Indigenous, and from diasporas of the African, Eastern European, Latin and Asian communities — to make innovative works on paper. These artistic creations presented new narratives to American and global visual arts from voices previously not heard or seen.

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Playful Frames

Styles of Widescreen Cinema

Rutgers University Press

Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema studies the poetics of the auteur-driven widescreen image, offering nimble, expansive analyses of the work of four distinctive filmmakers – Jean Negulesco, Blake Edwards, Robert Altman, and John Carpenter – who creatively inhabited the nooks and crannies of widescreen moviemaking during the final decades of the twentieth century.

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Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition

A Black Feminist Anthology

Edited by Barbara Smith
Rutgers University Press

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, feaures writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminisms foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package. 

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Bridge and Tunnel Boys

Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century

Rutgers University Press

Exploring the surprising parallels between Long Islander Billy Joel and Asbury Park, NJ native Bruce Springsteen, cultural historian Jim Cullen places their music within a longer tradition of the New York metropolitan sound. By recombining classic influences in unique ways, each man created music that appealed to wide audiences in a rapidly changing America. 

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AntoloGaia

Queering the Seventies, A Radical Trans Memoir

Rutgers University Press

AntoloGaia offers a vivid first-hand account of the rise of the gay liberation movement in Italy, revealing how it was intimately intertwined with other forms of left-wing activism. Porpora Marcasciano conveys both the heartbreak of living through an era of institutionalized homophobia and the queer joy of encountering Italy’s unique gay and trans communities.





 

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An Age of Accountability

How Standardized Testing Came to Dominate American Schools and Compromise Education

Rutgers University Press

An Age of Accountability highlights the role of test-based accountability as a policy framework in American education. Even after very clear disappointments no other policy framework has emerged to challenge its hegemony, and many Americans continue to believe that accountability remains a vital necessity, even if educators and policy scholars disagree.

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Staging a Comeback

Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance

Rutgers University Press

Drawing on original archival research and interviews, Peter C. Kunze offers a revisionist account of the Disney Renaissance that foregrounds the role of theatrically-trained talent in revitalizing Disney Animation. In so doing, he situates this impressive turnaround at the intersection of two dynamic entertainment industries with a long, underexamined relationships, Hollywood and Broadway.

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Race and Police

The Origin of Our Peculiar Institutions

Rutgers University Press

In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order.

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Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital

Centering the Periphery

Rutgers University Press

This book highlights the modernity of Polish Jewish culture through its literature, poetry, film, cabaret, theater, architecture, the visual arts, and music in urban centers large and small. The contributors expertly reassert the belonging of Jews in Polish lands and showcase the multivalent texture of Polish Jewish cultural production before World War II.
 

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