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 211-240 of 2,599 items.

Policing Victimhood

Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State

Rutgers University Press

Policing Victimhood analyzes semi-structured interviews with 54 service providers in the Midwestern US, a region that, though colloquially understood as “flyover country,” regularly positions itself as a leader in state-level anti-trafficking policies and collaborative networks. These frontline workers’ perceptions and narratives are informed by their interpersonal, day-to-day encounters with exploited or trafficked persons. Their insights underscore how anti-trafficking policies are put into practice and influenced by specific ideologies and stereotypes. Extending the reach of street-level bureaucracy theory to anti-trafficking initiatives, Corinne Schwarz demonstrates how frontline workers are uniquely positioned to perpetuate or radically counter punitive anti-trafficking efforts.

More info

On the Turtle's Back

Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren

Rutgers University Press

On the Turtle’s Back is the first collection of folklore from the Lenape people, New Jersey’s native inhabitants. Originally compiled by anthropologist M. R. Harrington over a century ago, but never published until now, it shares the tribe’s cherished tales about the world’s creation, epic heroes, and ordinary human foibles.

More info

Migrants Who Care

West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care

Rutgers University Press

As the U.S. population ages, and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. Migrants Who Care draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labor that is called upon to meet this need, telling the little-known story of a group of English-speaking West African immigrants who have become central to the U.S. health and long-term care systems.

More info

Metamorphosis

Who We Become after Facial Paralysis

Rutgers University Press

Imagine losing the ability to smile. After suffering permanent facial difference, Faye Linda Wachs finds a community of people reconstructing identity while coping with what she terms a social disability. By detailing personal accounts and interviews of those facing microaggressions and internal disruptions to communication, Metamorphosis explores the process of reconstructing the self.
 

More info

Mainstreaming Gays

Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television

Rutgers University Press

Mainstreaming Gays examines a key transitional period linking the eras of legacy and streaming, when queer production and interaction was transformed by the emergence of digital media, the rising influence of fan cultures, and increasing interest in LGBTQ content. It is critical reading for those interested in media production, fandom, subcultures, and LGBTQ digital media.
 

More info

Ideal Beauty

The Life and Times of Greta Garbo

Rutgers University Press

Ideal Beauty reveals the woman behind the Garbo mystique, a tough negotiator who used her newfound power in Hollywood to develop a distinctly new feminist screen persona. Examining how she was an icon who helped to define female beauty in the twentieth century, the book also considers Garbo’s spiritual and sexual exploration away from the camera’s glare.  

More info

Chinese Marriages in Transition

From Patriarchy to New Familism

Rutgers University Press

Chinese Marriages in Transition documents the nuanced and multidirectional nature of the transformations in Chinese marriage, gender roles, and family. Using complex and large-scale historical national data as well as comprehensive data from multiple countries, Xiaoling Shu and Jingjing Chen demonstrate that Chinese new familism consists of values both old and new.

More info

The Prism of Human Rights

Seeking Justice amid Gender Violence in Rural Ecuador

Rutgers University Press

The Prism of Human Rights illustrates how women’s human rights campaigns have taken off in rural Ecuador. Drawing on two decades of research and activism, Friederic shows how the initial promises of legal empowerment often give way to self-blame, social isolation, and more extreme structural violence, and she demonstrates how one rural community is renegotiating beliefs about gender, the family, the meaning of violence, and even community development.

More info

The Outcast

A Novel

By Luigi Pirandello; Translated by Bradford A. Masoni; Foreword by Daniela Bini
Rutgers University Press

A tale of false accusations, social stigma, and adultery, The Outcast is an early masterwork from Nobel Prize–winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello. Combining elements of Zolaesque naturalism with emerging modernist aesthetics, the novel is notable for its deft use of irony and its resourceful and resilient heroine. 

More info

The Cyborg Caribbean

Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction

Rutgers University Press

The Cyborg Caribbean examines twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction, showing how it negotiates legacies of techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. It traces histories of four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed corporality and humanity in the Caribbean.

More info

Oh, Serafina!

A Fable of Ecology, Lunacy, and Love

By Giuseppe Berto; Translated by Gregory Conti; Foreword by Matteo Gilebbi
Rutgers University Press

Newly translated into English, Giuseppe Berto’s 1973 novel Oh, Serafina! is a whimsical fable of ecology, lunacy, and love. One of the first environmentally-conscious works of Italian literature, it questions the destructive effects of industrial capitalism, the many forms spirituality might take, and the ways our society defines madness.
 

More info

Maid for Television

Race, Class, Gender, and a Representational Economy

Rutgers University Press

Maid for Television examines the racialized female domestic by tracing the maid’s representational and narrative function in American television. As domestic service has been a long-standing occupation for women of color, the figure of the maid in the employer’s home is a recurrent and patterned image, simultaneously enacting and revealing the nexus of race, class, and gender hierarchies in American culture.

More info

Islam and Me

Narrating a Diaspora

Rutgers University Press

In Islam and Me, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel tells her story of being a Somali immigrant in Italy and shares the experiences of other Muslim women in southern Europe. She reveals the common prejudices they encounter and explores how Italy might reimagine its national culture and identity to become more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist. 

 

More info

City of Men

Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport

Rutgers University Press

How do men experience gender in the city? Through descriptions of autorickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters in Kolkata, India, this book highlights the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities.  
 

More info

Calling Family

Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

Rutgers University Press

How do digital technologies shape how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? Calling Family explores how digital devices shape elder care at a distance and how it should be done in order to be considered good. Through Tanja Ahlin's ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, this book aspires to uncover the subtle workings of digital technologies beyond seeing them as tools of communication.

More info

Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean

Critical Research and Perspectives

Rutgers University Press

This volume collects intellectual work by and about Black women while shedding light on the socio-political conditions that shape their participation and leadership in political struggles for citizenship rights and resources. Additionally, this volume explores the role of the social sciences in documenting anti-Black violence and forging hemispheric struggles against that violence.

More info

Asian American History

Rutgers University Press

A comprehensive survey, Asian American History places Asian immigration to America in international and domestic contexts, and explores the significant elements that define Asian America: imperialism and global capitalist expansion, labor and capital, race and ethnicity, immigration and exclusion, family and work, community and gender roles, assimilation and multiculturalism, panethnicity and identity, transnationalism and globalization, and new challenges and opportunities. It is an up-to-date and easily accessible resource for high school and college students, as well as anyone who is interested in Asian American history.
 

More info

Stepping Away

Returning to the Faculty After Senior Academic Leadership

Rutgers University Press

Senior leadership transitions in higher education are inevitable. Given their ubiquity, those who work in colleges and universities share the responsibility to make these changing of the guard moments beneficial both for institutions and leaders. Moving beyond the well-worn cliché of "stepping down," Stepping Away identifies policies that institutions, administrators, chairs, and members of governing boards can enact as leaders assume a new place in the social architecture of their campus.

More info

Murder Town, USA

Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism in Wilmington

Rutgers University Press

Far too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death, and incarceration. Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize fifteen residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods. 

More info

Defiant Bodies

Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean

Rutgers University Press

Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone extends the discourse on Caribbean sexuality, queerness, and trans experiences by focusing on several moments of community-making across the Anglophone Caribbean -- Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago -- including legal challenges against Caribbean laws, drag pageantry, kinship formations, and a co-opting of mainstream urban nightclubs and bars. These offer readers new ways to understand the creative and complicated ways that queer Caribbean people are responding to the dominant sexual politics in the region. They also reveal how queer people are envisioning transgressive ways of existing despite the various forms of violence that they face.
 

More info

Bishops and Bodies

Reproductive Care in American Catholic Hospitals

Rutgers University Press

Four out of the ten largest U.S. health care systems follow the policies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that forbid abortion, sterilization, and related treatments in their hospitals. Drawing on rich interviews with patients and providers, Bishops and Bodies shows how these opaque restrictions conflict with medical standards, producing unjust and unequal reproductive care.

More info

Between Self and Community

Children’s Personhood in a Globalized South Korea

Rutgers University Press

Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it examines how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social contexts.

More info

Aspiring in Later Life

Movements across Time, Space, and Generations

Rutgers University Press

While aspirations are most often connected to younger people, this volume argues that people do not stop aspiring in older age. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations are pursued over the course of life and in contexts of globalization and mobility.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.

More info

Aloha Compadre

Latinxs in Hawai'i

Rutgers University Press

Aloha Compadre is the first study to examine the collective history and contemporary experiences of the Latinx population of Hawaiʻi. It reveals that contrary to popular discourse, Latinx migration to Hawaiʻi is not a recent event. From the early 1830s to the present, Latinx communities have been a part of the cultural landscape of Hawaiʻi prior to annexation, territorial status, and statehood.

More info

Dead Funny

The Humor of American Horror

Rutgers University Press

Covering everything from the use of slapstick in Final Destination to the comedy of awkwardness in Get OutDead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film. It explores how the genre uses physical comedy, parody, satire, and camp to comment on gender, sexuality, and racial politics. 
 
 

More info

Rockin' in the Ivory Tower

Rock Music on Campus in the Sixties

Rutgers University Press

Historian James Carter takes a close look at how the rock music of the 1960s played an integral role in the lives of American college students. He traces connections between rock fandom and the civil rights protests, free speech activism, radical ideas, lifestyle transformations, and anti-war movements that revolutionized universities.

More info

Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town

Rutgers University Press

Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town examines the role of emotion and its relationship to community experiences of social belonging and inequality. Using a cancer cluster community in Northwest Ohio as a case study, Laura Hart advances an approach to risk that grapples with the complexities of community belonging in the wake of suspected industrial pollution. Her research points to a fear driven not only by economic anxiety, but also by a fear of losing security within the community—a sort of pride that is not only about status, but connectedness. Hart reveals the importance of this social form of risk—the desire for belonging and the risk of not belonging—ultimately arguing that this is consequential to how people make judgements and respond to issues. Within this context, affected families experience psychosocial and practical conflicts as they adapt to cancer as a way of life. Hart ultimately presents possibilities for the democratization of risk management and underscores the need for transformative approaches to environmental justice.
 

More info

Race and Role

The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama

Rutgers University Press

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama explores the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater, and through theater’s generative power, exposes the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.

More info

Mary Climbs In

The Journeys of Bruce Springsteen's Women Fans

Rutgers University Press
More info

Mammography Wars

Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes

Rutgers University Press

Mammography is a routine health screening performed 40 million times each year in the United States, yet it remains one of the most deeply contested topics in medicine. In Mammography Wars, sociologist Asia Friedman uses the sociology of attention to map the cognitive structure of the “mammography wars.”
 

More info
Find what you’re looking for...
Stay Informed

Receive the latest UBC Press news, including events, catalogues, and announcements.


Read past newsletters

Publishers Represented
UBC Press is the Canadian agent for several international publishers. Visit our Publishers Represented page to learn more.