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.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is one of the most important figures in the history of the US left. Her participation in “the working-class movement,” as she called it, spanned nearly six decades, from 1906 to 1964. It is no exaggeration to claim that Flynn was involved in just about every major campaign of the left in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. It was her politics, not her commitment to the Constitution, which bothered her critics and relegated her to the margins of civil liberties history. The end of the Cold War has made it possible finally to write her into the center of civil liberties history where she belongs.
Climate Bridge
An International Perspective on How to Enact Climate Action at the Government Public Interface
Climate Bridge compares New Jersey and the German Ruhr Region to build an international perspective on how to enact climate action at the government-public interface. The book grew from fifteen years of collaboration between scholars in New Jersey and Germany through summer programs, a landscape architecture design studio, internships for Rutgers students, and joint publications. Notably, settlement patterns and brownfield issues reveal similarities between the underserved in both regions.
American Infanticide
Sexism, Science, and the Politics of Sympathy
Emile Weaver seemed like the perfect college student—a studious, athletic, and popular sorority sister. So why did she kill her newborn baby? American Infanticide answers this question by situating Emile’s tragic crime in a long intellectual and social history that reveals why our legal responses to infanticide are so deeply misguided.
Rural County, Urban Borough
A History of Queens
This book explains how, in less than 100 years, Queens transformed from an agricultural hinterland to a vital urban corridor. This richly illustrated, vital work of history charts the rapid transformation of the Queens landscape and identifies what drove the borough’s development.
Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers
Radio and Film Noir
Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers is the first book to explore in detail noir storytelling in cinema and on radio. Arguing that radio’s noir dramas were a counterpart to, influence on, or a spin-off from the noir films, this scrupulously researched yet accessible study challenges conventional understandings of noir as well as shedding new light on a medium that was cinema’s major rival.
Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town
The first intensive study of Mervyn LeRoy’s work, as varied in form as it is crucial to an understanding of American cinema and American culture.
Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town
The first intensive study of Mervyn LeRoy’s work, as varied in form as it is crucial to an understanding of American cinema and American culture.
Leon Bibel
Forgotten Artist of the New Deal
The first biography of prolific modern American artist Leon Bibel, this book tells how a boy from a Jewish shtetl received support from New Deal agencies that recognized his talents. Reprinting over 240 of Bibel’s works, many in vivid color, it reveals how he depicted everything from the horrors of lynching to the pleasures of everyday life.
Imagining the Tropics
Women, Romance, and the Making of Modern Tourism
Imagining the Tropics is a history of the development of tourism in the Caribbean across the twentieth century that focuses on the ways women’s labors of hospitality, writing, and advocacy built the industry and its ubiquitous imagery of tropical island relaxation, escape, and romance.
Citizen Bird
Scenes from Bird-Life in Plain English for Beginners, A Critical Edition
A new edition of 1897’s Citizen Bird, the first birding guide for children and a vital text in the history of American conservationism, updated with explanatory footnotes, supplemental historical material, and a new introduction that places the book in its cultural context.
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.”