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.
At Home with the Holocaust
Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives
Based on analyses of literature and oral histories of children of survivors, At Home with the Holocaust reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as archives of trauma that in turn traumatized the children of Holocaust survivors.
Apocalyptic Crimes
Why Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal and Must Be Abolished
Ronald C. Kramer applies theories from criminology to argue that possession of nuclear weapons is a criminal act and shows how a nuclear apocalypse might be averted, offering a pathway to the abolition of these devastating weapons.
Caribbean Inhospitality
The Poetics of Strangers at Home
Caribbean Inhospitality juxtaposes the Caribbean’s reputation for being hospitable to foreigners with the alienation of the Caribbean citizen-subject from nations they call home. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts, Natalie Lauren Belisle demonstrates that the inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the Caribbean nation/state.
Memorializing Violence
Transnational Feminist Reflections
This volume brings together feminist reflections on the transnational lives of memorializations to colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. It asks what’s at stake in memorializing amidst and against ongoing harm and injustice produced by white supremacist global capitalist empire.
Memorializing Violence
Transnational Feminist Reflections
This volume brings together feminist reflections on the transnational lives of memorializations to colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. It asks what’s at stake in memorializing amidst and against ongoing harm and injustice produced by white supremacist global capitalist empire.
Labs of Our Own
Feminist Tinkerings with Science
Dancing for Their Lives
The Pursuit of Meaningful Aging in Urban China
Dancing for Their Lives delves into the world of retired Chinese “dancing grannies” who seek fulfillment amid broad social transformation. Based on ethnographic research, it challenges conventional narratives of aging by portraying old age as a site of innovation. It examines how retirees navigate changing norms and offers insights on resilience and meaning in later life that resonate globally.
The Dressing Room
Backstage Lives and American Film
A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imagination of audiences for over a century. In the only book-length study of the space, Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed.
Supervillains
The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics
This book provides a savvy investigation of the supervillains that appear in superhero comics. Exploring villainous archetypes and Otherness in relation to the notion of evil, the book investigates how supervillains uphold and solidify but also trouble hegemonic ideals expressed by the heroism of superheroes.
Strength through Diversity
Harlem Prep and the Rise of Multiculturalism
Rewriting Television
Raritan on War
An Anthology
On War gathers together some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan’s wide-ranging sensibility--focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. It is also all too timely.
Public Catastrophes, Private Losses
The essays in this collection expand the definition of catastrophe to include not only events like pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires but also slower-moving phenomena that have equally disastrous long-term consequences—like environmental degradation and structural racism. This book is a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.
Public Catastrophes, Private Losses
The essays in this collection expand the definition of catastrophe to include not only events like pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires but also slower-moving phenomena that have equally disastrous long-term consequences—like environmental degradation and structural racism. This book is a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.
Moving Blackness
Black Circulation, Racism, and Relations of Homespace
Moving Blackness explores the centrality of circulation within the framework of western modernity and the racially structured regulations of mobility. Storytelling emerges as the primary mode through which blackness is conveyed: it serves as a means of circulating the lived experiences of being Black while also functioning as acts of resistance and solidarity performed by blackened individuals who were (once) colonized and enslaved.
Latinas/os in New Jersey
Histories, Communities, and Cultures
Latinas/os in New Jersey
Histories, Communities, and Cultures
Icons Axed, Freedoms Lost
Russian Desecularization and a Ukrainian Alternative
In the years between the Soviet collapse and the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia went from persecuting believers to jailing irreligionists, while Ukraine solidified religious pluralism and tolerance. The book richly documents and explains the development of this contrast while offering an original theoretical and methodological perspective on desecularization (the resurgence of religion’s societal role).
Black Sporting Resistance
Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Internationalism
In this text, the Black Sporting Resistance Framework (BSRF) is introduced to examine how resistance actions in and through sport have contributed to the advancement of local and global racial justice efforts. Key concepts such as African (Black) diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism, sporting resistance typology, and sport activism typology are presented.
Ben Hecht's Theatre of Jewish Protest
Transmedia Geographies
Decoloniality, Democratization, Cultural Citizenship, and Media Convergence
Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders, and how those stories re-emerge as transmediated events.
The Future of Youth Violence Prevention
A Mixtape for Practice, Policy, and Research
The Future of Youth Violence Prevention: A Mixtape for Practice, Policy, and Research focuses on innovative approaches to youth violence prevention that utilize consistent principles found within existing best practices but are dynamic and adaptable across settings – and the socio-historical and cultural realities of those settings.
Reclaiming Haiti's Futures
Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination
Reclaiming Haiti's Futures traces the experiences of two generations of Haitian returned scholars who envisioned and sought to enact new worlds after crisis. An ethnography of the future, the book pursues concerns of home, belonging, and emplacement beyond coloniality’s fractures and displacements. These concerns ever more pressing amid overlapping crises that are displacing and enclosing the prospects of many, especially those living in post-colonial (outer) peripheries like Haiti.
Metagraffiti
Graffiti Art and the Urban Image in Latin America
This innovative visual ethnography examines diverse forms of self-reference and metareference that appear in Latin American graffiti art. Focusing on graffiti scenes from São Paulo, Brazil and Santiago in Chile, Chandra Morrison Ariyo shows how practitioners use metagraffiti features to influence public perceptions about this artform and its effect on the urban environment.
Imprisoned Minds
Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison
Imprisoned Minds tells the stories of men in prison that few people ever hear. Six gripping, first-person narratives of unimaginable childhood trauma and neglect set the men on a pathway for prison or death. We finally hear their stories because the author is in prison alongside them—incarcerated for life at the age of 21.
Hollywood Unions
Who makes films and television shows? How do those people make a living in Hollywood? Hollywood Unions tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized and negotiate on behalf of motion picture and television labor: the DGA, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, and WGA.
Hollywood Unions
Who makes films and television shows? How do those people make a living in Hollywood? Hollywood Unions tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized and negotiate on behalf of motion picture and television labor: the DGA, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, and WGA.
Grieving Pregnancy
Memorializing Loss in Japanese Buddhism and American Catholicism
Grieving Pregnancy compares contemporary American Catholic and Japanese Buddhist memorial practices focused on miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion. Maureen L. Walsh demonstrates that while the memorial practices confront the same basic problem—that is, pregnancy loss—they conceive of the problem in different terms, and as a result, propose distinct responses to it.
God's Waiting Room
Racial Reckoning at Life's End
A ghost story rich in mystery and life lessons, God's Waiting Room takes readers on a day-long tour of a tropical nursing home to hear stories of older white people and the younger Black nurses who care for them, showing how people formerly primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.
Becoming an Expert Caregiver
How Structural Flaws Shape Autism Carework and Community
This book features the voices of 50 primary caregivers of autistic and neurodivergent children who illuminate the process through which lay women become expert caregivers to provide the best care for their children. Expert caregiving captures an intensification of traditional family carework – meeting dependents’ financial, emotional, and physical needs – that transcends the walls of one’s private home and family and challenges the strict boundaries between many worlds: lay and professional, family and work, private and public, medical and social, and individual and society.
Transformed States
Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990–2020
Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post-Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century.
Rutgers Then and Now
Two Centuries of Campus Development: A Historic and Photographic Odyssey
Rutgers University has come a long way since it was granted a royal charter in 1766. It migrated from a parsonage in Somerville, to New Brunswick-sited The Sign of the Red Lion tavern, to stately Old Queens, expanding northward along College Avenue, and beyond. Replete with more than 500 campus images, Rutgers, Then and Now offers stunning pictorial and historical evidence of what it was then, side by side, with what it is today, a vital hub for research and beloved home for students.
Post-Crisis Leadership
Resilience, Renewal, and Reinvention in the Aftermath of Disruption
Crisis leadership—which takes account of leading before, during, and after crisis—is an imperative for leaders at all levels. Often relegated as an afterthought in crisis scholarship and practice, the ability to navigate the post-crisis period can distinguish highly effective leaders and organizations. This book introduces a research-informed framework for this critical, and often neglected, phase of crisis leadership.
Persisting Pandemics
Syphilis, AIDS, and COVID
Syphilis, AIDS, and COVID disprove any belief that scientific discoveries have ended the period of acute epidemic diseases that once defined 19th century life and replaced them with chronic cardiovascular diseases and cancers. Today, we cope with a greater array of epidemics than those who lived during the 19th century, even though we have the biomedical means to control them. Our cumulative experience with epidemic diseases, together with our attempts to eliminate them, remains a continued component of our existence.
Making the Human
Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans
Making the Human grapples with the interactions between narrative, materiality, and Asian American racialization. Examining contemporary debates over the role of Asian Americans in affirmative action, media representation, police brutality, and public health discourses, Sugino argues media and cultural narratives about Asian Americans shape contemporary ideas about humanity, justice, family, and nation in ways that naturalize hierarchy.
Lifting the Shadow
Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums
Lifting the Shadow examines how the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum and Tulsa’s Greenwood Rising are challenging the national narrative on slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice.
Inside Tenement Time
Suss, Spirit, and Surveillance
Inside Tenement Time is a study of Jamaican literary and cultural texts presenting surveillance in the Caribbean. The project introduces two Afro-Indigenous variations on surveillance--sussveillance and spiritveillance--as exemplars of vernacular arts and shows that Caribbean hegemonies are flexible. The book reads the Smile Jamaica concert (1976) and the Tivoli Incursion (2010) as states of high surveillance emergency.
Inaccessible Access
Rethinking Disability Inclusion in Academic Knowledge Creation
Inaccessible Access ethnographically addresses barriers to inclusion within knowledge-making. It focuses on the social, environmental, communicative, and epistemological barriers that people with disabilities confront and embody throughout the course of their learning, living and in the specific context of their Higher Education Institutions and in research.
Inaccessible Access
Rethinking Disability Inclusion in Academic Knowledge Creation
Inaccessible Access ethnographically addresses barriers to inclusion within knowledge-making. It focuses on the social, environmental, communicative, and epistemological barriers that people with disabilities confront and embody throughout the course of their learning, living and in the specific context of their Higher Education Institutions and in research.
Cinema under National Reconstruction
State Censorship and South Korea’s Cold War Film Culture
Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive’s digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Cinema Under National Reconstruction redefines censorship as a productive feedback system where both state regulators and filmmakers played active roles in shaping the new narrative or sentiment of the nation on the big screen.
Cinema under National Reconstruction
State Censorship and South Korea's Cold War Film Culture
Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive’s digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Cinema Under National Reconstruction redefines censorship as a productive feedback system where both state regulators and filmmakers played active roles in shaping the new narrative or sentiment of the nation on the big screen.
Children as Social Butterflies
Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten
Children as Social Butterflies offers an analysis of how children negotiate social belonging. Ursina Jaeger followed the children of a kindergarten class in a stigmatized and diverse neighborhood for several years, both inside and outside of school. Along with giving vivid insights into the children's everyday lives, she examines how social differentiation is learned in diverse societies.
Black Feminist Anthropology, 25th Anniversary Edition
Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics
Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics established a new canon that guaranteed the voices, theorizing, and experiences of Black Feminist anthropologists could shine out loud in ways that 25 years later are still “healing,” “life-saving,” and an affirmation of these transformative and decolonized contributions. It is both an archive and a legacy for the next generation.
Walking East Harlem
A Neighborhood Experience
East Harlem native Christopher Bell takes you on three separate walking tours of his beloved neighborhood, sharing fascinating stories about its theatres, museums, art spaces, schools, churches, mosques, and synagogues. You’ll also learn about the people who have lived in this famously diverse community, including actress Cecily Tyson and opera singer Marian Anderson.
Remittance as Belonging
Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home
Conceptualizing remittance as an expression of migrants’ belonging, this book presents detailed accounts of the emergence, growth, decline, and revival of remittance as a function of transformations in Bangladeshi migrants’ sense of belonging to home.
Pandemonium Logs
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2020–2022
In 2015, Ben Miller moved from New York City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota to focus on his writing. Working a day job in a hospital, he had a front-row seat to the Covid-19 pandemic. His book gives voice to the doctors, nurses, staff, and patients he observed.
More-than-Human Aging
Animals, Robots, and Care in Later Life
Aging is not only reserved for humans. Similarly, how humans age is often a process in which other-than-humans – be it other species or technology – become entangled or carved out. The contributions to this edited volume open a conversation about how aging is always a hybrid, more-than-human process.
More-than-Human Aging
Animals, Robots, and Care in Later Life
Aging is not only reserved for humans. Similarly, how humans age is often a process in which other-than-humans – be it other species or technology – become entangled or carved out. The contributions to this edited volume open a conversation about how aging is always a hybrid, more-than-human process.
Making It
Success in the Commercial Kitchen
The restaurant industry is one of the few places in America where workers from lower-class backgrounds can rise to positions of power and prestige. But what determines who succeeds or fails in this pressure-cooker environment? Through extensive interviews and fieldwork, sociologist Ellen Meiser discovers how status in the kitchen is tied to knowledge, interpersonal skills, and emotional labor.
Genocide Studies
Pathways Ahead
In recent years, the world has been shaken by numerous events that have caused and continue to cause massive human suffering, from the COVID-19 pandemic to intrastate and interstate armed conflicts. These crises confound definition and label, but now is the time to think about current manifestations of genocide and those likely to emerge in the future