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 951-1,000 of 2,598 items.
Not Quite a Cancer Vaccine
Selling HPV and Cervical Cancer
Rutgers University Press
In Not Quite a Cancer Vaccine, medical anthropologist S.D. Gottlieb explores how the vaccine Gardasil—developed against the most common sexually-transmitted infection, human papillomavirus (HPV)—was marketed primarily as a cervical cancer vaccine. Gardasil quickly became implicated in two pre-existing debates—about adolescent sexuality and pediatric vaccinations more generally.
Thieving Three-Fingered Jack
Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015
Rutgers University Press
Botkin has compiled and analyzed plays, novels, and folklore about Three-Fingered Jack in order to show how the story of this hero-villain has evolved as it traveled from the Caribbean to England and the United States, returning to Jamaica as a tale of heroic resistance.
Narrating Love and Violence
Women Contesting Caste, Tribe, and State in Lahaul, India
Rutgers University Press
Narrating Love and Violence is an ethnographic exploration of women’s stories from the Himalayan valley of Lahaul, in the region of Himachal Pradesh, India, focusing on how violence is produced at the intersection of gender, tribe, caste, and the state in India, while demonstrating how love operates as a politic.
Demographic Angst
Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s
By Alan Nadel
Rutgers University Press
Alan Nadel explores influential non-fiction books, magazine articles, and public documents to demonstrate how films such as Singin’ in the Rain, On the Waterfront, Sunset Boulevard, Roman Holiday, North by Northwest, and Sayonara, negotiated anxieties over the changes impelled by postwar America’s radically reconfigured population.
Lesson Plans
The Institutional Demands of Becoming a Teacher
Rutgers University Press
Judson G. Everitt takes readers into the everyday worlds of teacher training. Using rich qualitative data, he analyzes how people make sense of their prospective jobs as teachers, and how their introduction to this profession is shaped by the institutionalized rules and practices of higher education, K-12 education, and gender.
Rock 'n' Roll Movies
Rutgers University Press
This book offers an eclectic look at how rock ‘n’ roll and its fans have been represented in B-movies, blockbusters, biopics, documentaries, and experimental films. David Sterritt explores how rock ‘n’ roll movies kept pace with rapidly changing musical trends, helping to fuel a worldwide revolution in youth culture.
Embodying the Problem
The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother
By Jenna Vinson
Rutgers University Press
Embodying the Problem shows that the dominant narrative regarding teenage pregnancy perpetuates harmful discourses about women and sustains racialized gender ideologies that construct women’s bodies as sites of national intervention and control. However, many women who embody the “problem” of teenage pregnancy actively resist this narrative by publishing their own stories.
Searching for Sycorax
Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror
Rutgers University Press
Searching for Sycorax highlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre’s historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory.
Lady Lushes
Gender, Alcoholism, and Medicine in Modern America
Rutgers University Press
In Lady Lushes, medical historian Michelle L. McClellan traces the story of the female alcoholic from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century. She draws on a range of sources—including medical literature, archival materials, popular media, and autobiographical writings of alcoholic women—to demonstrate the persistence of the belief that alcohol use is antithetical to an idealized feminine role.
Developing Faculty in Liberal Arts Colleges
Aligning Individual Needs and Organizational Goals
Rutgers University Press
Developing Faculty Members in Liberal Arts Colleges analyzes the career stage challenges these faculty members must overcome, such as a lack of preparation for teaching, limited access to resources and mentors, and changing expectations for excellence in teaching, research, and service to become academic leaders in their discipline and at these distinctive institutions.
Poison in the Ivy
Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses
Rutgers University Press
Poison in the Ivy examines college students in the U.S.’s upper-echelon of higher education to identify how young elites interact with one another, how these social interactions influence their views of race and inequality, and how these views and interactions may contribute to broader racial inequalities in society.
A Dream of Resistance
The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki
Rutgers University Press
A Dream of Resistance is the first book in English to explore Kobayashi Masaki’s entire career. Drawing from rare archives, including the young director’s wartime diary, Stephen Prince illuminates the political and religious dimensions of Kobayashi’s films and examines how their values were shaped by his intellectual history and upbringing.
In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills
Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles
Rutgers University Press
In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills examines the multilayered process by which Mexican Americans moved out of the barrios and emerged as a majority population in the San Gabriel Valley, and the impact that movement had on collective racial and class identity.
A Queerly Joyful Noise
Choral Musicking for Social Justice
Rutgers University Press
A Queerly Joyful Noise investigates why so many LGBTIQ people are drawn to choral music and how queer chorus members create an experience that is beautiful and politically impactful. Julia “Jules” Balén vividly conveys how queer choruses can collectively empower their singers and serve as progressive rallying calls for their listeners.
Directing
Edited by Virginia Wright Wexman
Rutgers University Press
Directing examines a diverse range of classic and contemporary directors, including Orson Welles, Tim Burton, Cecil B. DeMille, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, and Ida Lupino, and demonstrates how a century’s worth of Hollywood directors have negotiated changing film industry practices while harnessing the creative contributions of many collaborators.
Directing
Edited by Virginia Wright Wexman
Rutgers University Press
Directing examines a diverse range of classic and contemporary directors, including Orson Welles, Tim Burton, Cecil B. DeMille, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, and Ida Lupino, and demonstrates how a century’s worth of Hollywood directors have negotiated changing film industry practices while harnessing the creative contributions of many collaborators.
Gangsters to Governors
The New Bosses of Gambling in America
By David Clary
Rutgers University Press
Gambling was once illegal and controlled by gangsters. But today, gambling is legal in forty-eight states. Are states now addicted to revenue from casinos, lotteries, and online gaming? Clary’s history of American gambling introduces us to the industry’s colorful kingpins while asking tough questions about the pros and cons of legal gambling.
Shadow Bodies
Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics
Rutgers University Press
Grounded in Black feminist thought, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery looks at the functioning of scripts ascribed to Black women’s bodies in the framing of HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse, and mental illness and how such functioning renders some black female bodies invisible in Black politics in general and Black women’s politics specifically.
Challenges of Diversity
Essays on America
Rutgers University Press
What unites and what divides Americans as a nation? Opening with a survey of American literature through the vantage point of ethnicity, Werner Sollors examines the changing self-understanding of the United States from an Anglo-American to a multicultural country and the role writing has played in that process.
Food Across Borders
Rutgers University Press
The act of eating defines and redefines borders. The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.
Food Across Borders
Rutgers University Press
The act of eating defines and redefines borders. The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.
Voices of Mental Health
Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970-2000
Rutgers University Press
Halliwell examines the cultural history of modern American medicine and psychiatry focusing on the late twentieth century. He pays particular attention to the politics of the post-Watergate, bicentennial-era American nation and brings into conversation a diverse cast of writers, filmmakers, physicians, policy-makers, social critics, and public figures.
Making Whole What Has Been Smashed
On Reparations Politics
By John Torpey
Rutgers University Press
Exploring recent political efforts to rectify injustices handed down from the past, John Torpey argues that there are major differences between reparations for the living victims of past wrongdoing and reparations for the descendants of such victims. This reprint edition contains a new preface by the author.
Blood on Their Hands
How Greedy Companies, Inept Bureaucracy, and Bad Science Killed Thousands of Hemophiliacs
By Eric Weinberg and Donna Shaw
Rutgers University Press
By the mid-1980s, over half the hemophiliacs in the United States had become infected with HIV. Blood on Their Hands reveals the toxic combination of corporate greed, governmental complacency, and medical negligence that exacerbated this public health disaster.
Sovereign Acts
Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone
Rutgers University Press
Sovereign Acts explores how artists, activists, and audiences performed and interpreted sovereignty struggles in the Panama Canal Zone over the last century. By demonstrating the place of performance in the legal landscape of U.S. Empire, Zien transforms our understanding of U.S. imperialism in the Panama Canal Zone and the Caribbean.
When Women Rule the Court
Gender, Race, and Japanese American Basketball
Rutgers University Press
In When Women Rule the Court, Nicole Willms tells the story of women who became Asian American sport icons by tracing their beginnings in the Japanese American basketball leagues of California. Using data from interviews and observations, Willms explores the interplay of social forces and community dynamics that have shaped this unique context of female athletic empowerment.
Textual Silence
Unreadability and the Holocaust
By Jessica Lang
Rutgers University Press
In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself forms barriers between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that these barriers, or silences, are not a lack of substance, but an essential characteristic of the genre.
Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People
Rutgers University Press
In Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, award-winning writer and cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette raises urgent legal, economic, educational, esthetic, and ethical issues to show why anti-ageism should be the next social movement of our time.
Dwelling in Resistance
Living with Alternative Technologies in America
Rutgers University Press
Chelsea Schelly uses ethnographic research, participant observation, and numerous in-depth interviews to examine four alternative U.S. communities where individuals use electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation technologies that differ markedly from those used by the vast majority of modern American residential dwellers.
Imperial Affects
Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema
By Jonna Eagle
Rutgers University Press
Imperial Affects is the first sustained account of American action-based cinema as melodrama. From the earliest war films through the Hollywood Western and the late-century action cinema, imperialist violence and mobility have been produced as sites of both visceral pleasure and moral virtue.
Killing Poetry
Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities
Rutgers University Press
Killing Poetry examines the performance of race as it relates to gender, sexuality, and class in the spoken word communities of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Javon Johnson, a renowned slam poet himself, focuses on how slam poets navigate the diverse poetry scenes in which they perform, as part of the larger world they encounter as Black Americans.
Making Believe
Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema
By Lisa Bode
Rutgers University Press
With the rise of digital effects in cinema the human performer is increasingly the only “real” element on screen. Making Believe sheds new light on screen performance by historicizing it within the context of visual and special effects cinema and technological change in filmmaking, through the silent, early sound, and current digital eras.
Red and Yellow, Black and Brown
Decentering Whiteness in Mixed Race Studies
Rutgers University Press
This book gathers together life stories and analysis by twelve contributors who express and seek to understand the often very different dynamics that exist for mixed race people who are not part white. Chapters focus on the social, psychological, and political issues and identities for people who are in dual or multiple minority situations.
Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat
The Origins of School Lunch in the United States
Rutgers University Press
Historian A. R. Ruis explores the origins of American school meal initiatives to explain why it has been so difficult to establish meal programs that satisfy the often competing interests of children, parents, schools, health authorities, politicians, and the food industry.
Addicted to Rehab
Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Rutgers University Press
Sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two women’s rehab programs, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system—two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.
Youth in Postwar Guatemala
Education and Civic Identity in Transition
Rutgers University Press
Through rich ethnographic accounts, Youth in Postwar Guatemala, traces youth experiences in schools, homes, and communities, examining how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice develop through formal and informal educational interactions. Michelle J. Bellino shows how a new generation struggles to unlearn authoritarianism and develop new democratic civic identities.
In Lady Liberty's Shadow
The Politics of Race and Immigration in New Jersey
Rutgers University Press
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez explores the impact of anti-immigrant municipal ordinances on a range of immigrant groups living in different types of suburban communities. Although it is a case study of New Jersey, In Lady Liberty’s Shadow offers crucial insights that can shed fresh light on the national immigration debate.
Haiti and the Uses of America
Post-U.S. Occupation Promises
Rutgers University Press
Contrary to popular notions, Haiti-U.S. relations have not only been about Haitian resistance to U.S. domination. In Haiti and the Uses of America, Chantalle F. Verna makes evident that there have been key moments of cooperation that contributed to nation-building in both countries.
Demanding Justice and Security
Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America
Edited by Rachel Sieder
Rutgers University Press
The contributors to this book analyze Latin American indigenous women’s engagements with different legal forums and language to secure greater justice and security, and aim to set out a series of key concepts and issues for analyzing these mobilizations, in order to present innovative, engaged research on constructions of justice and security.
Demanding Justice and Security
Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America
Edited by Rachel Sieder
Rutgers University Press
The contributors to this book analyze Latin American indigenous women’s engagements with different legal forums and language to secure greater justice and security, and aim to set out a series of key concepts and issues for analyzing these mobilizations, in order to present innovative, engaged research on constructions of justice and security.
In/visible War
The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America
Rutgers University Press
In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The editors examine how the contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous and utterly present in public, popular culture, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war.
In/visible War
The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America
Rutgers University Press
In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The editors examine how the contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous and utterly present in public, popular culture, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war.
Complicated Lives
Girls, Parents, Drugs, and Juvenile Justice
By Vera Lopez
Rutgers University Press
Complicated Lives focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez’s work examines how these relationships with their parents contribute to the girls’ future drug use and involvement in the justice system.
Wonder Woman
New edition with full color illustrations
Rutgers University Press
William Marston was an unusual man—a psychologist, a soft-porn pulp novelist, more than a bit of a carny, and the (self-declared) inventor of the lie detector. He was also the creator of Wonder Woman, the comic where he expressed two of his greatest passions: feminism and women in bondage. Noah Berlatsky takes us on a wild ride through the Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, showing how Marston and illustrator Harry Peter came together to create a fictional universe that celebrated female empowerment and queer sexualities.
Twelve-Cent Archie
New edition with full color illustrations
By Bart Beaty
Rutgers University Press
For over seventy-five years, Archie and the gang at Riverdale High have been America’s most iconic teenagers. Yet they have been relatively ignored by scholars—until now. Twelve-Cent Archie is both the first academic study of these comics and an innovative creative work in its own right. In a hundred short chapters, renowned comics scholar Bart Beaty takes us on a witty, eclectic tour of the Archie universe, addressing everything from the history of the American teenager to the mystery of Jughead’s hat.
Mothering by Degrees
Single Mothers and the Pursuit of Postsecondary Education
Rutgers University Press
In Mothering by Degrees, Jillian Duquaine-Watson shows how single mothers pursuing college degrees must navigate a difficult course as they attempt to reconcile their identities as single moms, college students, and in many cases, employees. They also negotiate a balance between what they think, and what society is telling them, and how that affects their choices to go to college.
Everyday Desistance
The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth
Rutgers University Press
In Everyday Desistance, the authors examine the transition to adulthood among twenty-five formerly incarcerated young men and women in Los Angeles, California. They describe their day-to-day experiences, focusing on their attempts to surmount the challenges of adulthood, resist the temptations of criminal activity, and formulate their long-term goals for a secure adult future.
Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics
New edition with full color illustrations
Rutgers University Press
In this groundbreaking new study, Andrew Hoberek examines Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s landmark comic book series Watchmen from a variety of angles: as an artistic achievement, as a political statement, and as a self-conscious piece of intellectual property. He not only provides a historical context for appreciating how innovative Watchmen was in the 1980s, but also demonstrates the continued influence it has exerted on both comics and literature as a whole.
Ida Lupino, Director
Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition
By Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman
Rutgers University Press
Ida Lupino, Director shines a long-awaited spotlight on one of our greatest filmmakers, one whose movies depicted the plights of postwar women and exposed the dark underside of American society. The authors show Lupino as a trailblazing feminist auteur who created a distinctive style in film and television that was both highly expressionistic and grittily realistic.
Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession
Global Perspectives
Edited by Sarah Lamb; Epilogue by Susan Reynolds Whyte
Rutgers University Press
Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession exposes and complicates contemporary readings of successful aging, questioning and defamiliarizing Western visions of the place of old age in the life course. This volume brings fresh insight and international perspectives that expand our collective imagination about what it is to age, and, by extension, to live.
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