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.
Higher Education amid the COVID-19 Pandemic
Supporting Teaching and Learning through Turbulent Times
Notes from Home
The Darién Gap
The Darién Gap has become a mass migrant graveyard, as hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers navigate its perils in the hopes of reaching the United States. In the very first book on migration through the Gap, Belén Fernández puts the trajectory in compelling context, combining history, on-the-ground reporting, travelogue, memoir, and searing politico-economic analysis of a crisis that is itself largely Made-in-USA.
Monuments Askew
An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor
In a city reeling from Bolshevik revolution, a group of Ukrainian transplants formed the Factory of the Eccentric Actor—a collective devoted to the revolutionary overhaul of stagnant cultural institutions. The story of these artists and their first steps in cinema is perhaps the best kept secret in early Soviet culture.
Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland
Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption
Jenny Banh examines the attempt to transplant Disney's "happiest place on earth" to Hong Kong, delving into the three-way dynamics of American culture-corporation intentions; Hong Kong, China government investment; and Hong Kong and Chinese audiences. The situation poses special challenges for Disney's efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success.
Undocumented in the U.S. South
How Youth Navigate Racialization in Policy and School Contexts
Undocumented in the U. S. South is a rare look into the everyday realities of undocumented youth in K-12 public schools. In an anti-immigrant policy context, youth and their families navigate historical and current legacies and realities of segregation, racial discrimination and inequality. With a deep three-year ethnographic study, hundreds of hours of observational research, interviews, and policy analysis, Rodriguez traces the lives of undocumented youth across multiple public school settings, calling for policies that are humanizing and rooted in youth experience.
Techno-Orientalism 2.0
New Intersections and Interventions
Techno-Orientalism 2.0 addresses the impact of a volatile post-COVID present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The volume engages with techno-Orientalist inflections in recent high-profile and lesser-known Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policy and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.
Techno-Orientalism 2.0
New Intersections and Interventions
Techno-Orientalism 2.0 addresses the impact of a volatile post-COVID present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The volume engages with techno-Orientalist inflections in recent high-profile and lesser-known Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policy and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.
Steven Spielberg's Children
Steven Spielberg’s Children is the first book to investigate children, childhood, and Spielberg’s employment of child actors together and in depth. Through lively readings of both the celebrated performances he elicits from his young stars as well as less discussed roles this book shows children to be key players in the director’s articulation of childhood since the 1970s.
Race and Place
School Desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland
Race and Place considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George’s County, Maryland from 1945 through 1973.
Decolonial Care
Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean
Decolonial Care examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.
Connective Tissue
Factory Accidents and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery in South India
An ethnography of factory accidents and their attendant reconstructive plastic surgeries in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Connective Tissue explores notions of risk, work and labor practices, and the way meaning is made from experiences of trauma, care, and recovery. The book charts a chronology of the accident and its future impacts.
The Negotiation of Urgency
Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room
The Negotiation of Urgency ethnographically explores the everyday life of an Italian ER, where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration policies, hospital overcrowding, life and death, intersect daily. The analysis of the different, shifting ways in which triage operates and attention circulates in the ER illuminates the practical effects of the changing nature of welfare state in Italy, as elsewhere.
The Black Pack
Comedy, Race, and Resistance
Amidst escalating social tensions in the 1980s, five comedic pioneers—Eddie Murphy, Paul Mooney, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend, and Arsenio Hall—revolutionized American comedy joining forces as Hollywood’s “Black Pack.” In The Black Pack, Artel Great delivers a comprehensive analysis of their work, exploring their success, creative strategies, defiance of systemic barriers, and enduring cultural legacy.
Spaces of Creative Resistance
Social Change Projects in 21st Century East Asia
This edited volume brings together an exciting cross-regional inter-disciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists and others. Each chapter focuses on a different form of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, increased income disparity and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment taking place in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday--focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.
Spaces of Creative Resistance
Social Change Projects in 21st Century East Asia
This edited volume brings together an exciting cross-regional inter-disciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists and others. Each chapter focuses on a different form of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, increased income disparity and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment taking place in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday--focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.
Monsters Vs. Patriarchy
Toxic Imagination in Global Horror Cinema
Monsters vs. Patriarchy examines female monstrosity as it appears in horror films from around the world and considers specific political, scientific, and historical contexts to better understand how we construct and reconstruct monstrosity, using an intersectional approach to examine the imposition of gender and racial hierarchies that support national power structures and horrorize female and other subjects.
Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Media and Journalism
Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Media and Journalism analyzes what motivates and enables women to become media leaders, what obstacles they face, how they solve problems, and the intersecting impacts of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. In addition to looking at executive leadership, it considers moral leadership and willingness to innovate. Spanning the history of U.S. commercial, non-commercial, and alternative media, the book includes cases in print, broadcast, PR, film, and digital media.
Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Media and Journalism
Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Media and Journalism analyzes what motivates and enables women to become media leaders, what obstacles they face, how they solve problems, and the intersecting impacts of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. In addition to looking at executive leadership, it considers moral leadership and willingness to innovate. Spanning the history of U.S. commercial, non-commercial, and alternative media, the book includes cases in print, broadcast, PR, film, and digital media.
Insiders, Outliers
Centering Adult Student Writers at an HBCU
Insiders, Outliers showcases the educational histories and lifewide writing experiences of adult HBCU students to illuminate critical needs for more age-inclusive practices across academia. Their cases also show the centrality of writing in fueling changes for these students and the people and institutions that they care about—including higher education.
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.”
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.”
Hustles for Humanists
Build a Business with Purpose
Discover your full potential.Hustles for Humanists helps you unlock the value of your humanities practice and explore exciting new pathways to achieving economic stability both within and beyond academia.
Faith and the Fragility of Justice
Responses to Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
Faith and the Fragility of Justice illuminates the role of religion in the intersection of race, gender, and power by showing how South African Christian organizations’ responses to apartheid follow a clear path for their attention to gender-based violence in the democracy, arguing that theologies that promote racial justice can facilitate or constrain the pursuit of gender justice.
Crossings
Creative Ecologies of Cruising
A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossing takes queer sex practices seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir.
Contested Curriculum
LGBTQ History Goes to School
Contested Curriculum recounts the fight for LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 history education in the United States. Historian Don Romesburg makes a powerful case for why teaching about LGBTQ lives in schools can help us produce more informed, more thoughtful, and more compassionate citizens.
The Twilight of Rome's Papal Nobility
The Life of Agnese Borghese Boncompagni Ludovisi
The Twilight of Rome’s Nobility provides an intimate look at an illustrious family who grew up surrounded by almost unimaginable wealth and power. A tender elegy to a bygone era, this book offers a first-hand account of late nineteenth-century Italy’s social upheavals as the family’s vast Villa Ludovisi was lost.
The High School
Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024
Taking over a century’s worth of yearbooks from his alma mater, Salinas High School, as a historical archive, acclaimed sociologist Michael A. Messner discovers a not-so-distant time when all the cheerleaders were boys and nearly equal attention was paid to boys’ and girls’ sports. In the process, he explores the changing meanings of high school athletics.
Say Her Name
Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sport
Say Her Name: Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sports offers an in-depth look into the lived experiences of Blackgirlwomen as athletes, activists, and everyday people through a Black feminist lens. With so much research on race centered on Black men and gender research focusing on white women, Say Her Name offers a necessary conversation that places Blackgirlwomen at the center of discussion.
Islamists in a Zionist Coalition
The Political and Religious Origins
Islamists in a Zionist Coalition explores a political drama that shocked Israel and the world in 2021: the decision of an Islamist party to join a Zionist coalition, and its elevation to the position of "king-maker" in Israeli politics. Based on analyses of hundreds of texts and exclusive interviews, it uncovers the religious and political origins of a development that will greatly impact Israeli society in years to come.
Films That Spill
Beyond the Cinema of Transgression
Films That Spill takes up a previously understudied moment in 1980s underground culture in New York City called Cinema of Transgression, offering both a microhistory of the intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes of the time and a glimpse into their afterlives.