More than just gags and giggles, comedy is a powerful force, reflecting our hopes and fears, helping us understand social and political changes, and creating a shared national culture. In this book, historians from the Smithsonian Institution and National Comedy Center tell the stories of the comedians, performances, and provocations that have shaped American history.

This beautifully illustrated volume weaves together personal stories, photographs, drawings, poems of students who have experienced insecurity during childhood into a tapestry of memories about the meaning of home.

In the aftermath of the fall of Roe, this volume offers readers the opportunity to reorient scholarship and understanding about abortion, recognizing what was already true before Roe was overturned and how losing the protections of Roe forced, enabled, and perhaps even facilitated a new era of abortion. Only by understanding the historical moment when Roe fell can we anticipate what might happen next in the ongoing social and political contention over reproductive autonomy and freedom.
 
 

The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast critically examines the entanglements between Jewishness, gender, and animality in modernist Hebrew fiction. Analyzing the effeminate Jew vis-à-vis the animalized woman through cutting-edge theoretical frameworks of animal studies and posthumanism, alongside the established scholarship of Hebrew/Jewish literature and gender studies, this book innovatively revisits the Hebrew literary canon.

The Impossible Woman examines scripted television programs featuring exceptional women and how these shows contribute to sexist realism, or the cultural assumption that there is no alternative to patriarchy. This book explains how the problems facing television’s strongest women illustrates television’s inability to imagine a just feminist future.

Post-Weird explores communities formed when authority and meaning collapse, drawing parallels between serpent-handling churches, conspiracy theorists, pro-anorexia forums, and pseudoscientists. Dr. Matheson critiques their rigid worldviews and advocates for rethinking rhetoric as an approach to navigating the world's ambiguity and uncertainty.
 

Blending candid story-telling, cultural critique, and theory, Darla Schumm invites readers to reflect on the experiences of people with disabilities in religious communities. Schumm argues that it’s not disability that needs healing, it’s ableism that needs healing. To heal ableism, Schumm calls us to enact accessible love.

This short volume considers conversion in a Jewish context as broadly as possible, as an act of socioreligious boundary crossing. It charts how, across the long arc of Jewish history from biblical times to the present, patterns of boundary crossing have developed and shifted, whether of Gentiles entering Jewish life or of Jews exiting from it.

Class Cultures and Social Mobility tells the stories of people who grew up working-class, became the first of their family to graduate from college, and undertook professional work that serves working-class people, drawing upon their roots to construct careers aimed at building stability, mobility, and fulfillment for the next generation.

Chronicling the life of Korea’s “National Poet,” Yun Dong-ju (1917-1945), Song WooHye explores the historical and political backgrounds that influenced Yun’s development as a poet and a patriot. Universally acclaimed as the most comprehensive and definitive biography of the poet in South Korea, and now translated into English by Flora M. Kim, it is an indispensable guide to understanding Yun Dong-ju and Korea’s colonial period.
 

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). 

In these two stories, "Granny Wild Goose" and "The Root's Tale," award-winning South Korean writer Kim Soom presents portraits of complex women who have emerged wiser from life’s brutality. One is a former comfort woman, one is a modern woman in a failing relationship, yet neither flinches away from their lives. The sensitive translation maintains Kim’s beautiful imagery and musical prose.
 

In his poetry collection, Flatfish, Moon Tae-jun offers an aesthetic that emphasizes the author’s exploration of the inner self. At times sparse and allusive, his poems use blank space and other stylistic considerations to convey a voice and thought that ranges from the contemplative to the surreal and absurd. Moon’s poems suggest Buddhist ideologies, natural images, and Korean temples.

Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women’s Labor explores the global dating industry, challenging stereotypes by examining how men seek "feminine capital" in international partners. Through twelve years of research, the book reveals how gender, labor, and cultural dynamics shape relationships across different regions.

Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women’s Labor explores the global dating industry, challenging stereotypes by examining how men seek "feminine capital" in international partners. Through twelve years of research, the book reveals how gender, labor, and cultural dynamics shape relationships across different regions.