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 1,001-1,040 of 2,578 items.
Children as Caregivers
The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia
By Jean Hunleth
Rutgers University Press
Medical anthropologist Jean Hunleth chronicles the experiences of children living with parents and guardians who are suffering from these infectious diseases and shows how their perspectives matter in the global debates about health care. Children as Caregivers examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realize how children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill.
The Three Axial Ages
Moral, Material, Mental
By John Torpey
Rutgers University Press
How can historical developments and discoveries be used to affect future outcomes? Sociologist and historian John Torpey proposes that the “Axial Age,” a period in the first millennium BCE when major religious and intellectual developments emerged, can be used to directly affect present social problems, from economic inequality to ecological destruction.
Hollywood's Hawaii
Race, Nation, and War
Rutgers University Press
Hollywood’s Hawaii is the first full-length study of the film industry’s intense engagement with Hawaii and the South Pacific from 1898 to the present. This book presents a history of cinema that examines Hawaii and the Pacific and its representation in film in the context of colonialism, war, Orientalism, occupation, military buildup, and entertainment.
Soft Corruption
How Unethical Conduct Undermines Good Government and What To Do About It
Rutgers University Press
New Jersey has long been a breeding ground for political corruption, much of it perfectly legal. In Soft Corruption, a former state senator recounts his fifty-year fight to expose such misconduct. William E. Schluter doesn’t simply wade through New Jersey’s muck, but provides concrete suggestions for how our political system might be reformed and how citizens can effect that change.
Superman
The Persistence of an American Icon
By Ian Gordon
Rutgers University Press
Superman is an icon of the American Way. Examining his many appearances over eighty years in comics, films, television series, and other media, Ian Gordon explores the dynamic process of mythmaking surrounding the character. Digging into comics archives, he reveals the prominent roles fans and collectors have played in remembering, interpreting, and reimagining Superman’s iconography.
Republic on the Wire
Cable Television, Pluralism, and the Politics of New Technologies, 1948-1984
Rutgers University Press
The history of cable television in America is far older than MTV, ESPN, and HBO. Tracing the origins of cable back to the late 1940s, media scholar John McMurria also locates the roots of many current debates about premium television, taste hierarchies, minority programming, content restriction, and corporate ownership. Drawing from rare archives, Republic on the Wire reconstructs the pivotal moments when elite policymakers and disenfranchised viewers clashed over the future of cable television and the meaning of American democracy.
College in Prison
Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration
Rutgers University Press
This book tells the story of the Bard Prison Initiative—a unique example of academic excellence achieved inside high-security prisons across New York State. The rigor of how students learn, and the careers they go on to pursue once released, force us to rethink our beliefs about who is in prison, reimagine the way forward out of mass incarceration, and renew our faith in the relevance of liberal learning.
U.S. Women's History
Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood
Edited by Leslie Brown, Jacqueline Castledine, and Anne Valk; Foreword by Deborah Gray White; Preface by Nancy A. Hewitt
Rutgers University Press
Spanning the antebellum era to the present day, the ten original essays in U.S. Women's History represent a cross-section of current scholarship, examining both the causes that have united American women and the conflicts that have divided them. The book offers a fresh take on familiar events and figures, from Rosa Parks to Take Back the Night marches, while vividly conveying the multi-textured and multi-hued tapestry that is U.S. women’s history.
Redefining Japaneseness
Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland
Rutgers University Press
Redefining Japaneseness chronicles how Japanese American migrants to Japan experience both racial inclusion and cultural dislocation while negotiating between the categories of Japanese and “foreigner.” Drawing from extensive observations and interviews with Japanese Americans who are geographically, culturally, and linguistically diverse, Jane H. Yamashiro reveals wide variations in how Japanese Americans perceive both Japaneseness and Americanness. Her findings have major implications for both Asian American studies and scholarship on transnational migration and global diasporic identity.
Jew
Rutgers University Press
This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew—charting the past meanings, present usages, and possible futures of a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but at the core of how Western civilization has imagined the Other. Tracing the word’s evolution, Cynthia M. Baker also interrogates the contested categories of “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion,” while providing a glimpse of what Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, and uncertain identities.
Selling Women's History
Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture
Rutgers University Press
Assessing a dazzling array of media from the 1900s to the 1970s, including advertisements, films, magazines, and greeting cards, Selling Women’s History reveals how popular culture helped teach Americans about the accomplishments of their foremothers. Emily Westkaemper examines how Madison Avenue co-opted women’s history, using it to sell everything from Betsy Ross Red lipstick to Virginia Slims cigarettes. But she also shows how pioneering adwomen and female historians used consumer culture to publicize histories ignored elsewhere. Their feminist work challenged sexist assumptions about women’s subordinate roles.
Nursing with a Message
Public Health Demonstration Projects in New York City
Rutgers University Press
Nursing with a Message transports readers to New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, charting the rise and fall of two community health centers. Patricia D’Antonio examines the day-to-day operations of these clinics, as well as the community outreach work done by nurses who visited schools, churches, and homes. Assessing both the successes and failures of these public health projects, she also traces their legacy in shaping both the best and worst elements of today’s primary care system.
Movie Comics
Page to Screen/Screen to Page
By Blair Davis
Rutgers University Press
Movie Comics is the first book to study the long history of comics-to-film and film-to-comics adaptations, covering everything from silent films starring Happy Hooligan to sound films and serials featuring Dick Tracy and Superman to comic books starring John Wayne and Bob Hope. Blair Davis tracks the artistic coevolution of films and comics, investigates how the film and comics industries joined forces to expand the reach of their various brands, and contemplates our abiding desire to experience the same characters and stories in multiple forms.
Sociology on Film
Postwar Hollywood's Prestige Commodity
By Chris Cagle
Rutgers University Press
After World War II, Hollywood’s “social problem films”—tackling topical issues that included racism, crime, mental illness, and drug abuse—were hits with critics and general moviegoers alike. Sociology on Film considers the postwar “problem film” as a form of popular sociology, translating contemporary policy debates and intellectual discussions into cinematic form. Examining the politics and aesthetics of films like Gentleman’s Agreement and The Lost Weekend, Chris Cagle explores how the genre both shaped and reflected the middle-class audience’s views of society.
Scarlet and Black
Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History
Edited by Marisa J. Fuentes and Deborah Gray White
Rutgers University Press
Scarlet and Black documents the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty. The contributors offer this history as a usable one—to strengthen Rutgers and help direct its course for the future.
The work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History.
The work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History.
Moving Performances
Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage
Rutgers University Press
Offering innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect, Moving Performances introduces readers to four remarkable divas from the early twentieth century—Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker—who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Scheper rejects iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, and vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements.
Reel Inequality
Hollywood Actors and Racism
Rutgers University Press
Not only are #OscarsSoWhite, but white male gatekeepers dominate Hollywood, breeding a culture of ethnocentric storytelling and casting. Reel Inequality examines the structural barriers actors of color face in Hollywood, while shedding light on how they survive in a racist industry. Through nearly a hundred interviews with working actors, Nancy Wang Yuen reveals the biases they experience in talent agents’ offices, at auditions, and on sets, yet also provides vital insights from actors of color who have succeeded on their own terms.
Why Afterschool Matters
Rutgers University Press
Offering an in-depth and long-term examination of how extracurricular activities impact the lives of disadvantaged youth, Why Afterschool Matters tracks ten Mexican American students who participated in the same afterschool program. Discovering that participation in the program was life-changing for some students, yet had only a minimal effect on others, sociologist Ingrid A. Nelson investigates the factors behind these very different outcomes. Though it focuses on a single program, this book’s findings have major implications for education policy nationwide.
Home Safe Home
Housing Solutions for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence
Rutgers University Press
For survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), housing is a key to establishing a new life free from abuse. Home Safe Home offers a multifaceted analysis that both values the perspectives of IPV survivors and accounts for the practical challenges involved in providing them with adequate permanent housing. As it traces how housing options and support mechanisms for IPV survivors have evolved over time, this book also offers innovative suggestions for how to better meet the needs of this vulnerable population.
The Extraordinary Image
Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema
Rutgers University Press
The Extraordinary Image takes readers on a fascinating journey through the lives and films of three great directors—Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick—seeking to identify the qualities that made them cinematic visionaries. Offering a deeply personal set of reflections on three artists who have changed the way he understands movies, acclaimed scholar Robert P. Kolker leads readers on an exploration of how movies work, what they mean, and why they bring us so much pleasure.
Vanishing Bees
Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health
Rutgers University Press
In 2005, beekeepers in the United States began observing a mysterious and disturbing phenomenon: once-healthy colonies of bees were suddenly collapsing, leaving behind empty hives. As it explores the contours of this crisis, Vanishing Bees considers an equally urgent question: what happens when beekeepers, farmers, scientists, agrichemical corporations, and government regulators approach the problem from different vantage points and cannot see eye-to-eye? The answer may have profound consequences for every person who wants to keep fresh food on the table.
Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Theory and Practice across Disciplines
Rutgers University Press
Universities in North America and Europe increasingly provide financial incentives to encourage collaboration between faculty in different disciplines, based on the premise that this yields more innovative and sophisticated research. Drawing from a wealth of empirical data, the contributors to Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration put that theory to the test. What they find reveals how interdisciplinarity is not living up to its potential, but also suggests how universities might foster more genuinely collaborative and productive research. Chapter 10 is available Open Access here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883/.
Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Theory and Practice across Disciplines
Rutgers University Press
Universities in North America and Europe increasingly provide financial incentives to encourage collaboration between faculty in different disciplines, based on the premise that this yields more innovative and sophisticated research. Drawing from a wealth of empirical data, the contributors to Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration put that theory to the test. What they find reveals how interdisciplinarity is not living up to its potential, but also suggests how universities might foster more genuinely collaborative and productive research. Chapter 10 is available Open Access here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883/.
The Dominican Racial Imaginary
Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola
Rutgers University Press
This book begins with a simple question: why do so many Dominicans deny the African components of their DNA, culture, and history? By poring through rare historical documents and conducting extensive interviews, Milagros Ricourt uncovers a complex and often contradictory Dominican racial imaginary. Finding that the country’s social elite has long propagated a national creation myth that revolves around the union of native islanders and Spanish settlers, she also explores how many Dominicans subvert this official narrative and celebrate their African heritage.
War Is Not a Game
The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built
By Nan Levinson
Rutgers University Press
On July 23, 2004, five marines, two soldiers, and one airman became the most unlikely of antiwar activists. War Is Not a Game tells the story of these men and women, and the many others who joined them, harnessing their disillusionment, idealism, and determination to become leaders of a nationwide movement, Iraq Veterans Against the War. Nan Levinson chronicles the accomplishments of these brave veterans, showing that sometimes the most vital battles take place on the home front.
Communities of Health Care Justice
Rutgers University Press
U.S. health care has often been conceived as a social good, and more specifically as a national good. Communities of Health Care Justice presents an alternate model, making a powerful ethical argument for why smaller communities—bound together by culture, religion, gender, race, and place—should be regarded as critical moral actors that play key roles in defining and upholding just health policy. Furthermore, it outlines the systemic, conceptual, and structural changes required to move toward this health care justice.
City Kids
Transforming Racial Baggage
Rutgers University Press
City Kids profiles fifth-graders in one of New York City’s most diverse public schools, detailing how they collectively developed a sophisticated understanding of race that challenged many of the stereotypes, myths, and commonplaces they had learned from mainstream American culture. Drawing from more than a year of close observations and interviews with students, anthropologist Maria Kromidas not only examines how we can best support children’s antiracist practices, but also considers what they might have to teach us.
Dads, Kids, and Fitness
A Father's Guide to Family Health
Rutgers University Press
This book challenges dads to become more health-conscious in how they live and raise their children. William Marsiglio draws from revealing interviews with a diverse sample of dads and pediatric healthcare professionals, as well as his own unique personal experiences, to provide constructive advice for fathers and the institutions that might support them. Dads, Kids, and Fitness breathes new life into discussions about fathering and manhood, while adding a fresh dimension to the conversation about public health.
Costume, Makeup, and Hair
Edited by Adrienne L. McLean
Rutgers University Press
From the Behind the Silver Screen series, Costume, Makeup, and Hair charts the development of these three crafts in the American film industry from the 1890s to the present. Each chapter examines a different era, revealing how these artistic fields have fostered creative collaboration and improvisation, often fashioning striking looks and ingenious effects out of limited materials, while continually adapting to new technologies, fashions, and economic conditions.
Never Done
A History of Women’s Work in Media Production
By Erin Hill
Rutgers University Press
Never Done introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry—from dressmakers to secretaries to script readers. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. As it pores through rare archives and integrates the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, this book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible.
Never Done
A History of Women's Work in Media Production
By Erin Hill
Rutgers University Press
Never Done introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry—from dressmakers to secretaries to script readers. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. As it pores through rare archives and integrates the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, this book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible.
Reichsrock
The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Hate Music
By Kirsten Dyck
Rutgers University Press
Reichsrock shines a light on the international white-power music industry, the fandom it has spawned, and the virulently racist beliefs it perpetuates. Kirsten Dyck investigates how white-power bands and their fans have used the internet to spread their message worldwide, while closely examining distinctly local white-power scenes in the United States, England, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Latin America. Tracking the very real violence this music fandom has sparked, she sounds an urgent message about a global menace.
The Other Air Force
U.S. Efforts to Reshape Middle Eastern Media Since 9/11
Rutgers University Press
As it seeks to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, the United States has poured millions of dollars into local television and radio programming. However, as this fascinating new book shows, the Middle Eastern media producers who rely on these funds are hardly puppets on an American string, but instead contribute their own political and artistic agendas. The Other Air Force reveals the remarkable creative output that can emerge even from the world’s tensest conflict zones.
From Workshop to Waste Magnet
Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region
Rutgers University Press
From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Tracing the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, sociologist Diane Sicotte uncovers how only a few communities came to host many types of polluting or waste disposal land uses. What she finds reveals the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and inequality.
Saving Face
The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth
Rutgers University Press
The Asian immigrant family myth celebrates Asian families for upholding the traditional heteronormative ideal of the “normal (white) American family” yet also demonizes them for reinforcing oppressive and backwards cultural values. Saving Face cuts through these myths, offering a more nuanced portrait of Asian immigrant families in a changing world. Angie Y. Chung examines how the grown children of Korean and Chinese immigrants emotionally negotiate the complex and conflicted feelings they have toward their family responsibilities and upbringing through new modes of love, communication, and caregiving.
Fantasies of Neglect
Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction
Rutgers University Press
From Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, American popular culture is filled with fictional children who journey through cities, unsupervised by adults. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient urban child originated and considers why it persists, even in the era of stranger danger and helicopter parenting. Drawing from a wide range of films, novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have been central to how Americans imagine the freedom and neglect of children.
Imagining Asia in the Americas
Edited by Zelideth María Rivas and Debbie Lee-DiStefano
Rutgers University Press
Imagining Asia in the Americas investigates the myriad ways that Asians throughout North and South America use language, literature, religion, commerce, and other practices to establish a sense of community and negotiate between their native and adopted cultural identities. Drawing from a rich array of source materials, including texts in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Gujarati that have never before been translated into English, this groundbreaking work opens up a conversation between various Asian communities within the Americas and beyond.
Imagining Asia in the Americas
Edited by Zelideth María Rivas and Debbie Lee-DiStefano
Rutgers University Press
Imagining Asia in the Americas investigates the myriad ways that Asians throughout North and South America use language, literature, religion, commerce, and other practices to establish a sense of community and negotiate between their native and adopted cultural identities. Drawing from a rich array of source materials, including texts in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Gujarati that have never before been translated into English, this groundbreaking work opens up a conversation between various Asian communities within the Americas and beyond.
Gender Violence in Peace and War
States of Complicity
Rutgers University Press
This powerful new book argues that violence against women should be understood as a systemic problem—one for which the state must be held accountable. The essays in Gender Violence in Peace and War examine a variety of cases where the state facilitates, legitimates, or perpetuates violence against women—a continuum that ranges from state-sponsored rape and torture in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Kenya to lax prosecution of domestic violence and sex trafficking in Russia and the United States.
Gender Violence in Peace and War
States of Complicity
Rutgers University Press
This powerful new book argues that violence against women should be understood as a systemic problem—one for which the state must be held accountable. The essays in Gender Violence in Peace and War examine a variety of cases where the state facilitates, legitimates, or perpetuates violence against women—a continuum that ranges from state-sponsored rape and torture in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Kenya to lax prosecution of domestic violence and sex trafficking in Russia and the United States.