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 2,552 items.
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.
Deconstructing the High Line
Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park
Edited by Christoph Lindner and Brian Rosa
Rutgers University Press
The High Line, an innovative promenade created on a disused elevated railway in Manhattan, is a new “hot” iconic landmark, but is it a model of urban revitalization or a bellwether of gentrification? A diverse group, including planners and architects directly involved in its design, assess it critically, exploring its aesthetic, economic, ecological, symbolic, and social impacts.
Deconstructing the High Line
Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park
Edited by Christoph Lindner and Brian Rosa
Rutgers University Press
The High Line, an innovative promenade created on a disused elevated railway in Manhattan, is a new “hot” iconic landmark, but is it a model of urban revitalization or a bellwether of gentrification? A diverse group, including planners and architects directly involved in its design, assess it critically, exploring its aesthetic, economic, ecological, symbolic, and social impacts.
Life after Guns
Reciprocity and Respect among Young Men in Liberia
Rutgers University Press
Life After Guns explores how ex-combatants and other post-war youth negotiated a depleted and difficult social and cultural landscape in the years following Liberia’s fourteen-year bloody civil war. Abby Hardgrove focuses on the structural constraints and household and family organizations that either helped or limited opportunities as these young men grew into adulthood.
Frederick Novy and the Development of Bacteriology in Medicine
Rutgers University Press
Medical historian, medical researcher, and clinician Powel H. Kazanjian uses Novy’s archived letters, laboratory notebooks, lecture notes, and published works to examine medical research and educational activities at the University of Michigan and other key medical schools during a formative period in modern U.S. medical science.
Black Movements
Performance and Cultural Politics
Rutgers University Press
Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Colbert offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and American studies.
The Holocaust Averted
An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967
Rutgers University Press
In The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938–1967, Jeffrey Gurock imagines what might have happened to the Jewish community in the United States if the Holocaust had never occurred and challenges readers to contemplate how the road to acceptance and empowerment for today’s American Jews would have been harder than it actually was. As Gurock tells his tale, he concludes every chapter with a short section that describes what actually happened and, thus, further educates the reader.
Discriminating Taste
How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution
Rutgers University Press
A provocative look at contemporary food culture, Discriminating Taste critically examines cultural touchstones from Ratatouille to The Biggest Loser, identifying how “good food” is conflated with high status. Drawing historical parallels with the Gilded Age, Margot Finn argues that the rise of gourmet, ethnic, diet, and organic foods must be understood in tandem with the ever-widening income inequality gap.
Parkour and the City
Risk, Masculinity, and Meaning in a Postmodern Sport
Rutgers University Press
In the increasingly popular sport of parkour, athletes run, jump, climb, flip, and vault through city streetscapes. In Parkour and the City, Jeffrey L. Kidder examines the ways in which this internet-friendly twenty-first-century sport involves a creative appropriation of urban spaces as well as a method of everyday risk-taking by a youth culture that valorizes individuals who successfully manage danger.
Writing America
Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (A Reader's Companion)
Rutgers University Press
Writing America takes readers on an eclectic tour of historic sites that have been pivotal to the making of American literature, reflecting the true diversity of the nation and its authors. Profusely illustrated, it is the literary gift book for 2015.
American Girls and Global Responsibility
A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War
Rutgers University Press
American Girls and Global Responsibility brings together Cold War culture studies, girls’ studies, and the history of gender and militarization to shed new light on how age and gender work together to form categories of citizenship. Jennifer Helgren shows the particular ways that girls’ identities and roles were configured, thus shaping their sense of responsibilities as citizens.
New African Cinema
Rutgers University Press
New African Cinema examines the pressing social, cultural, economic, and historical issues explored by African filmmakers in the new millennium by offering an overview of the development of postcolonial African cinema as it has evolved since the 1960s into the new medium, known as “new African cinema,” it is today.
Digital Music Videos
Rutgers University Press
In Digital Music Videos, Steven Shaviro surveys a wide range of music videos, highlighting some of their most striking innovations. In sampling and reworking a century’s worth of movies and other pop culture artifacts, these videos create a whole new digital world for the music industry that offers a plethora of visions and sounds never before encountered.
My City Highrise Garden
Rutgers University Press
Nearly four decades ago, when best-selling author Susan Brownmiller first planted her garden in an apartment terrace twenty stories above street level in the borderland between Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and the Meatpacking District, she could little imagine the struggles and triumphs she and her plants would experience over the years. Filled with humor and candor, My City Highrise Garden tells the story of how she managed to carve out a little home for the natural world in a seemingly inhospitable big city.
Teacher Education across Minority-Serving Institutions
Programs, Policies, and Social Justice
Edited by Emery Petchauer and Lynnette Mawhinney
Rutgers University Press
Teacher Education across Minority-Serving Institutions focuses on teacher education across a diverse array of institutions. It pushes for scholars to consider that racial diversity in teacher education is not simply an end in itself, but is rather, a means to accomplish other goals, such as developing justice-oriented and asset-based pedagogies.
Teacher Education across Minority-Serving Institutions
Programs, Policies, and Social Justice
Edited by Emery Petchauer and Lynnette Mawhinney
Rutgers University Press
Teacher Education across Minority-Serving Institutions focuses on teacher education across a diverse array of institutions. It pushes for scholars to consider that racial diversity in teacher education is not simply an end in itself, but is rather, a means to accomplish other goals, such as developing justice-oriented and asset-based pedagogies.
Zombie Cinema
By Ian Olney
Rutgers University Press
The zombie apocalypse is here! The living dead have been lurking in popular culture since the 1930s, but they are now ubiquitous. Presenting a historical overview of zombies in film and on television, Zombie Cinema also explores this globalized phenomenon, examining why the dead have captured the imagination of twenty-first-century audiences worldwide.
Disney Culture
By John Wills
Rutgers University Press
The Walt Disney Company has grown into a diversified global media giant, but is it still possible to identify a coherent Disney ethos? Examining everything from theme parks to merchandising to animation to live-action films, Disney Culture proposes that they all follow a core corporate philosophy dating back to the 1920s.
A Professor at the End of Time
The Work and Future of the Professoriate
By John Best
Rutgers University Press
A Professor at the End of Time tells one professor’s story in the context of the rapid reconfiguration of higher education going on now, and analyzes what the job included before the supernova of technological innovation, the general influx of less-well-prepared students, and the diminution of state and federal support wrought wholesale changes on the profession.
Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work
Edited by Parin Dossa and Cati Coe
Rutgers University Press
Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work documents the social and emotional contributions of older persons to their families in settings shaped by migration, their everyday lives in domestic and community spaces, and in the context of intergenerational relationships and diasporas.
Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work
Edited by Parin Dossa and Cati Coe
Rutgers University Press
Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work documents the social and emotional contributions of older persons to their families in settings shaped by migration, their everyday lives in domestic and community spaces, and in the context of intergenerational relationships and diasporas.
When Riot Cops Are Not Enough
The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland
By Mike King
Rutgers University Press
In When Riot Cops Are Not Enough, sociologist Mike King examines the policing, and broader political repression, of the Occupy Oakland movement. King’s active and daily participation in that movement provides a unique insider perspective to illustrate how the Oakland police and city administrators lost the ability to effectively control the movement.
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.
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