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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 1,201-1,240 of 2,552 items.
The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos
Uncovering Hidden Influences from Spain to Mexico
Rutgers University Press
In The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos, Marie-Theresa Hernández unmasks the secret lives of conversos and judaizantes and their likely influence onthe Catholic Churchin the New World. On a Da Vinci Code – style quest, Hernández persisted in hunting against resistance for a trove of forgotten manuscripts at the New York Public Library. These documents, once unearthed, describe the Jewish/Christian religious beliefs of an early nineteenth century Catholic priest in Mexico City, focusing on the relationship between the Virgin of Guadalupe and Judaism.
Abortion in the American Imagination
Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940
Rutgers University Press
Abortion in the American Imagination takes us back to the early twentieth century, when American writers first dared to broach the controversial subject of abortion. Putting authors like Wharton and Faulkner into conversation with the era’s films and non-fiction, Karen Weingarten uncovers a vigorous public debate decades before Roe v. Wade. Along the way, she discovers not only how discourses on abortion have changed dramatically, but also how they’ve shaped our very sense of what it means to be an American.
War Echoes
Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production
Rutgers University Press
War Echoes examines how Latina/o cultural production has engaged with U.S. militarism in the post–Viet Nam era. Analyzing literature alongside film, memoir, and activism, Ariana E. Vigil highlights the productive interplay among social, political, and cultural movements while exploring Latina/o responses to U.S. intervention in Central America and the Middle East.
Inside Newark
Decline, Rebellion, and the Search for Transformation
Rutgers University Press
For decades, leaders in Newark, New Jersey, have claimed their city is about to return to its economic and social vibrancy of yesteryear. Tracing Newark’s history from the 1950’s through the reign of Cory Booker, Curvin approaches his story as both an insider rooting for Newark and as an objective social scientist illuminating the causes and effects of the sweeping changes in the city’s economy and demography. Readers are witness to the weakness contributing to Newark’s downfall and treated to Curvin’s insightful recommendations for a true turnaround.
Anatomy of a Robot
Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People
Rutgers University Press
Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human.
Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village
Shaping Hierarchy and Desire
Rutgers University Press
Childhood in a Sri Lankan Village starts with a mystery: why do Sri Lankan children, normally rambunctious and demanding as toddlers, become uncannily compliant as they grow older? To answer this question, anthropologist Bambi Chapin spent over a decade tracking the development of children in a rural Sri Lankan village. What she learned gives us a fresh perspective on the ways children think and on how cultural beliefs are passed down through the generations.
Feminism as Life's Work
Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars
Rutgers University Press
Tracing the intertwined lives and work of four women who carried forward the cause of feminism after the suffrage victory in 1920, this book recasts the “doldrums” of the women’s movement as a time of experimentation in new realms—the National Women’s Party; sexuality, marriage, and relations with men; and work and financial independence—and documents struggles that prefigure those of a later generation.
Sacred Divorce
Religion, Therapeutic Culture, and Ending Life Partnerships
Rutgers University Press
In a world where marriage remains a largely sacred undertaking, what role does religion play when such bonds are broken? Kathleen Jenkins takes up this question in a work that combines broad sociological analysis with the intimate stories of the clergy and the faithful across the religious spectrum as they talk about experiencing a break in core family and religious bonds. Discussed within are the associated social emotions, the spiritual tools available to them, and the larger cultural strategies and approaches in institutions that assist in restructuring family and religious identity.
Sacred Divorce
Religion, Therapeutic Culture, and Ending Life Partnerships
Rutgers University Press
In a world where marriage remains a largely sacred undertaking, what role does religion play when such bonds are broken? Kathleen Jenkins takes up this question in a work that combines broad sociological analysis with the intimate stories of the clergy and the faithful across the religious spectrum as they talk about experiencing a break in core family and religious bonds. Discussed within are the associated social emotions, the spiritual tools available to them, and the larger cultural strategies and approaches in institutions that assist in restructuring family and religious identity.
Kids in the Middle
How Children of Immigrants Negotiate Community Interactions for Their Families
Rutgers University Press
Kids in the Middle explores how children of immigrants use their language capabilities, knowledge of American culture, and facility with media content and devices to help their parents forge connections with local schools, healthcare facilities, and social services as they adjust to life in the United States. Through in-depth inquiry in one Southern California community, Vikki S. Katz explores the important contributions children make to the functioning of their immigrant families and considers what social workers and parents in diverse community can do to support them.
Conceiving Cuba
Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era
By Elise Andaya
Rutgers University Press
Conceiving Cuba offers an intimate look at how the institutions promoting the well-being of mothers and children, once a cornerstone of the socialist system, collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union, throwing both individual families and the nation itself into profound crisis. Drawing from years of first-hand observations and interviews, anthropologist Elise Andaya takes us inside the island’s households and medical facilities, as they struggle to make do with limited resources and grapple with difficult questions concerning family planning, reproductive health, and the future of the socialist revolution itself.
Modern Motherhood
An American History
Rutgers University Press
How did mothers transform from parents of secondary importance in the colonies to having their multiple and complex roles continuously connected to the well-being of the nation? In the first comprehensive history of motherhood in the United States, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves explores how tensions over the maternal role have been part and parcel of the development of American society.
Finding the Right Psychiatrist
A Guide for Discerning Consumers
Rutgers University Press
Choosing the right psychiatrist is as important as it is difficult. Combining forty years of experience as a practicing psychiatrist with an honest assessment of the trends and current issues patients face when presented with prospective psychiatric treatments, Dr. Robert Taylor provides an invaluable guide to readers considering psychiatric help for the first time or to those changing doctors in an effort to find a better treatment. Dr. Taylor carefully distinguishes what few conditions are established scientifically with clear, proven pharmacologic remedies from the many that do not offer benefits from such treatments.
Genocide as Social Practice
Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina's Military Juntas
Rutgers University Press
Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, Argentinean social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators.
Framing the Rape Victim
Gender and Agency Reconsidered
Rutgers University Press
In recent years, members of legal, law enforcement, media and academic circles have portrayed rape as a special kind of crime distinct from other forms of violence. In Framing the Rape Victim, Carine M. Mardorossian argues that this differential treatment of rape has exacerbated the ghettoizing of sexual violence along gendered lines. Both a critical analysis and a call to action, Framing the Rape Victim shows that rape is not a special interest issue that pertains just to women but a pervasive one that affects our society as a whole.
Feminism and Popular Culture
Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique
Rutgers University Press
Over the past fifty years, feminism has revolutionized the lives of American women. Yet much of our popular culture seems to be set in an alternate universe filled with retro images of femininity: suburban Stepford wives, maniacal career women, and alluring amnesiacs. Feminism and Popular Culture investigates why contemporary media is being haunted by the ghosts of feminism’s past—and considers what this means for its future.
Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán
From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement
By Xóchitl Bada
Rutgers University Press
In this groundbreaking new book, Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán, Xóchitl Bada reveals how Mexican hometown associations, groups consisting of immigrants from the same small towns, have become a surprisingly powerful force for mobilizing social change in both the United States and Mexico. By giving voice to the members of a group of Chicago-based hometown associations from the state of Michoacán, Xóchitl Bada draws much larger conclusions about the emergence and global impact of new transnational forms of community activism.
Shaping the Future of African American Film
Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers
Rutgers University Press
Through analysis of the production, funding, and content of thousands of films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, Monica White Ndounou reveals the process of history and film development where race-based economics and the politics of distribution hamstring the making, the expression, and the creative freedom of films about, by, or for people of color.
Gender and Violence in Haiti
Women’s Path from Victims to Agents
Rutgers University Press
Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. In Gender and Violence in Haiti, award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visits Haiti to discover why these women act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence.
Gender and Violence in Haiti
Women's Path from Victims to Agents
Rutgers University Press
Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. In Gender and Violence in Haiti, award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visits Haiti to discover why these women act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence.
Worried Sick
How Stress Hurts Us and How to Bounce Back
By Deborah Carr
Rutgers University Press
Thousands of academic studies reveal that stressful life events, ongoing strains, and even daily hassles affect every aspect of our physical and emotional well-being. Cutting through a sea of scientific research and theories, Worried Sick answers many questions about how stress gets under our skin, makes us sick, and how and why people cope with stress differently. Included are several standard stress and coping checklists, allowing readers to gauge their own stress levels.
Defining Student Success
The Role of School and Culture
By Lisa M. Nunn
Rutgers University Press
A provocative work that will prompt a thorough reevaluation of the culture of secondary education, Defining Student Success shows how different schools, promoting modified versions of larger cultural ideas of success, foster distinct understandings of what it takes to succeed—understandings that do more to reproduce a socioeconomic status quo than to promote upward mobility.
Defining Student Success
The Role of School and Culture
By Lisa M. Nunn
Rutgers University Press
A provocative work that will prompt a thorough reevaluation of the culture of secondary education, Defining Student Success shows how different schools, promoting modified versions of larger cultural ideas of success, foster distinct understandings of what it takes to succeed—understandings that do more to reproduce a socioeconomic status quo than to promote upward mobility.
Rachel Carson and Her Sisters
Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America's Environment
Rutgers University Press
In Rachel Carson and Her Sisters, Robert K. Musil redefines the achievements and legacy of environmental pioneer and scientist Rachel Carson, linking her work to a wide network of American women activists and writers and introducing her to a new, contemporary audience.On the fiftieth anniversary of her death, Rachel Carson and Her Sisters helps underscore Carson’s enduring environmental legacy and brings to life the achievements of women writers and advocates who influenced and were influenced by her and Silent Spring.
Salvadoran Imaginaries
Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption
Rutgers University Press
Accessible and beautifully written, Rivas examines how El Salvador’s post-war identity has been transformed by communication technologies, journalistic narratives of migratory experiences, and the complex relationships between private and public spaces of consumption and belonging. This book shows how seemingly disparate sites of experience and representation—call centers, newspapers, shopping malls, and literature—can reveal the complicated process of a nation reinventing itself.
Salvadoran Imaginaries
Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption
Rutgers University Press
Accessible and beautifully written, Rivas examines how El Salvador’s post-war identity has been transformed by communication technologies, journalistic narratives of migratory experiences, and the complex relationships between private and public spaces of consumption and belonging. This book shows how seemingly disparate sites of experience and representation—call centers, newspapers, shopping malls, and literature—can reveal the complicated process of a nation reinventing itself.
Mining Coal and Undermining Gender
Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West
Rutgers University Press
Among the miners of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin—the largest coal-producing region in the U.S.—anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston reveals how the mining industry, though heavily masculinized, generates new configurations of the “working family”—a kind of kinship based on the shared burdens of shift work and concerns for safety, which challenges and reproduces gender differences in everyday working and family life.
Holocaust Memory Reframed
Museums and the Challenges of Representation
Rutgers University Press
In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines Holocaust representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States.
Managing Madness in the Community
The Challenge of Contemporary Mental Health Care
Rutgers University Press
The mentally ill might not go to Shutter Island or the Cuckoo’s Nest, but that doesn’t mean they’re getting the best care they can. With extensive, unique ethnographic research at two community-based organizations that provide the bulk of such care, Managing Madness in the Community lays bare the true nature, effects, and costs of our fragmented mental health system and provides a useful broad framework that will help researchers and policymakers understand the key forces influencing the system today.
Cinematic Canines
Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film
Edited by Adrienne L. McLean
Rutgers University Press
Dogs have been part of motion pictures since the movies began. They have been featured onscreen in various capacities, from any number of “man’s best friends” (Rin Tin Tin, Asta, Toto, Lassie, Benji, Uggie, and many, many more) to the psychotic Cujo. The contributors to Cinematic Canines take a close look at Hollywood films and beyond in order to show that the popularity of dogs on the screen cannot be separated from their increasing presence in our lives over the past century.
Treating AIDS
Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention
Rutgers University Press
In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practices of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in south Florida. Using in-depth ethnographic data, she underscores the difference between the global response to this public health crisis—where everyone is implicated as a potential carrier of risk—and the uncontested existence of racial and ethnic disparities in HIV/AIDS rates, access to treatment and care, and, especially, the stigma borne by carriers of the disease.
American Melancholy
Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century
Rutgers University Press
In American Melancholy, Laura D. Hirshbein traces the growth of depression as an object of medical study and as a consumer commodity and illustrates how and why depression came to be such a huge medical, social, and cultural phenomenon. This is the first book to address gender issues in the construction of depression, explores key questions of how its diagnosis was developed, how it has been used, and how we should question its application in American society.
The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma
How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance
Rutgers University Press
Drawing on repeated interviews with forty-nine women newly released from prison, Leverentz explores the conflicting messages these women receive about who they are and who they should be—from prison staff, workers at halfway houses and drug treatment programs, family members, and friends. These messages, she shows, shape the narratives the women create to explain their past records and guide their future behavior.
Dream Nation
Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence
Rutgers University Press
In this provocative new book, Maria Acosta Cruz investigates why the rhetoric of independence is so pivotal to Puerto Rican culture, despite the fact that the island’s voters have consistently rejected calls for national sovereignty. Weaving together texts from literature, history, and popular culture, Dream Nation shows how this seemingly revolutionary and populist iconography of independence has become an established orthodoxy.
War and Disease
Biomedical Research on Malaria in the Twentieth Century
By Leo Slater
Rutgers University Press
Malaria is one of the leading killers in the world today. Though drugs against malaria have a long history, attempts to develop novel therapeutics spanned the twentieth century and continue today. In this historical study, Leo B. Slater shows the roots and branches of an enormous drug development project during World War II
A massive undertaking, the antimalarial program was to biomedical research what the Manhattan Project was to the physical sciences.
A volume in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series, edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden.
The History of Modern Japanese Education
Constructing the National School System, 1872-1890
Rutgers University Press
The History of Modern Japanese Education is the first account in English of the construction of a national school system in Japan, as outlined in the 1872 document, the Gakusei.
Saving Sickly Children
The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970
Rutgers University Press
Known as "The Great Killer" and "The White Plague," few diseases influenced American life as much as tuberculosis. Sufferers migrated to mountain or desert climates believed to ameliorate symptoms. Architects designed homes with sleeping porches and verandas so sufferers could spend time in the open air. The disease even developed its own consumer culture complete with invalid beds, spittoons, sputum collection devices, and disinfectants. The "preventorium," an institution designed to protect children from the ravages of the disease, emerged in this era of Progressive ideals in public health. In this book, Cynthia A. Connolly provides a provocative analysis of public health and family welfare through the lens of the tuberculosis preventorium.
Disaster!
Stories of Destruction and Death in Nineteenth-Century New Jersey
Rutgers University Press
In Disaster!, Alan A. Siegel brings readers face-to-face with twenty-eight of the deadliest natural and human-caused calamities to strike New Jersey between 1821 and 1906. Accounts of fires, steamboat explosions, shipwrecks, train wrecks, and storms are told in the words of the people who experienced the events firsthand, lending a sense of immediacy to each story. These and many other stories of forgotten acts of courage in the face of danger will make Disaster! an unforgettable read.
Television in the Age of Radio
Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium
Rutgers University Press
Television in the Age of Radio is a unique account of how television came to be, not just from technical innovations or institutional struggles, but from cultural concerns that were central to the rise of industrial modernity. A major revision of the history of television, it provides investigations of the values of early television amateurs and enthusiasts, the passions and worries about competing technologies, and the ambitions for programming that together helped mold the medium.
Television in the Age of Radio
Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium
Rutgers University Press
Television in the Age of Radio is a unique account of how television came to be, not just from technical innovations or institutional struggles, but from cultural concerns that were central to the rise of industrial modernity. A major revision of the history of television, it provides investigations of the values of early television amateurs and enthusiasts, the passions and worries about competing technologies, and the ambitions for programming that together helped mold the medium.
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