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 931-960 of 2,552 items.

Dwelling in Resistance

Living with Alternative Technologies in America

Rutgers University Press

Chelsea Schelly uses ethnographic research, participant observation, and numerous in-depth interviews to examine four alternative U.S. communities where individuals use electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation technologies that differ markedly from those used by the vast majority of modern American residential dwellers. 
 

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Imperial Affects

Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema

Rutgers University Press

Imperial Affects is the first sustained account of American action-based cinema as melodrama. From the earliest war films through the Hollywood Western and the late-century action cinema, imperialist violence and mobility have been produced as sites of both visceral pleasure and moral virtue.

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Killing Poetry

Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities

Rutgers University Press

Killing Poetry examines the performance of race as it relates to gender, sexuality, and class in the spoken word communities of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Javon Johnson, a renowned slam poet himself, focuses on how slam poets navigate the diverse poetry scenes in which they perform, as part of the larger world they encounter as Black Americans. 
 

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Making Believe

Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema

Rutgers University Press

With the rise of digital effects in cinema the human performer is increasingly the only “real” element on screen. Making Believe sheds new light on screen performance by historicizing it within the context of visual and special effects cinema and technological change in filmmaking, through the silent, early sound, and current digital eras.  
 

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Red and Yellow, Black and Brown

Decentering Whiteness in Mixed Race Studies

Rutgers University Press

This book gathers together life stories and analysis by twelve contributors who express and seek to understand the often very different dynamics that exist for mixed race people who are not part white. Chapters focus on the social, psychological, and political issues and identities for people who are in dual or multiple minority situations. 
 

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Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat

The Origins of School Lunch in the United States

Rutgers University Press

Historian A. R. Ruis explores the origins of American school meal initiatives to explain why it has been so difficult to establish meal programs that satisfy the often competing interests of children, parents, schools, health authorities, politicians, and the food industry.  
 

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Addicted to Rehab

Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Rutgers University Press

Sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two women’s rehab programs, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system—two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.  
 

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Youth in Postwar Guatemala

Education and Civic Identity in Transition

Rutgers University Press

Through rich ethnographic accounts, Youth in Postwar Guatemala, traces youth experiences in schools, homes, and communities, examining how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice develop through formal and informal educational interactions. Michelle J. Bellino shows how a new generation struggles to unlearn authoritarianism and develop new democratic civic identities. 

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In Lady Liberty's Shadow

The Politics of Race and Immigration in New Jersey

Rutgers University Press

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez explores the impact of anti-immigrant municipal ordinances on a range of immigrant groups living in different types of suburban communities. Although it is a case study of New Jersey, In Lady Liberty’s Shadow offers crucial insights that can shed fresh light on the national immigration debate. 
 

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Haiti and the Uses of America

Post-U.S. Occupation Promises

Rutgers University Press

Contrary to popular notions, Haiti-U.S. relations have not only been about Haitian resistance to U.S. domination. In Haiti and the Uses of America, Chantalle F. Verna makes evident that there have been key moments of cooperation that contributed to nation-building in both countries.
 

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Demanding Justice and Security

Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America

Edited by Rachel Sieder
Rutgers University Press

The contributors to this book analyze Latin American indigenous women’s engagements with different legal forums and language to secure greater justice and security, and aim to set out a series of key concepts and issues for analyzing these mobilizations, in order to present innovative, engaged research on constructions of justice and security. 
 

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Demanding Justice and Security

Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America

Edited by Rachel Sieder
Rutgers University Press

The contributors to this book analyze Latin American indigenous women’s engagements with different legal forums and language to secure greater justice and security, and aim to set out a series of key concepts and issues for analyzing these mobilizations, in order to present innovative, engaged research on constructions of justice and security. 
 

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In/visible War

The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America

Edited by Jon Simons and John Louis Lucaites; By (photographer) Nina Berman
Rutgers University Press

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The editors examine how the contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous and utterly present in public, popular culture, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war.  
 

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In/visible War

The Culture of War in Twenty-first-Century America

Edited by Jon Simons and John Louis Lucaites; By (photographer) Nina Berman
Rutgers University Press

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The editors examine how the contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous and utterly present in public, popular culture, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war.  
 

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Complicated Lives

Girls, Parents, Drugs, and Juvenile Justice

Rutgers University Press

Complicated Lives focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez’s work examines how these relationships with their parents contribute to the girls’ future drug use and involvement in the justice system.
 

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Wonder Woman

New edition with full color illustrations

Rutgers University Press

William Marston was an unusual man—a psychologist, a soft-porn pulp novelist, more than a bit of a carny, and the (self-declared) inventor of the lie detector. He was also the creator of Wonder Woman, the comic where he expressed two of his greatest passions: feminism and women in bondage. Noah Berlatsky takes us on a wild ride through the Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, showing how Marston and illustrator Harry Peter came together to create a fictional universe that celebrated female empowerment and queer sexualities.

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Twelve-Cent Archie

New edition with full color illustrations

Rutgers University Press

For over seventy-five years, Archie and the gang at Riverdale High have been America’s most iconic teenagers. Yet they have been relatively ignored by scholars—until now. Twelve-Cent Archie is both the first academic study of these comics and an innovative creative work in its own right. In a hundred short chapters, renowned comics scholar Bart Beaty takes us on a witty, eclectic tour of the Archie universe, addressing everything from the history of the American teenager to the mystery of Jughead’s hat.

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Mothering by Degrees

Single Mothers and the Pursuit of Postsecondary Education

Rutgers University Press

In Mothering by Degrees, Jillian Duquaine-Watson shows how single mothers pursuing college degrees must navigate a difficult course as they attempt to reconcile their identities as single moms, college students, and in many cases, employees. They also negotiate a balance between what they think, and what society is telling them, and how that affects their choices to go to college. 
 

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Everyday Desistance

The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth

Rutgers University Press

In Everyday Desistance, the authors examine the transition to adulthood among twenty-five formerly incarcerated young men and women in Los Angeles, California. They describe their day-to-day experiences, focusing on their attempts to surmount the challenges of adulthood, resist the temptations of criminal activity, and formulate their long-term goals for a secure adult future.
 

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Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics

New edition with full color illustrations

Rutgers University Press

In this groundbreaking new study, Andrew Hoberek examines Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s landmark comic book series Watchmen from a variety of angles: as an artistic achievement, as a political statement, and as a self-conscious piece of intellectual property. He not only provides a historical context for appreciating how innovative Watchmen was in the 1980s, but also demonstrates the continued influence it has exerted on both comics and literature as a whole.

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Ida Lupino, Director

Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition

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.

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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.
 

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Deconstructing the High Line

Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park

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.

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Deconstructing the High Line

Postindustrial Urbanism and the Rise of the Elevated Park

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.

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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.  
 

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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.
 

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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.
 

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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.
 

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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.

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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.  
 

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