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 1,261-1,290 of 2,552 items.

Daughters and Granddaughters of Farmworkers

Emerging from the Long Shadow of Farm Labor

Rutgers University Press

The work and family lives of Mexican American women in a community near the U.S.-Mexico border in California’s Imperial County are examined. Wells provides stories of the struggles, triumphs, and everyday experiences of these women and explores the social structures that create the barriers, constraints, and opportunities that have shaped their lives. These women aspire to achieve the American Dream, but the realities of life in a rural, agricultural border community strictly limit social mobility for these descendants of immigrant farm laborers.

More info

Why We Harm

Rutgers University Press

This timely book scrutinizes accounts of acts as diverse as genocide, environmental degradation, war, torture, terrorism, homicide, rape, and meat-eating in order to develop an original theoretical framework with which to consider harmful actions and their causes. Chapter by chapter, it examines statements made by perpetrators of a wide variety of harmful actions, identifying the logics they share that motivate, legitimize, and sustain them and mapping out strategies for reducing harm.

More info

Black Resonance

Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature

Rutgers University Press

Black Resonance analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. The book focuses on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s; each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice.

More info

Classrooms and Clinics

Urban Schools and the Protection and Promotion of Child Health, 1870-1930

Rutgers University Press

Classrooms and Clinics is the first book-length assessment of the development of public school health policies from the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Great Depression. Richard A. Meckel examines the efforts of early twentieth-century child health care advocates and reformers to utilize urban schools to deliver health care services to socioeconomically disadvantaged and medically underserved children in the primary grades to improve children’s health and thereby improve their academic performance.

More info

Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream

Shaping America's Immigration Story

Rutgers University Press

This collection presents eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large.

More info

Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream

Shaping America's Immigration Story

Rutgers University Press

This collection presents eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large.

More info

When Sex Changed

Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars

Rutgers University Press

When Sex Changed analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain. The book compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, to concerns about the movement’s race and class implications, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications.

More info

Amigas y Amantes

Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family

Rutgers University Press

Amigas y Amantes (Friends and Lovers) explores the experiences of sexually nonconforming Latinas in the creation and maintenance of families. It is based on forty-two in-depth enthnographic interviews with women who identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer (LBQ) and draws from fourteen months of participant observation at LBQ Latina events that Katie L. Acosta conducted in 2007 and 2008 in a major northeast city. The book examines how LBQ Latinas manage loving relationships with the families who raised them, and with their partners, their children, and their friends.

More info

Life on the Malecón

Children and Youth on the Streets of Santo Domingo

Rutgers University Press

Life on the Malecón is a narrative ethnography of the lives of street children and youth living in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and the non-governmental organizations that provide social services for them. Writing from the perspective of an anthropologist working as a street educator with a child welfare organization, Jon M. Wolseth follows the intersecting lives of children, the institutions they come into contact with, and the relationships they have with each other, their families, and organization workers.

More info

The Glass Slipper

Women and Love Stories

Rutgers University Press

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Susan Ostrov Weisser compares diverse narratives, historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres, discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; romantic movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

More info

The Star of Bethlehem

The Legacy of the Magi

Rutgers University Press

For years, scientists have looked, with little success, to astronomical records for an explanation of the magical star that guided the Magi to Christ’s manger. Molnar argues in his book that the Star of Bethlehem was not a star at all, but rather a regal portent centering around the planet Jupiter that was eclipsed by the moon. He bases this theory on the actual beliefs of astrologers, such as the Magi, who lived around the time of Christ. Using clues from astronomy, astrology, and history, Molnar has created a provocative, fascinating theory on the Christmas Star., weaving together an intriguing scientific detective story which resolves one of the world’s greatest mysteries: The Star of Bethlehem at the birth of Christ.

More info

Asbestos and Fire

Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk

Rutgers University Press

This thought-provoking and controversial book challenges the recent vilification of asbestos by providing a historical perspective on Americans' changing perceptions about risk. Rachel Maines suggests that the very success of asbestos and other fire-prevention technologies in containing deadly blazes has led to a sort of historical amnesia about the very risks they were supposed to reduce. Asbestos and Fire is an important contribution to a larger debate that considers how the risks of technological solutions should be evaluated.

More info

Broadcasting Birth Control

Mass Media and Family Planning

Rutgers University Press

Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Historians have recently begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and novels in fostering support for the cause. This book builds upon this new scholarship on the women’s reproductive health movement to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning in the U.S. and internationally.

More info

Checklist for Change

Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise

Rutgers University Press

Checklist for Change diagnoses the problems in American higher education today and describes principal reforms that must occur in combination in order for it to remain a vital enterprise: a fundamental recasting of federal financial aid; new mechanisms for better channeling the competition among colleges and universities; recasting the undergraduate curriculum; and a stronger, more collective faculty voice in governance that defines not why, but how the enterprise must change.

More info

Hidden Chicano Cinema

Film Dramas in the Borderlands

Rutgers University Press

This visual representation of New Mexico and its people is a fascinating study of how the region has been depicted in film from the dawn of early filmmaking and the silent era to today. Meléndez examines such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, that have both educated and misinformed us about a state in our own midst that remains a “distant locale” to most white Americans.

More info

Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free

How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities

Rutgers University Press

Robert Samuels explains why universities cost so much and offers solutions as to how they can reduce their expenses by concentrating on their core mission of instruction and research. Not only can tuition be reduced, but public universities and colleges can be made free by allocating existing resources to provide quality undergraduate education and diminishing the amount of money spent in the areas of athletics, administration, and public research.

More info

Mapping "Race"

Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research

Rutgers University Press

The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.

More info

Mapping "Race"

Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research

Rutgers University Press

The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.

More info

Killer Fat

Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American "Obesity Epidemic”

Rutgers University Press

Killer Fatexamines how and why obesity emerged as a major public health concern and national obsession in recent years. Using primary sources and in-depth interviews, Boero enters the world of bariatric surgeries, Weight Watchers, and Overeaters Anonymous to show how common expectations of what bodies are supposed to look like help to determine what sorts of interventions and policies are considered urgent in containing this new kinds of disease.

           

More info

Discipline and Indulgence

College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life during the Cold War

Rutgers University Press

Discipline and Indulgence demonstrates how American popular culture during the early Cold War (1947–1964), especially college football, addressed the nation’s postwar affluence and consumerism and their effects on the population by integrating men into the economy of the Cold War as workers, warriors, and consumers. It assesses the period’s institutional linkage of sport, higher education, media and militarism and finds connections of contemporary sport media to today’s War on Terror.

More info

Reel Vulnerability

Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television

Rutgers University Press

Reel Vulnerability explores the way American popular culture thinks about vulnerability, arguing that our culture and our scholarship remain stubbornly invested in the myth of the helplessness of the female body. It examines the shifting constructions of vulnerability in the wake of the cultural upheavals of World War II, the Cold War, and 9/11, placing defenseless male bodies onscreen alongside representations of the female body in the military, in the interrogation room, and on the margins.

More info

Jewish Families

Rutgers University Press

Jonathan Boyarin explores a wide range of scholarship in Jewish studies to argue that Jewish family forms and ideologies have varied greatly throughout the times and places where Jewish families have found themselves. He considers a range of family configurations from biblical times to the twenty-first century, including strictly Orthodox communities and new forms of family, including same-sex parents, and suggests productive ways to think about possible futures for Jewish family forms.

More info

Courting Justice

Ten New Jersey Cases That Shook the Nation

Edited by Paul L. Tractenberg; Foreword by Deborah T. Poritz
Rutgers University Press

Ten cases decided between 1960 and 2011, including the Karen Ann Quinlan decision, the Baby M case, the Mount Laurel decision, Megan’s Law, and the series of decisions known as Abbott/Robinson that directed state funding of poor urban schools on par with suburban districts, shed light on landmark decisions and their impact on national and global events. Different experts cover each case, providing insight into the court’s approach and decision-making process.

More info

New Jersey Politics and Government, 4th edition

The Suburbs Come of Age

Rutgers University Press

This thoroughly updated fourth edition reflects the challenges New Jersey has overcome and those it continues to face. State politics and government have been almost entirely reshaped in recent decades, and those changes are analyzed in every chapter. It offers a comprehensive overview, covering New Jersey’s political history; campaigns and elections; interest groups; the constitution; the development of government institutions; relationships with neighboring states, the federal government, and its own municipalities and counties; tax and spending policies; and quality of life.

More info

On-Demand Culture

Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies

Rutgers University Press

On-Demand Culture is unique in its focus on the effects of digital technologies on movie distribution. It offers a compelling introduction to a world in which movies have become digital files and navigates through the complexities of digital delivery to show how new modes of access (online streaming services, digital downloads , DVD kiosks in grocery stores) are redefining how audiences obtain and consume motion picture entertainment and destabilizing the business of culture.

More info

When Diversity Drops

Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Rutgers University Press

Julie J. Park examines how losing racial diversity in a university affects the everyday lives of its students. She uses a student organization as a case study to show how reductions in racial diversity impact the ability of students to sustain multiethnic communities. The book contributes to our understanding of race and inequality in collegiate life and is a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in the influence of racial politics on students’ lives.

More info

The Phantom Holocaust

Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe

Rutgers University Press

Focusing on work by both celebrated and unknown Soviet directors and screenwriters, this is the first book written about all Soviet narrative films dealing with the Holocaust from 1938 to 1991. In addition to studying the completed films, it analyzes the projects that were banned at various stages of production. Archival research and in-depth interviews are used to tell the stories of filmmakers who found authentic ways to represent the Holocaust in the face of official silencing.

More info

Comrades in Health

U.S. Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home

Rutgers University Press

This collection brings together a group of professionals and activists whose lives have been dedicated to health internationalism. By presenting a combination of historical accounts and first-hand reflections, these essays aim to draw attention to the longstanding international activities of the health left and the lessons they brought home. The involvement of these progressive U.S. health professionals is presented against the background of foreign and domestic policy, social movements, and global politics.

More info

Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America

Rutgers University Press

David Gillota examines the ways in which contemporary comic works both reflect and participate in national conversations about race and ethnicity. Such well-known texts as Chappelle’s Show, South Park, and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, as well as numerous stand-up comedy acts, children’s films, and situation comedies are analyzed to explore how various humorists respond to multiculturalism and the increasing diversity of the American population.

More info

Domestic Negotiations

Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art

Rutgers University Press

Domestic Negotiations explores how U.S. Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Drawing from a range of archival sources and cultural productions, the book demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage with the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting the lives of Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today.

More info
Find what you’re looking for...
Stay Informed

Receive the latest UBC Press news, including events, catalogues, and announcements.


Read past newsletters

Publishers Represented
UBC Press is the Canadian agent for several international publishers. Visit our Publishers Represented page to learn more.