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 981-1,000 of 2,552 items.

U.S. Women's History

Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood

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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 
 

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Movie Comics

Page to Screen/Screen to Page

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. 
 

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Sociology on Film

Postwar Hollywood's Prestige Commodity

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. 

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Scarlet and Black

Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History

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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.  

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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. 
 

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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.

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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.

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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/.

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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/.

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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. 

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War Is Not a Game

The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built

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.

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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.

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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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