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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, University of Delaware Press, and Templeton Press.
Contested Curriculum
LGBTQ History Goes to School
Contested Curriculum recounts the fight for LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 history education in the United States. Historian Don Romesburg makes a powerful case for why teaching about LGBTQ lives in schools can help us produce more informed, more thoughtful, and more compassionate citizens.
Raritan on War
An Anthology
On War gathers together some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan’s wide-ranging sensibility--focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. It is also all too timely.
The Twilight of Rome's Papal Nobility
The Life of Agnese Borghese Boncompagni Ludovisi
The Twilight of Rome’s Papal Nobility is an intimate look at an ancient papal family who grew up accustomed to almost unimaginable wealth, power, and glamour. A tender elegy to a bygone era, this book offers a first-hand account of late nineteenth-century Italy’s social upheavals as the family’s vast private villa is divided up into public lands.
The High School
Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024
Taking over a century’s worth of yearbooks from his alma mater, Salinas High School, as a historical archive, acclaimed sociologist Michael A. Messner discovers a not-so-distant time when all the cheerleaders were boys and nearly equal attention was paid to boys’ and girls’ sports. In the process, he explores the changing meanings of high school athletics.
Say Her Name
Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sport
Say Her Name: Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sports offers an in-depth look into the lived experiences of Blackgirlwomen as athletes, activists, and everyday people through a Black feminist lens. With so much research on race centered on Black men and gender research focusing on white women, Say Her Name offers a necessary conversation that places Blackgirlwomen at the center of discussion.
Islamists in a Zionist Coalition
The Political and Religious Origins
Islamists in a Zionist Coalition explores a political drama that shocked Israel and the world in 2021: the decision of an Islamist party to join a Zionist coalition, and its elevation to the position of "king-maker" in Israeli politics. Based on analyses of hundreds of texts and exclusive interviews, it uncovers the religious and political origins of a development that will greatly impact Israeli society in years to come.
Films That Spill
Beyond the Cinema of Transgression
Films That Spill takes up a previously understudied moment in 1980s underground culture in New York City called Cinema of Transgression, offering both a microhistory of the intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes of the time and a glimpse into their afterlives.
At Home with the Holocaust
Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives
Based on analyses of literature and oral histories of children of survivors, At Home with the Holocaust reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as archives of trauma that in turn traumatized the children of Holocaust survivors.
Apocalyptic Crimes
Why Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal and Must Be Abolished
Ronald C. Kramer applies theories from criminology to argue that possession of nuclear weapons is a criminal act and shows how a nuclear apocalypse might be averted, offering a pathway to the abolition of these devastating weapons.
Caribbean Inhospitality
The Poetics of Strangers at Home
Caribbean Inhospitality juxtaposes the Caribbean’s reputation for being hospitable to foreigners with the alienation of the Caribbean citizen-subject from nations they call home. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts, Natalie Lauren Belisle demonstrates that this inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the Caribbean nation-state.