More than just gags and giggles, comedy is a powerful force, reflecting our hopes and fears, helping us understand social and political changes, and creating a shared national culture. In this book, historians from the Smithsonian Institution and National Comedy Center tell the stories of the comedians, performances, and provocations that have shaped American history.

This beautifully illustrated volume weaves together personal stories, photographs, drawings, poems of students who have experienced insecurity during childhood into a tapestry of memories about the meaning of home.

In the aftermath of the fall of Roe, this volume offers readers the opportunity to reorient scholarship and understanding about abortion, recognizing what was already true before Roe was overturned and how losing the protections of Roe forced, enabled, and perhaps even facilitated a new era of abortion. Only by understanding the historical moment when Roe fell can we anticipate what might happen next in the ongoing social and political contention over reproductive autonomy and freedom.
 
 

The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast critically examines the entanglements between Jewishness, gender, and animality in modernist Hebrew fiction. Analyzing the effeminate Jew vis-à-vis the animalized woman through cutting-edge theoretical frameworks of animal studies and posthumanism, alongside the established scholarship of Hebrew/Jewish literature and gender studies, this book innovatively revisits the Hebrew literary canon.

The Impossible Woman examines scripted television programs featuring exceptional women and how these shows contribute to sexist realism, or the cultural assumption that there is no alternative to patriarchy. This book explains how the problems facing television’s strongest women illustrates television’s inability to imagine a just feminist future.

Post-Weird explores communities formed when authority and meaning collapse, drawing parallels between serpent-handling churches, conspiracy theorists, pro-anorexia forums, and pseudoscientists. Dr. Matheson critiques their rigid worldviews and advocates for rethinking rhetoric as an approach to navigating the world's ambiguity and uncertainty.
 

Blending candid story-telling, cultural critique, and theory, Darla Schumm invites readers to reflect on the experiences of people with disabilities in religious communities. Schumm argues that it’s not disability that needs healing, it’s ableism that needs healing. To heal ableism, Schumm calls us to enact accessible love.

Finding Mr. Perfect explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and the women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. The book analyzes the disparate erotic desires that shape such transnational encounters.
 

This short volume considers conversion in a Jewish context as broadly as possible, as an act of socioreligious boundary crossing. It charts how, across the long arc of Jewish history from biblical times to the present, patterns of boundary crossing have developed and shifted, whether of Gentiles entering Jewish life or of Jews exiting from it.

Class Cultures and Social Mobility tells the stories of people who grew up working-class, became the first of their family to graduate from college, and undertook professional work that serves working-class people, drawing upon their roots to construct careers aimed at building stability, mobility, and fulfillment for the next generation.

Chronicling the life of Korea’s “National Poet,” Yun Dong-ju (1917-1945), Song WooHye explores the historical and political backgrounds that influenced Yun’s development as a poet and a patriot. Universally acclaimed as the most comprehensive and definitive biography of the poet in South Korea, and now translated into English by Flora M. Kim, it is an indispensable guide to understanding Yun Dong-ju and Korea’s colonial period.
 

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). 

In these two stories, "Granny Wild Goose" and "The Root's Tale," award-winning South Korean writer Kim Soom presents portraits of complex women who have emerged wiser from life’s brutality. One is a former comfort woman, one is a modern woman in a failing relationship, yet neither flinches away from their lives. The sensitive translation maintains Kim’s beautiful imagery and musical prose.
 

In his poetry collection, Flatfish, Moon Tae-jun offers an aesthetic that emphasizes the author’s exploration of the inner self. At times sparse and allusive, his poems use blank space and other stylistic considerations to convey a voice and thought that ranges from the contemplative to the surreal and absurd. Moon’s poems suggest Buddhist ideologies, natural images, and Korean temples.

Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women’s Labor explores the global dating industry, challenging stereotypes by examining how men seek "feminine capital" in international partners. Through twelve years of research, the book reveals how gender, labor, and cultural dynamics shape relationships across different regions.

Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women’s Labor explores the global dating industry, challenging stereotypes by examining how men seek "feminine capital" in international partners. Through twelve years of research, the book reveals how gender, labor, and cultural dynamics shape relationships across different regions.

Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore brings to life the history of J. Roth / Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, which was a microcosm of the Los Angeles Jewish community from 1966 to 1994 and one of the premier Jewish bookstores in the United States.

A powerful resource for classrooms and individual readers alike, The Nursing Clio Reader invites reflection on how the past informs current debates, urging us to engage deeply with the history of reproductive justice in a time of unprecedented change.

The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai is a rich collection of essays and interviews that explores the cultural impact of that iconic and comforting American sitcom. Featuring twelve original essays and in-depth interviews with producers, the book offers rare insights into the show’s creation, its beloved characters, long-lasting life in syndication, and appeal for marginalized viewers, especially Black, queer, and female audiences. Perfect for both fans and scholars alike.

The Golden Girls: Tales from the Lanai is a rich collection of essays and interviews that explores the cultural impact of that iconic and comforting American sitcom. Featuring twelve original essays and in-depth interviews with producers, the book offers rare insights into the show’s creation, its beloved characters, long-lasting life in syndication, and appeal for marginalized viewers, especially Black, queer, and female audiences. Perfect for both fans and scholars alike.

The Black Body is the story of Anna Maria Gehnyei, also known as singer Karima 2G. Anna was born in Rome to Liberian parents. Wherever Anna goes in Rome, there is always something or someone to remind her that she is Black, so she finds herself continually negotiating two cultures, the Italian one which does not accept her and the African one to which she does not fully belong. Originally published in Italian as Il corpo nero, this new English-language translation by Eilis Kierans and Sandra Waters brings this moving memoir to an Anglophone audience for the first time.

On the Frontlines of Crisis by Jason Rodriquez is a powerful and deeply human account of the experiences of healthcare workers during one of the most harrowing periods in modern history—the COVID-19 pandemic. As hospitals around the globe became overwhelmed by the influx of critically ill patients, those working in intensive care units (ICUs) were thrust into an unprecedented battle against a new, deadly virus about which little was understood. Rodriquez takes readers into the heart of two Massachusetts ICUs to learn about the people who put their lives on the line and faced unimaginable challenges as they treated critically ill patients at the peak of the pandemic.
 

Menace of Our Time provides a history of the repression against the Communist Party, USA, the longest-lasting, most intensive, domestic repressive campaign ever undertaken against a political organization in the United States. While the magnitude of attacks between the years 1917-1991 varied, there was never a time when U.S. communism was not a high-priority target of the U.S. political, social, and criminal justice apparatus. There has never been anything on this scale, before or since.

This book makes the case that the secret to feature filmmaking is that it is fundamentally the practice of making a very specific type of argument. It deep-dives into how filmmakers are trained and taught to think about filmmaking, looking at hundreds of films to explore why knowing this can both unlock both a greater appreciation of the form, and improve a filmmaker’s technique.

Families for Mobility documents elite Korean transnational families, focusing on how they use elite education abroad as a tool for class reproduction. Drawing on interviews with parents and children at elite U.S. colleges, the book argues that gendered transnational parenting—by both mothers and fathers—plays a crucial role in the intergenerational transmission of mobility and cosmopolitan lifestyles.

The history of international cinema is now available in a concise, conveniently sized, and affordable volume. Succinct yet comprehensive, A Short History of Film, Fourth Edition provides an accessible overview of the major movements, directors, studios, and genres from the 1880s to the present. More than 250 rare stills and illustrations accompany the text, bringing readers face to face with many of the key players and films that have marked the industry.

Undocumented in the U. S. South is a rare look into the everyday realities of undocumented youth in K-12 public schools. In an anti-immigrant policy context, youth and their families navigate historical and current legacies and realities of segregation, racial discrimination and inequality. With a deep three-year ethnographic study, hundreds of hours of observational research, interviews, and policy analysis, Rodriguez traces the lives of undocumented youth across multiple public school settings, calling for policies that are humanizing and rooted in youth experience.

A bracing dispatch from one of the most dangerous places in the world about the millions of migrants who risk their lives to travel through it.

Race and Place considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George’s County, Maryland from 1945 through 1973.

In a city reeling from Bolshevik revolution, a group of Ukrainian transplants formed the Factory of the Eccentric Actor—a collective devoted to the revolutionary overhaul of stagnant cultural institutions. The story of these artists and their first steps in cinema is perhaps the best kept secret in early Soviet culture.
 

Jenny Banh examines the attempt to transplant Disney's "happiest place on earth" to Hong Kong, delving into the three-way dynamics of American culture-corporation intentions; Hong Kong, China government investment; and Hong Kong and Chinese audiences. The situation poses special challenges for Disney's efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success.

Techno-Orientalism 2.0 addresses the impact of a volatile post-COVID present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The volume engages with techno-Orientalist inflections in recent high-profile and lesser-known Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policy and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.

Techno-Orientalism 2.0 addresses the impact of a volatile post-COVID present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The volume engages with techno-Orientalist inflections in recent high-profile and lesser-known Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policy and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.

Steven Spielberg’s Children is the first book to investigate children, childhood, and Spielberg’s employment of child actors together and in depth. Through lively readings of both the celebrated performances he elicits from his young stars as well as less discussed roles this book shows children to be key players in the director’s articulation of childhood since the 1970s.
 

Decolonial Care examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.

An ethnography of factory accidents and their attendant reconstructive plastic surgeries in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Connective Tissue explores notions of risk, work and labor practices, and the way meaning is made from experiences of trauma, care, and recovery. The book charts a chronology of the accident and its future impacts.

The Negotiation of Urgency ethnographically explores the everyday life of an Italian ER, where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration policies, hospital overcrowding, life and death, intersect daily. The analysis of the different, shifting ways in which triage operates and attention circulates in the ER illuminates the practical effects of the changing nature of welfare state in Italy, as elsewhere.

This book tells the story of how five comedic pioneers—Eddie Murphy, Paul Mooney, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend, and Arsenio Hall—joined forces to revolutionize American popular culture. Known as Hollywood’s “Black Pack,” they shattered Hollywood norms, using sharp social satire to boldly critique America’s persistent racial inequalities.

This edited volume brings together an exciting cross-regional inter-disciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists and others. Each chapter focuses on a different form of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, increased income disparity and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment taking place in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday--focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.

This edited volume brings together an exciting cross-regional inter-disciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists and others. Each chapter focuses on a different form of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, increased income disparity and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment taking place in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday--focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.