Rutgers University Press Spring 2026 Catalogue

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RECENT HIGHLIGHTS

The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas by Belén Fernández

• Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Riveting. . . . A travelogue punctuated by bouts of critical analysis, The Darién Gap offers a harrowing glimpse into the reality of a natural phenomenon made criminal.”

• Shelf Awareness

“Fernández’s gonzo journalism is fearless. . . . The Darién Gap is a revelatory, yet heated, examination of the human costs of seeking asylum and a better life in America that skewers the notion of national borders. . . . [A] chilling exposé.”

A Blacklist Education: American History, a Family Mystery, and a Teacher Under Fire by Jane S. Smith

• Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[A] devastating and dogged research investigation. . . . Smith evocatively ties her impressive archival sleuthing to memories of her father’s disillusionment: ‘Raised to revere the power of education and... democratic equality,’ he ‘did not just lose his job. He was robbed of his ideals.’ Readers will be engrossed.”

The Black Pack: Comedy, Race, and Resistance by Artel Great

• Library Journal

“Great deftly examines an era when a group of Black actors, writers, and comedians met and collaborated on a brand of subversive comedy that generated laughs while calling out the hypocrisy and absurdity of racism. . . . Great gives the talented men of the Black Pack their due in each chapter, while providing social and cultural lessons. . . . An entertaining and essential read.”

The Joyce of Everyday Life by Vicki Mahaffey (Bucknell University Press)

• The Irish Times

“An innovative new lens through which to view Ireland’s most iconic literary export anew.”

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution by Mary Anne Trasciatti

• CounterPunch

“Trasciatti...has resurrected the life of a woman whose importance to the never-ending work towards a socially just society has never been appropriately acknowledged. Engagingly composed and accessibly written . . . A book well worth one’s time.”

Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism by Aaron J. Leonard

• Counterpunch

“Leonard [is] the best living historian on the topic of political repression of the US Left in the United States....

In today’s USA, Leonard’s chronicles of political repression become even more important than before....

The history told in Menace of Our Time leads to a far different truth about freedoms and their fragility. Indeed, this book could not have come at a better time.”

Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising by João Florêncio and Liz Rosenfeld

• Los Angeles Review of Books “Provocative.”

Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School by Don Romesburg

• Gay & Lesbian Review

“In this period of escalating attacks on the LGBT community, Romesburg’s account of the dedicated, determined work of activist educators over more than a generation provides some much-needed hope and inspiration. It can also serve as a resource for future progress.”

An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana by Preity R. Kumar

• CHOICE

“This book demonstrates how coloniality replicates the power structure of colonialism, defining all aspects of Guyana. Gender, race, class, and sexual identity nurture violence in these women’s lives. . . . Highly recommended.”

Films That Spill: Beyond the Cinema of Transgression by Marie Sophie Beckmann

• CHOICE

“Beckmann greatly aids the discipline when she interrogates concepts such as ‘downtown,’ ‘underground,’ and ‘scene.’ She goes far beyond the genre in her theorization of concepts that are directly related to late-20th-century nonmainstream film culture and the impact of both video and cable on this culture. . . . Highly recommended.”

Poverty and Antitheatricality: Form and Formlessness in Latin American Literature, Art, and Theory by Stephen Buttes

• CHOICE

“Buttes argues that poverty is more than just a result of economic exploitation and that other factors— social, political, and cultural—have a role to play. . . . Recommended.”

Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore by Laurence Roth

• Midwest Book Review

“Fascinating, informative, exceptionally well written. . . . A compelling and fully engaging read from start to finish. Of special value to readers with an interest in the changing nature of the publishing industry and the impact of those changes on independent and neighborhood bookstores.” Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family by Nora Rubel and Brett Krutzsch

• Reading Religion

“Offers a variety of possibilities to examine in contemporary Jewish practice that break from traditional observance. In taking seriously the role of Judaism and contemporary Jewish ritual, the collection allows for a richer appreciation of the accomplishments of Transparent.”

The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024 by Michael A. Messner

• Social Forces

“A timely exploration of how sports have shaped—and gendered—the American high school experience. . . . The yearbooks serve as student-edited carriers of ‘cultural memory’ that provide vivid written and visual snapshots of the past.”

Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings by Fernanda Díaz-Basteris and Maite Urcaregui

• CHOICE

“Latinx Comics Studies is useful for its wealth of information on a number of comics and various approaches to analysis. . . . Recommended.”

Apocalyptic Crimes: Why Nuclear Weapons Are Illegal and Must Be Abolished by Ronald C. Kramer

• CHOICE

“There is no shortage of books about the dangers of nuclear weapons, but Kramer still makes a unique contribution with Apocalyptic Crimes. . . . Recommended.”

She’s the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II by Debra Michals

• CHOICE

“Michals provides a nuanced account of how entrepreneurship provided women with income, greater autonomy, and freedom from discrimination at work, without producing a backlash based on gendered ideas of a woman’s place. . . . Recommended.”

Jane Fonda

There's a Great Deal to Say

Marilyn S. Greenwald

“Brilliantly researched and utterly compelling, this book unpacks the many lives of Jane Fonda—Oscar-winning actor, fierce activist, fitness icon, and cultural lightning rod. With nuance and insight, Marilyn Greenwald shows there is, indeed, a great deal to say about a woman who continues to challenge America’s ideas about fame, feminism, and power.”

—Tracy Lucht, author of Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist

“Many people think of Jane Fonda as a rabble-rouser who crops up now and then to bring attention to her cause du jour. Marilyn Greenwald’s compelling book shows us how the most accomplished and controversial actor of her generation discovered a unique voice and a higher purpose beyond the screen.

—Douglass K. Daniel, author of Anne Bancroft: A Life

The story of Jane Fonda’s devotion to movement politics, charting the decadeslong evolution of her activism and the merging of her acting and producing with her advocacy.

Since the late 1960s, Jane Fonda has identified as an activist first and an actor second, using her celebrity as a vehicle to convey her views and her advocacy. Few stars of her stature have been as simultaneously acclaimed and vilified as Fonda. Even as she won two Academy Awards and was a major box office draw of the 1970s and 1980s, she received reams of hate mail for her political activism and antiwar stances. This book explores Fonda’s devotion to movement politics—sometimes at the expense of her career and her personal safety.

Digging deep into rare material from cinema archives and Fonda’s own personal papers, journalist Marilyn Greenwald tells the story of how Fonda came to view acting as a “side gig” that gives her a worldwide platform to convey her personal and political views. Charting the evolution of her activism and the merging of her acting and producing with her advocacy, Greenwald focuses on the years from 1968—when she was jarred out of complacency by the Vietnam War—to 1980, after the release of The China Syndrome and the advent of the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis, which brought to light the possible dangers of nuclear energy. Greenwald details how three of her films Klute (1971), Coming Home (1978), and The China Syndrome (1979)—were designed to further her personal beliefs. She also considers how Fonda has weathered changes in the entertainment industry and public tastes to produce and star in decades' worth of socially conscious projects. Charting Fonda’s personal and professional growth while offering a candid account of her struggles, this book shows how Fonda viewed movies as an influential storytelling tool that can influence public opinion, change minds, and trigger social change.

MARILYN S. GREENWALD is a professor emerita of journalism at Ohio University. She is the author of several biographies, including A Woman of the Times: Journalism, Feminism and the Career of Charlotte Curtis, and a coauthor of Eunice Hunton Carter: A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

Funny Stuff

How Comedy Shaped American History

Edited by Laura LaPlaca and Ryan Lintelman

Foreword by Mel Brooks

"A one-of-a-kind trip through the archives of the National Comedy Center and Smithsonian Institution that shines a new light on America’s funniest moments."

Carol Burnett

Experts from the Smithsonian and the National Comedy Center take you on a guided tour through the history of American comedy, from Mark Twain to Margaret Cho.

The Smithsonian Institution and the National Comedy Center hold unparalleled collections of objects that illustrate the vitality and importance of comedy in American life, from nineteenth-century vaudeville, minstrel, and puppet shows to stand-up comedians, television satire, and internet memes. Now, for the first time, these incredible collections will be shown in vibrant photographs and illuminating essays that tell the story of how comedy shaped American history.

This accessible, comprehensive history transports readers behind the scenes to see beloved and rarely exhibited artifacts while learning the stories of famous, infamous, and unknown comics and their influence on the nation’s culture. Perfect for comedy fans, pop culture aficionados, history lovers, and anyone who has ever laughed at a viral video, this dynamic work offers a new perspective on American history and who we are as a nation through the lens of comedy.

LAURA LAPLACA is the founding director of the National Comedy Center’s archive in Jamestown, New York, the United States’ congressionally designated home for the preservation of comedy history.

RYAN LINTELMAN is the curator of entertainment at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and is one of the curators of the landmark exhibition Entertainment Nation

Pipps

Bret Harte

Hari Kondabolu

Vaudeville

Andy Bumatai

Marx Brothers

Blackface Minstrelsy Brownface/brownvoice

Phyllis Diller

Bob

Patsy

March 10, 2026

208 Pages • 8 x 10 • 73 color images 9781978847415 • Paperback • $45.00

Rutgers Trade Art • Biography

Liu Shiming

Sculpting Empathy

Richard Vine

The story of Liu Shiming, a man who sought to lead a simple life, dedicated entirely to art, in the midst of China’s epochal, dangerously complex 20thcentury social and political changes.

Liu Shiming (1926–2010) is a revered Chinese artist whose works have had a distinct impact on the course of modern Chinese sculpture. Shiming was part of the first generation of sculptors trained by the People’s Republic of China to study both traditional Chinese art and French modernist principles. Shiming received early recognition for his work and his student project Measuring Land (1950).

Though well respected in China, the sculptor is only now beginning to win the wider recognition he deserves. The story of Liu Shiming reveals a great deal about the forces that have shaped postwar art worldwide. He was a man who sought to lead a simple life, dedicated entirely to art, in the midst of China’s epochal, dangerously complex twentieth-century social and political changes.

LIU SHIMING (1926–2010) was born in Tianjin, China and is a sculptor trained at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in both Chinese tradition and French modernism. After early recognition for monumental works, he made a radical shift, leaving urban life to observe daily rhythms in rural Henan and Hebei. Returning to Beijing in 1975, he worked in cultural relics restoration at the National Museum of Chinese History.

RiICHARD VINE is a New York-based art critic and the former managing editor of Art in America

Origins

Tianjin, Tangshan, Beijing: 1926–46

Student Years Beijing: 1946–51

Early Success

Beijing, Shanxi, and Elsewhere: 1952–60 Provinces Henan, Hebei, and Elsewhere: 1961–74

Return to Beijing

National Museum of Chinese History: 1975–80 Central Academy of Fine Arts: 1980–1995

Home 1995–2010

Cultural Contribution

Appendix

Life Chronology, Exhibition History, Awards, and Bibliography

June 9, 2026

164 Pages • 5½ x 8½

9781978848320 • Hardcover with printed dust jacket • $27.95 Rutgers Trade Current Affairs • Civil Rights

Tulsa Speaks

A City Council, Reparations, and Race in America Today

Kristal Brent Zook

“Kristal Brent Zook is one of our most gifted and astute observers of the American scene. Her riveting new book, Tulsa Speaks, is a bracing look at what happens when inspired but fallible human beings set out to remedy past racial catastrophes. Eschewing both easy cynicism and glib optimism, Zook instead offers a resilient hopefulness about the possibility that local figures can achieve the kind of progress that eludes national lawmakers and public policy wonks. This brilliant book is history from the bottom up, and an illuminating chronicle of social change one political decision at a time.”

—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America

“Tulsa Speaks is a no-nonsense account of how government actually functions at the municipal level. By looking at the lives of nine city council members, and how they grappled with the legacy of their city’s greatest tragedy, Kristal Brent Zook has provided us with an indelible, street-level portrait of racial politics in 21st century America.”

—Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice

“This powerful narrative illustrates the challenges and possibilities for achieving racial reconciliation and justice in the United States.”

—Meena Bose, author of Pragmatic Vision: Obama and the Enactment of the Affordable Care Act

"We tend to forget about the unknown names behind so many decisions in cities and towns across America. Award-winning journalist Kristal Brent Zook gets inside the hearts and minds of real, living, breathing city councilors to uncover their pain and their triumphs, as they try to decide whether or not to make amends for one of the most significant acts of domestic terrorism in our history, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre."

—Tatsha Robertson, Editor-in-Chief, The Root

How nine elected officials decided it was not too late to get reparative justice for the century-old racial atrocity that still haunted their city: the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Not a “Huggy” Person

Chapter 2: Madam Councilor

Chapter 3: More Than a Friend

Chapter 4: The Secret Meetings

Chapter 5: An Apology

Chapter 6: The Family Business

Chapter 7: Brady Street

Chapter 8: A Centennial Fiasco

Chapter 9: A Tense Vote

Chapter 10: Three Councilors Request Extra Security

Chapter 11: Beyond Apologies

Chapter 12: An Unlikely (Possible) Ally

Chapter 13: Beyond Beyond Apologies, Part II

Chapter 14: The Wild Card

Chapter 15: Tulsa Makes History

Chapter 16: What Comes Next

In 2021, the international media descended upon Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the centennial commemoration of the May 31–June 1, 1921, massacre in which a white mob killed more than three hundred African American residents, burned homes and businesses, and decimated a thriving town once referred to as “Black Wall Street.”

Tulsa Speaks is about the ongoing work of the Tulsa City Council, both before the Centennial and afterward, when the cameras were no longer trained on the city. It dives deep into the interpersonal dynamics among the nine councilors, exploring the continuing fight for reparations and racial justice and the long-running efforts of the sole African American councilor, Vanessa Hall-Harper of District 1, to bring repair to Greenwood. Tulsa, like many municipal bodies across the country, serves as a hopeful sign of what we might become, as Americans and as a microcosm of race relations in America today.

KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, and author of four previous books, including The Girl in the Yellow Poncho. She is a former contributor to The Washington Post and ESSENCE magazine, her work on race, women, culture, and social justice has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Life, and The Guardian, among other outlets.

Aminata

Abbey Lincoln’s Song of Faith

Ada C. M. Thomas

A vivid portrait of the life of jazz legend and Black intellectual Abbey Lincoln. Abbey Lincoln (1930–2010), one of the greatest jazz vocalists of the twentieth century, was also an acclaimed composer, poet, playwright, actress, and activist and a towering figure within the African American intellectual tradition. Through constant reinvention, she resisted easy stereotyping and helped open a space for Black women artists to invoke their whole selves. Here, with meticulous research and insightful analysis, Ada C. M. Thomas contemplates Lincoln’s music alongside her poetry, plays, and reflections, revealing a multifaceted artist whose philosophical inquiries resonate deeply with the Black experience.

Thomas places Lincoln's albums in the context of both the female jazz and blues singers who influenced her and the male composers she collaborated with, including John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Max Roach. Highlighting Lincoln’s central position within a vibrant global community of Black artists, activists, and writers, it also puts her work into conversation with that of contemporaries and close friends like Maya Angelou, Miriam Makeba, and Toni Morrison. Above all, it traces Lincoln’s extraordinary spiritual and intellectual journey, from her early life in Michigan to her rebirth in the 1970s as Aminata Moseka, meaning “faithful goddess of love,” and her ultimate resurgence in the 1990s as a critically acclaimed jazz artist and composer. With reverence and rigor, Thomas invites readers to rediscover Abbey Lincoln and embrace the transformative power of her words.

ADA C. M. THOMAS is an independent scholar. She has been an assistant professor of English at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, and a Public Scholar through the New Jersey Council for the Humanities’ Public Scholars Project.

July 14, 2026

212 Pages • 6 x 9 • 17 B-W images

9781978843356 • Hardcover with printed dust jacket • $29.95

Rutgers Trade Biography • Music

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Introduction: Caged Bird

1 Song of Songs

2 Vashti

3 Black Nativity

4 Lamentations

5 Sun Salutations

6 Revelation

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes Bibliography Index

June 9, 2026

244 Pages • 6 x 9 • 1 B-W image

9781978844544 • Hardcover • $26.95

Rutgers Trade Relationships

Introduction

Part I: Questioning Love, Marriage, and the Couple

Chapter 1: Name-Calling (Margaret D. Stetz)

Chapter 2: I Now Pronounce You…Whatever You Two Are (Susan Ostrov Weisser)

Chapter 3: Reality TV, Wedding Fantasies, and Actual Reality Collide (Sarah Tucker Jenkins)

Chapter 4: Not Drowning but Waving (Beverley Stevens)

Chapter 5: Marriage Might Be Work, but It’s a Cushy Desk Job Compared to Being Single (Sara Eckel )

Chapter 6: Dancing in a Precarious World (Ana Tager)

Chapter 7: My Father’s Alzheimer’s Romance (Stephanie Golden)

Part II: Alternative Living Arrangements

Chapter 8: Spelling Bee Love (Mimi Schwartz)

Chapter 9: Happily Ever After… (Helle Trap Friis)

Chapter 10: I Want You Here Always. I Can’t Live Without You. Now, Please Go Home (Jaime Teich and Chris Nellen)

Chapter 11: Our Big, Strange Long-Distance Romance (Mindy Lewis)

Chapter 12: A Bicoastal Relationship (Jon Bagdon)

Chapter 13: Hundred Mile Marriage (Penelope Scambly Schott)

Chapter 14: Margaret Mead and the In Between (D. D. Wood)

Chapter 15: A Ten-Year Odyssey (Lisa Gioia-Acres)

Chapter 16: Our Pick-Me-Up-from-a-Colonoscopy List (Leah Sherman)

Chapter 17: The Evolving Landscape of Platonic Marriages (Pamela Pitman Brown)

Chapter 18: What We Gained and What We Lost: Politics, Partners, and Community (Vicki Breitbart)

Part III: Alternative Loving Arrangements

Chapter 19: The Golden Girls House: Building Our Own Queer Family (Renee Romanowsky)

Loving Arrangements

Stories About Modern Living and Loving

Edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel E. Hood

“Loving Arrangements is a beautifully curated, generous, and deeply human collection that captures the shifting landscape of intimacy with honesty, nuance, and grace. These courageous essays challenge old assumptions while illuminating the creativity with which people craft relationships that reflect their needs, values, and evolving identities. By bringing together voices across generations, cultures, and orientations, BauerMaglin and Hood highlight not only how love changes, but how we change with it. Moving and thought-provoking, this collection offers a refreshing celebration of the many ways people live, love, and belong in an increasingly complex world.”

—Angelos Bollas, author of Contemporary Irish Masculinities: Male Homosociality in Sally Rooney's Novels

"Loving Arrangements is a collection of first-person accounts of how some people live and love in the modern world. Its contributors have lived their fair share of relationships, both good and bad, some that worked and those that have not. Some essays are funny, some surprising, but all reflect some degree of courage in sharing the complexity of private lives today.”

—Jack Drescher, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University

"Loving Arrangements is the book that says out loud what so many of us know privately: the old rulebook is cracking, and people are courageously writing new ones. This is a compassionate, smart, and deeply human collection that expands our understanding of love, intimacy, and commitment. For anyone rethinking their relationship structure, Loving Arrangements is a powerful guide to what modern love really looks like.”

—Joe Kort, author of Side Guys: It’s Still Sex Even If You Don’t Have Intercourse

Twenty-nine personal essays about non-monogamous relationships, alternative forms of cohabitation, and the myriad ways we love and live today.

Love songs and Hollywood romances make it all sound so simple: You find your soul mate, move in together, get married, never stray from the path of monogamy, and live happily ever after. But real life tends to be more complicated. Many couples pursue alternative living arrangements, and some even pursue alternative loving arrangements.

DANIEL E. HOOD is a retired professor of sociology. He taught at several New York schools for four decades. His latest books are Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60 (Rutgers University Press, 2023) and Redemption and Recovery: Parallels of Religion and Science in Addiction Treatment (2012). Partial

Chapter 20: Loving the Past, Loving the Present: Polyamory and the Space for Both (Kelli S. Dunham)

The twenty-nine personal essays in this collection offer a variety of perspectives and experiences with nontraditional relationships and forms of cohabitation. The contributors include married couples who live in separate cities and single people who find companionship through communes and cohousing. These essays also present varied outlooks on the practice and ethics of having multiple partners, with some embracing large polycules while others opt for “monogamish” relationships. With contributors across generations and representing the full ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States, Loving Arrangements demonstrates the myriad ways that we live and love today.

NAN BAUER-MAGLIN is professor emerita at the City University of New York. She has published nine collections (seven with coeditors) on topics such as stepfamilies, retirement, feminism, death, dying and choice, and older parenting. Her latest book is Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60 (Rutgers University Press, 2023).

Nathan Straus

From Macy's Magnate to International Humanitarian

Andrew Fisher

"At last, a full-length biography of one of the greatest Jewish philanthropists that history forgot. Nathan Straus’s contribution to public health—especially by championing pasteurized milk for children—saved countless lives in the U.S. and Palestine and demonstrated how strategic philanthropy can improve the world. Brimming with lessons for our time."

—Jonathan D. Sarna, author of American Judaism: A History

“A compelling and highly engaging story of a largely forgotten philanthropist and entrepreneur whose efforts helped shape the twentieth century, this book fills gaps in diverse historical subfields such as medicine, economics, childhood, and religion. This inspiring story is a must-read for anyone interested in philanthropic innovation.”

—Cynthia Connolly, professor emerita, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing

"Finally, Nathan Straus receives his due. His life would have merited a biography, like this excellent one by Andrew Fisher, even if not for his transformative involvement in growing the nation's public health system, but this book offers a fine way to see that as well as the fuller breadth of his public service."

—Hasia R. Diner, professor emerita, New York University

"Finally, we have a comprehensive biography of Nathan Straus that does the great man justice. Fisher has crafted a scholarly, deeply referenced, and eminently readable book that tells the story of the legendary Straus family. Highly recommended to readers of Jewish history, philanthropy, commerce, politics, and public health."

—Jeff Levin, author of Religion and Medicine: A History of the Encounter Between Humanity's Two Greatest Institutions

The true story of how a Jewish retail tycoon became one of the Progressive Era’s most revered philanthropists.

Nathan Straus (1848–1931) encompassed worlds. He rose from his Jewish German immigrant family’s ruin in Civil War Georgia to become co-owner of Macy’s and Abraham & Straus department stores. He helped build American Zionism and cofounded the American Jewish Congress movement. His public service led to a nomination for New York City mayor.

This, the first comprehensive biography of Straus, details each of these lives but argues that his most historic achievements lay elsewhere—in philanthropy. Inspired by both his Jewish values and no-nonsense pragmatism, Straus designed, funded, and oversaw four Progressive philanthropic initiatives. The greatest—his demonstration and advocacy campaigns for milk pasteurization—saved the lives of countless thousands of infants in New York City and, ultimately, across much of America and western Europe. Straus also founded America’s first TB preventorium for at-risk children: a model for the forty-five more that followed. Partnering with Hadassah, he brought American public health innovations to Mandate Palestine. He provided vast relief for New York City’s jobless in the severe 1890s depression. In all, Straus’s humanitarianism won the acclaim of American presidents and world leaders and the gratitude of millions. We can learn from him today.

ANDREW FISHER, an independent scholar, is the retired founding executive director of the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. He has thirty-five years of experience in New York City philanthropic organizations and is a winner of Helen Keller International’s Humanitarian Award. He is based in New Jersey.

April 14, 2026

409 Pages • 6 x 9 • 1 color and 31 B-W images

9781978843479 • Hardcover with printed dust

jacket • $34.95

Rutgers Trade Biography

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One: From Bavaria to Georgia

Chapter Two: Retailing in Gilded-Age New York

Chapter Three: The Public Man

Chapter Four: The Private Man

Chapter Five: "Pasteurization Is Positive Prevention”

Chapter Six: From Philanthropy to Public Policy

Chapter Seven: European Prevention and Relief

Chapter Eight: Saving Tenement Children from TB

Chapter Nine: A Family in Transition

Chapter Ten: Dreaming of Zion

Chapter Eleven: Uplifting Palestine

Chapter Twelve: Legacies

A Note on Sources

Acknowledgments Index

Menachem Kipnis

Yiddish Folklore and Photographs from Interwar Poland

Edited by Sheila E. Jelen

Translated by Raphael Finkel

Contributions by Sheila E. Jelen

“Standing on the blurry but oh-so-firmly-felt border between folk tale and photographic reality, Menachem Kipnis helped to shape Yiddishland in the pre-Holocaust popular imagination more than almost anyone else. This highly welcome volume, with its sensitive translations and its wonderful reproductions, helps rescue this vital figure from undeserved obscurity.”

—Jeremy Dauber, author of The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye

"This beautifully illustrated translation of Kipnis's essential writings is an important companion to the canon of primary sources on Jewish life in Poland before the Second World War. Kipnis's own photographs stand close to the monumental work carried by Roman Vishniac and, sadly, very few others. An essential volume."

—Francesco Spagnolo, coauthor of The Jewish World: 100 Treasures of Art and Culture

Folktales and photographs by one of the early 20th century’s most popular Yiddish-language folklorists—together for the first time.

April 14, 2026

200 Pages • 8 x 10 • 44 color images

9781978846104 • Hardcover • $39.95

Rutgers Trade

Photography • Folklore • Jewish Studies

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Notes

Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942) was one of the early twentieth century’s greatest Jewish eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States. Now, for the first time, Kipnis’s stories and photographs are published together in a single book.

Menachem Kipnis brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the “Old Country” and eastern European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the shtetl Including an introductory essay, annotations, and an epilogue by Sheila E. Jelen, Menachem Kipnis suggests new ways of understanding both visual and literary depictions of East European Jewish culture between the two world wars.

MENACHEM KIPNIS (1879–1942) was born in Ushomir, Ukraine, into a family of cantors. Kipnis’s work as an ethnomusicologist, singer, photographer, and folklorist unfolded at the height of Jewish folkloristic activity in Europe between the world wars. Kipnis died of a stroke in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942.

SHEILA E. JELEN is a professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies and Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance.

RAPHAEL FINKEL is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Kentucky. He compiled the first version of the Jargon File. Finkel is also an activist for the survival of the Yiddish language.

In Hush to Harbor

Black Sanctuary from Slavery to Trump's America

La-Toya L. Scott

A history of sanctuaries formed in response to white supremacist violence in America and a blueprint for sustaining Black refuge in a time of urgent need.

Black communities in America have a long history of constructing sanctuaries amid oppression, from the secret hush harbors of slavery to the digital refuges created in response to the resurgence of white supremacist violence in the Trump era. These havens have offered places to grieve and to gather, to imagine freedom when the world denied it, and to practice care and resistance in the face of constant danger. They remind us that even in the darkest moments, Black people have made space to grieve, rest, heal, strategize, and imagine new futures.

In Hush to Harbor traces this enduring sanctuary-making through both historical memory and contemporary expression from the legacy of Freedmen’s Towns and Green Books for Motorists in the Jim Crow era as testaments to Black mobility and mutual protection to present-day digital activism and grassroots organizing that reimagine safety in the public sphere.

Blending literary criticism, cultural history, and ethnography, Scott demonstrates that sanctuary is not merely a place of retreat but a political and spiritual practice that calls forth a collective act of making space when none is offered. In Hush to Harbor offers not just a chronicle of survival but a blueprint for sustaining Black refuge in a time of urgent need, redefining what it means to be safe in a nation that has never guaranteed safety for Black life.

LA-TOYA L. SCOTT is an assistant professor of African American literature and culture at Sam Houston State University and founder of the public educational and cultural platform @InHouseScholar.

To Life

Jews Exploring Nature

Joel Greenberg

With Judith E. Winston

"This is an entirely original book that challenges the deep-seated assumption that Jews until recently had no interest in nature. It offers eight compelling biographies of Jewish naturalists who made important scientific contributions to the systematic study of life forms and the environment."

—Robert Jütte, author of The Jewish Body: A History

"Being Jewish and loving nature are not mutually exclusive. This well-researched study documents leading Jewish naturalists' lasting contribution to knowledge about plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, spiders, mosquitoes, and ecosystems. With diverse approaches to Jewishness, they explored nature as scientists, museum curators, educators, and conservationists. They inspire us to love nature and to love life."

—Hava Samuelson, author of Religion and Environment: The Case of Judaism

"This book brings nature, spirituality, and scientific practice together into an insightful, often compelling dialogue. The author's skill in weaving together academic theory and structures with methodical laboratory investigations and the unpredictability of field work results in a very dynamic, important read."

—Fern Shaffer, artist and environmentalist

Eight rich biographical sketches spotlight great Jewish scientists who made major contributions to the study of the natural world and led rich and colorful lives.

To Life explores the Jewish relationship with nature by illuminating significant Jewish thinkers who increased in important ways our understanding of various aspects of natural history. In eight compelling chapter-long biographies, naturalist Joel Greenberg demonstrates the diversity of both Jewish identity and the natural sciences.

Greenberg’s rich biographical sketches spotlight great Jewish scientists who not only made major contributions to the study of the natural world but also led rich and colorful lives: botanist and spy Aaron Aaronsohn, zoologist Libby Henrietta Hyman, infamous ornithologist Nathan Leopold, mammalogist Philip Hershkovitz, arachnologist Herbert Levi, herpetologist Hymen Marx, public health entomologist Andrew Spielman, and ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld. These individuals manifested different aspects of Jewish identity—some observant, some secular—but all were affected in one way or another by their being Jewish. By exploring the relationship between Jews and nature through the lives of these figures, Greenberg shares new and underrecognized aspects of Jewish and environmental history and opens new portals into the fields they studied.

JOEL GREENBERG has spent most of his life in the Chicago region and has been interested in natural history since childhood. He spent his career in environmental protection working for governmental and private entities. He has written numerous articles and has authored or coauthored four books, including A Natural History of the Chicago Region and A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction

JUDITH E. WINSTON became entranced by oceans at an early age and has focused on them throughout her career. She spent twelve years at the American Museum of Natural History and twenty-two years at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, where she worked on marine invertebrates. Judith has authored or coauthored eighty-seven scientific publications, nineteen reviews and popular articles, and two books, including Describing Species: Taxonomic Procedures for Biologists.

May 12, 2026

332 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 3 color and 5 B-W images

9781978844483 • Paperback • $29.95

Rutgers Trade Biography • Ecology • Jewish Studies

Additional print format:

9781978844490 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

Table of Contents

Introduction: The People of the Book Venture Outside: A Brief Consideration of Jewish Views Regarding Nature

Chapter One: Naturalist, Spy: Aaron Aaronsohn

Chapter Two: Invertebrate Zoologist Forging Her Own Path: Libby Henrietta Hyman—by Judith Winston

Chapter Three: Of Birds and Murder: Nathan Leopold

Chapter Four: Neotropical Mammals Above All Else: Philip Hershkovitz

Chapter Five: The Art of the Spider: Herbert Levi

Chapter Six: If Mel Brooks Had Been a Herpetologist: Hymen Marx

Chapter Seven: Indiana Jones Battling Vectors and the Agents of Disease: Andrew Spielman

Chapter Eight: Ecology Underfoot: Joan Ehrenfeld

Epilogue: My Nature

Acknowledgments Index

March 10, 2026

244 Pages • 6 x 9 • 60 B-W images

9781978846746 • Hardcover • $29.95 Rutgers Trade History • Holocaust • Memoir

Inheritance

Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust

Charlie Scheidt

With Kat Rohrer

Foreword by James Waller

“Inheritance is a heartfelt, urgent message about how the atrocities of the past continue to reverberate in the present. Working with the granddaughter of a 'true believer' in the Nazi Party, Scheidt tells an intricately braided tale of heartache and the inheritance of loss, eloquently capturing the cost of survival and the ache of what's left behind. Scheidt turns a family history into more than dots on a map; from the haunting shrine to a lost cousin to a grandfather's grave, this memoir is both a warning and a message of hope."

—Alexi Zentner, author of Copperhead: A Novel

“At a time when there are over 120 million people displaced globally by persecution, conflict, and atrocities, Scheidt’s Inheritance compels us to consider the humanity and tears behind all refugee statistics. This is not just a history of the desperate flight of a Jewish family from Nazi-controlled Europe—it’s an enduring story about love, loss, and the unconquerable power of hope.”

—Simon Adams, president and CEO, Center for Victims of Torture

“When Charlie Scheidt inherited a trove of papers and letters from his parents, they raised as many questions as they answered. Working with Kat Rohrer, a documentarian whose own grandfather was a Nazi officer, Charlie built on this inheritance, inviting readers into his family to educate readers on the sacrifices, suffering, resilience, and contributions of refugee families. They are a blessing.”

—Mark Hetfield, president, HIAS

“Scheidt’s Inheritance offers powerful insights into the lasting multigenerational psychological effects of the Holocaust. It is a product of an incisive intellect and a compassionate heart, embracing grief and mourning not with resentment, but with the aim of understanding and preventing further tragedies.”

—Pablo de Greiff, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence

Thousands of documents stashed in an old armoire unearth the gripping story of a family’s escape from Nazi Germany.

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Armoire

Chapter 2: Jewish and German: The Scheidts

Chapter 3: Germans Who Happened to Be Jewish: The Ballins

Chapter 4: An Imperfect Reprieve

Chapter 5: Rubble and Embers

Chapter 6: A Fateful Miscalculation

Chapter 7: “Mein Lieber Bruder”

Chapter 8: “The End of Everything”

Chapter 9: “Caught in a Mousetrap on a Powder Keg”

Chapter 10: Nowhere to Turn, No One to Trust

Chapter 11: A Fragile Silence

Chapter 12: Making Sense of the Present

In Memoriam

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Table of

After his mother’s death, Charlie Scheidt discovered a trove of historic documents that set him on a decade-long journey to uncover his family’s hidden past during the Holocaust. Joined by Kat Rohrer, the granddaughter of a Nazi officer, Scheidt embarked on a quest to trace his family’s harrowing efforts to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. As they investigated, they uncovered stories of survival and loss. Their journey takes them across generations and continents, revealing a legacy of love, loss, and resilience. Grappling with questions about the long-lasting effects of inherited trauma, the book asks whether it is possible to break free of a familial cycle. This memoir, rooted in his family’s escape and the lasting trauma that followed, is a powerful reflection on history’s enduring scars, the importance of remembrance, and healing across generations.

CHARLIE SCHEIDT is the chairman emeritus of Roland Foods. Born in New York City, he is the only child of German-Jewish refugees and dedicates his time to refugee support and genocide prevention.

KAT ROHRER is an award-winning producer and director. Her recent feature-length films include What a Feeling and the acclaimed documentary Back to the Fatherland.

Railroaded

A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway

Fred S. Naiden

"A vivid, ground-level, often funny view of what it was like to work on the New York City subway during the 1980s, when underfunding and neglect led to startling levels of decay and chaos, and what it was like to live in the pre-gentrified city. Along the way, motorman-turned-historian Fred Naiden provides a rich, iconoclastic history of New York mass transit."

—Joshua B. Freeman, author of In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966

“A gripping, often heartbreaking account of transit workers working in the tunnels under New York City, moving millions of souls each day. Fred Naiden worked on the New York subways as a young man, and Railroaded is a memoir of the deplorable conditions he and thousands of others worked in, combined with a sardonic history of the crazy quilt of subway lines that never quite became a system.”

—Jack Metzgar, author of Striking Steel: Solidarity

Remembered

A former subway worker turned Harvard-educated historian gives you the inside scoop on the New York City subway.

The New York City subway system is one of the largest and oldest in the world, still carrying traces of the transport systems that came before it. Some of its elevated tracks are remnants of steam railroads, and some tunnels run where canoes served as ferries. For passengers, riding the subway can feel like stepping into another world, dark and dank and sometimes dangerous. Now just imagine what it’s like to work there every day.

One of the few subway workers who went on to earn a PhD from Harvard, historian Fred Naiden gives readers a firsthand look at what it was like to work as a subway porter, a motorman, and a locomotive engineer during the 1980s. He recounts the labor activism of his fellow MTA employees, who advocated for better conditions, higher pay, and less institutional racism. He also shares wild stories about the riders he encountered, from a homeless former realtor who worked as a mob frontman to an angry passenger who pulled a gun on him while the train was stuck at a stop signal. Above all, Railroaded will answer many questions about the New York subway system, including how it could be improved.

FRED S. NAIDEN is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life of Alexander the Great. He is formerly employee #4046, New York City Transit Authority.

April 14, 2026

274 Pages • 5½ x 8½ • 10 color and 7 B-W images 9781978844094 • Hardcover with printed dust jacket • $27.95

Rutgers Trade New York City

Table of Contents Prologue 1

1 A Motorman’s Work

2 The Strikes and Deficits That Plague the Subway

3 My Life in a Downtown Railroad Flat

4 A Railroad Porter’s Work

5 My Time as a Shop Steward

6 A Locomotive Engineer’s Work

7 My Life as a Rider—and Yours Epilogue

Two Centuries of Subway Maps

Photographs and Illustrations

Chronology

Glossary

Acknowledgments and Bibliographical Essay Index

May 12, 2026

242 Pages • 7 x 8½ • 20

An Atlantic City Reader

The Rise and Decline of an American Resort

Edited by Louis J. Parascandola and John Parascandola

Foreword by Vicki Gold Levi

“Many authors have written of Atlantic City with nostalgia for bygone vacations or with criticism of the gambling industry and political corruption, but until now, no one has attempted to capture the multiplicity of viewpoints and commentary on the city across time in one volume. An Atlantic City Reader provides history, entertainment, and social commentary on ‘America’s Famous Playground’ through a variety of lenses and voices.” —Heather Perez, Stockton University and Atlantic City historian

A multifaceted portrait of the iconic New Jersey resort town.

Compiling fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, newspaper stories, and magazine reports, The Atlantic City Reader presents an engaging and multifaceted portrait of the iconic resort town. Including accounts from such visitors as Walt Whitman, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fanny Hurst, Langston Hughes, and Bruce Springsteen, it traces the city’s boom, bust, and possible resurgence.

LOUIS J. PARASCANDOLA is a professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of several books.

JOHN PARASCANDOLA (1941-2024) was a professor of the history of pharmacy and history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Chief, History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine in Washington DC. He is the author of numerous books.

Contributors

Jack Alexander

Additional print format:

Rachel Beanland

George A. Birmingham

Bruce Bliven

Margaret L. Brett

Sonora Webster Carver

Ed Condran

Meghan Crnic (and Cynthia Connolly)

Countee Cullen

Arthur Conan Doyle

Stephen Dunn

Jack Engelhard

George and Ira Gershwin

Christopher Cook Gilmore

Jeff Goldman

Molly Golubcow

Mack Gordon (and Josef Myrow)

Francis H. Hardy

Barbara Helfgott Hyett

A. M. Heston

Maurice M. Howard

Langston Hughes

James Huneker

Fanny Hurst

E. J. Kahn Jr.

Bill Kent

Joseph Kertes

John T. King

Robert Kotlowitz

Maxine Kumin

Steven Lemongello

Elmore Leonard

Sandra E. Lundy

Steven Malanga

John Matheus

John McPhee

Margot Mifflin

James Morrow

Peter E. Murphy

Frank Ward O’Malley

Priscilla Painton

Louis J. Parascandola

Gregory Pardlo

Rochelle Ratner

Damon Runyon

Martin Sherman

Bruce Springsteen

Diane Stopyra (Buzz Keough)

Gay Talese

Jim Waltzer and Tom Wilk

Walt Whitman

Thornton Wilder

William Carlos Williams

Jane Wong

Farewell to Russia

Memories of When I Was Kola

Nikolai Prestia

Translated by Teresa Fiore and Daniela Chaudhary Fiore

Foreword by Loredana Polezzi

“A vivid picture of a seven-year-old's experience in two Russian orphanages— remembering abuse and loneliness but also occasional comfort, companionship, beauty, and insight before he was adopted by an Italian couple.”

—Marianne Novy, author of Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories

“Entertaining, profound, and timely, Gregory Conti’s elegant translation prompts the rediscovery of this jewel of Italian literature.”

Serenella Iovino, author of Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation

An acclaimed autobiographical novel about two children finding slivers of hope and joy as they grow up in a bleak Russian orphanage.

Winner of the Premio Letterario Massarossa

Growing up in 1990s Russia in a family marked by poverty, substance abuse, and neglect, Kola and his sister are eventually admitted into the orphanage system. Here, Kola comes face to face with a different but equally daunting challenge: navigating an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile world haunted by the absence of his mother. The ensuing journey, which eventually culminates in the adoption by an Italian family, alternates moments of both trauma and deliverance, while asking fundamental questions about our ability to reconcile ourselves with unfathomable loss.

Harrowing yet lyrical, Nikolai Prestia’s prize-winning 2021 novel is a testament to the duality of memory in its ability to both hurt and heal, and to the transformative power of those figures, adults and peers alike, who contribute to a child’s development. Translated into English as part of a collaboration between the author and a motherdaughter translator duo, the novel serves up a wrenching glimpse into the back stories that often precede the adoption of an older child.

NIKOLAI PRESTAI was born in 1990 in Russia and adopted by an Italian couple at the age of eight. He currently lives in Rome. His first book, Dasvidania, won the 2022 Massarosa Prize. His forthcoming novel is entitled La coscienza delle piante

TERESA FIORE is the Inserra Endowed Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Montclair State University. She is the author of Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy's Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies.

DANIELA CHAUDHARY FIORE is a fine arts student at LaGuardia High School in New York City. An older adoptee from Colombia to the US, she is trilingual: Her first mother tongue is Spanish, her second mother tongue is Italian, and the language she adopted is English.

Other Voices of Italy

March 10, 2026

184 Pages • 5 x 8

9781978840898 • Paperback • $29.95

Rutgers Trade Literature

Additional print format:

9781978840904 • Hardcover • $69.95

Rutgers Super Short

August 11, 2026

298 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 6 color and 10 B-W images

9781978844964 • Paperback • $39.95

Rutgers Academic Trade Music • Popular Culture • Korea

Additional print format:

9781978844971 • Hardcover • $130.00 Rutgers Super Short

Table of Contents

Foreword: O Brother, There Thou Art: An Odyssey to Colonial (Pre)Modernity in Korean Popular Music, by Pil Ho Kim

Preface

Translator’s Note

1. Introduction

2. The Gramophone Record and the Creation of Popular Songs

3. The Consumption of Popular Songs

4. Literary Expressions of Popular Sentiment

5. The Historical Status and Significance of Korean Popular Songs from the First Half of the 20th Century

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Brother Is a Street Musician Viewing the Landscape of Modernity Through Korean Popular Music

Zhang Eujeong

Translated by Seulbin Han

"Zhang’s forensic account of the Korean popular music industry during the first half of the twentieth century has long been a standard go-to text for Korean writers. Now made accessible for all in translation, it brilliantly dissects issues surrounding genre, origin, and influence, usefully provides lyrics of important songs, and convincingly argues for a continuum running from the past to today’s all-conquering K-Pop."

—Keith Howard, professor emeritus of music, SOAS University of London

"An instant classic when originally published two decades ago, Brother is a Street Musician stands as a highly important and indeed pivotal record of Korean musicology. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in Korean modernity, the rise of celebrity culture and fandom, and the transnational nature of the music industry in its formative years."

—Roald Maliangkay, author of Broken Voices: Postcolonial Entanglements and the Preservation of Korea's Central Folksong Traditions

"In a touchstone study that charts the birth of modern Korean popular music, Zhang provides a virtuoso performance that analyzes a range of colonial-era musical genres, revealing through an eclectic range of sources how trot, jazz, and sinminyo songs transcended entertainment to become vital, resonant comforts for a people navigating the complexities and contradictions of colonial modernity."

—Hyung-Gu Lynn, AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research, University of British Columbia

A history of Korean pop music in the early 20th century, telling the inspiring story of how a colonized people preserved their language and culture through song.

The history of the Korean popular music industry dates back a century before the beginnings of K-Pop, to when the Korean peninsula was still under Japanese rule. Brother Is a Street Musician chronicles the development of Korean popular music over the first half of the twentieth century, examining both industry trends and talented composers and performers like Nam Insu and Yi Nanyǒng. Drawing from rare archives of gramophone records and lyric books, musicologist Zhang Eujeong shows how Korean musicians drew from folk traditions to create totally new genres, ranging from comic songs to Western-influenced jazz records. She also includes English translations and detailed analyses of lyrics from some of the era’s most popular songs.

A landmark study of Korean music, now available in English for the first time, Brother Is a Street Musician tells the inspiring story of how a colonized people developed their own form of popular music, planting the seeds for an industry that would grow to export Korean culture around the world.

ZHANG EUJEONG is a professor of liberal arts at Dankook University, South Korea. She has published thirty books and over ninety essays on Korean popular music, popular culture, and oral tradition.

SEULBIN HAN is a journalist, editor, and translator for the US-based K-Pop media outlet allkpop by 6Theory Media. Brother Is a Street Musician is her first translation. She is based in Durham, North Carolina.

DITTA: Korean Humanities in Translation

Collective Yearning

Black Women Artists from the Zimmerli Art Museum

Edited by Amber N. Wiley

Foreword by Nicole Simpson

A richly illustrated catalogue for an exhibition of art by Black women, including reflections from the Rutgers students who curated it.

When Rutgers professor Amber N. Wiley began teaching her African American Art class in 2018, she and her students made a shocking discovery. While the university’s Zimmerli Art Museum had over seveny thousand artworks in its collection, only one of the pieces on display was by a Black American woman. The students, who came from a variety of majors and reflected the ethnic diversity of New Jersey itself, agreed something needed to be done to correct this imbalance. And so begins the story of the groundbreaking exhibition Collective Yearning

In this book, Wiley tells the story of how she and her student curators took a deep dive into the Zimmerli’s holdings to recover, catalog, and display its art by Black women. Along the way, contributors discuss the ethics of curation, the history of African American expressive traditions, and the institutional biases that erase or marginalize Black female perspectives. Richly illustrated with pieces from the exhibition, including little-seen work by such visionaries as Faith Ringgold, Renée Stout, and Kara Walker, Collective Yearning makes a powerful statement on the importance of showcasing Black women artists.

AMBER N. WILEY is an associate professor of planning, landscape architecture and design and the Wick Cary Director of the Institute for Quality Communities in the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma.

May 12, 2026

140 Pages • 7 x 10 • 82 color images

9781978842847 • Hardcover • $35.00

Rutgers Academic Trade

Art

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Part I

Chapter 1: Teaching to Transgress

Chapter 2: Echoes: Speaking from the Threshold

Chapter 3: "Pass the Mic": A Conversation with Student Curators

Part II

Chapter 4: Self-Making and Identity

Chapter 5: The Brodsky Center and Rutgers Print Collaborative

Chapter 6: Process and Materiality

Chapter 7: The Art of Storytelling

Chapter 8: Alchemy and Spirituality

Conclusion: Seeing Ourselves

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Artist Biographies

Art Analysis Worksheet

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

March 10, 2026

300 Pages • 6 x 9 • 64 B-W images

9781978846128 • Paperback • $32.95

Rutgers Academic Trade Film and Media Studies • Biography • Women's Studies

Additional print format:

9781978846135 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

Partial Table of Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition by Imogen Sara Smith

Preface

PART ONE

Introducing Ida Lupino, Director and Feminist Auteur

A Rejection of Hollywood

Lupino Directs

Director Lupino and Colleagues

The Filmakers’ Films

Lupino and the Censors

Lupino as Feminist Auteur

Postwar Hollywood, American Society and Culture

Close-Up on Outrage

Empathy and a Cinema of Engagement

Italian Neorealism or American Realisms?

Looking Backward?

PART TWO

Lupino’s Ingenious Genres: Early Films and The Trouble with Angels (1966)

The Social Problem Film and Film Noir

Home Noir

Home Is Where the Noir Is

Doubled Dreams in Hard, Fast and Beautiful

Doubled Domesticity in The Bigamist

Doubled Trauma: Outrage

A Mighty Girl: Lupino and The Trouble with Angels

PART THREE

Lupino Moves to Television

Industrial Contexts: Film to Television

Directing for Television

“No. 5 Checked Out”

Ida Lupino, Television Director

On Close Readings of 1950s and 1960s Television

“The Return”: Norma Desmond and Ida Lupino Haunt the Small

Screen

Mr. Adams and Eve

Ida Lupino, Director, 2nd edition

Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition

Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman

Foreword by Imogen Sara Smith

Praise for the First Edition

"[A] landmark study of this underrecognized director. . . . Grisham and Grossman do not consider their subject narrowly as a woman filmmaker. They present Lupino broadly as a pioneer independent moviemaker and director."

Film Quarterly

"A detailed and readable account of Lupino as a filmmaker whose work and contributions deserve greater attention in an industry still overly dominated by the male gaze. This volume should encourage further scholarship on the life and work of a pioneering filmmaker."

The Journal of American Culture

"Groundbreaking and judiciously comprehensive."

South Atlantic Review

“Recommended.”

Choice

"Ida Lupino, Director fulfills a grand job in keeping her achievements in the public eye."

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

The updated edition of Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition, an in-depth exploration of Lupino’s film and television directing work, provides close readings of the films and TV episodes Lupino directed and accounts for the history of Lupino’s reception, continuing into the mid-2020s, in media and film scholarship. The book gives readers a fuller understanding of Lupino’s major contribution to the history of American cinema and media. The revisions update this book, the first on Lupino’s directing, to address recent scholarship on Lupino’s work and reinforce her abiding relevance for cinephiles and film scholars. It incorporates scholarly and popular culture references to Lupino in the last seven years. Updates include a foreword by writer and film critic Imogen Sara Smith, whose work in film scholarship and the public arena has drawn attention to Lupino and the importance of gender to film noir. Authors Therese Grisham and Julie Grossman have added a complete list of the TV episodes Lupino directed in the 1950s and '60s, as well as an updated epilogue.

This new edition addresses how our views of Lupino’s innovative cinema and her prodigious contributions to classic television have been taken up by others, proving that Lupino, whose reputation has waxed and waned since the middle of the twentieth century, is here to stay as a major figure in the history of American media.

THERESE GRISHAM taught in the film and media studies program and in the departments of humanities and philosophy at Oakton College in Des Plaines, Illinois.

JULIE GROSSMAN is a professor of English and communication at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. Her publications include Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster and The Femme Fatale (Rutgers University Press).

No More Chainsaws

Feminist Criticism and the New Wave of Women's Horror Cinema

Dan Vena

“By centering female-directed horror, this book not only rewrites the history of the genre but also shows how feminist critique can sharpen our understanding of cinema itself. Essential reading for anyone who cares about horror, feminism, or film history.”

—Dahlia Schweitzer, author of Haunted Homes

“This is a fascinating exploration of the new wave of women filmmakers reshaping the horror genre. Engaging in a critically sophisticated conversation with the work of feminist scholars such as Carol Clover and Barbara Creed, the book offers sharp and lucidly written readings of popular films, bringing fresh insights into debates about women and horror.”

—Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, author of Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

“Welcome to the Golden Age of Women-Directed Horror.” Over the last fifteen years, there has been a sustained global influx of women artists working in mainstream and independent horror cinemas earning notable public and industry acclaim. As a result, now, for the first time in horror history, there is also a concentrated corpus of films that explicitly address topics of identity, sexuality, trauma, and monstrosity from women’s perspectives. No More Chainsaws offers an indepth analysis of some of the earliest and underrated releases within this New Wave of women’s horror cinema: Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (2008), Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009), Jennifer and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012), and Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie (2013). No More Chainsaws articulates the ways in which these contemporary films attempt to liberate horror from an overdetermining gendered lexicon of violence and terror.

DAN VENA is a continuing adjunct associate professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Ontario.

The Total Black Experience

A History of Television’s Positively Black Ronald Bishop

"The Total Black Experience evokes the sense of urgency and commitment among Black activists and journalists who launched the innovative and foundational, Positively Black, in 1970. But Ron Bishop’s fascinating account, rooted in invaluable oral histories and rich context, stretches beyond the crucible of civil rights and Black Power, offering a lens into a half-century of Black history and a nuanced analysis of media representation and social change. is a critical source for readers interested in journalism and media, history, and activism.”

—Julia Rabig, author of The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, NJ, 1960-1990

The Total Black Experience is the first book to chronicle the history and social significance of Positively Black, one of the longest-running public affairs shows in the history of television. Spurred on by the findings of the Kerner Commission, executives at WNBC-TV greenlit the show and turned production over to a small but dedicated team of storytellers who quickly made it their mission to carve out a space for serious and nuanced discussion of issues important to the Black community and to celebrate all aspects of Black culture. They believed that accurate representation of their experiences was a right, not a privilege. The show’s first cohosts included the well-known Harlem-based activist Rev. Eugene Callender and Gus Heningburg, activist, successful consultant and mediator, and advocate for organized labor. Callender had founded Harlem Prep to equip young Black people for college, while Heningburg played a key role in stabilizing life in Newark following the rebellion there in the late 1960s. Both were adept at using the media to reach their constituencies. Combining in-depth interviews with painstaking archival research, The Total Black Experience introduces readers to key members of the Positively Black production team and analyzes thematic shifts in the show’s content. The book celebrates Positively Black’s longevity and challenges readers to explore the current state of Black representation on television.

RONALD BISHOP is a professor in the Department of Communication at Drexel University, Philadelphia. He has published six books, including most recently The Thematic Evolution of Sports Journalism’s Mental Health Narrative.

May 12, 2026

June 9, 2026 168

Stay Tuned

Listening to the Network Era

Patrick Sullivan

“Stay Tuned may promise to study sound seriously but I recommend you also read it to study Sullivan's writing. He is a scholarly writer that entertains, his writing is evocative, jazz-influenced, enticing. Come for the sound, stay for the style.”

—Alison Peirse, author of Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre and Professor of Film Studies, University of Leeds

“With a catholic sensibility, deep knowledge of technology, and encyclopedic realm of reference, he traces television’s penetration into our shared sonic lifeworlds and shows us how we have been affected, moved, swayed, and calibrated. This book will stimulate the next generation of research into TV sound.”

—Amy Villarejo, Professor, UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television

Since the 1950s, television flooded the American soundscape with not just pictures but sounds, a constant aural stream infiltrating domestic life. In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound not as background noise or auxiliary signal but as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He theorizes how television’s sonic forms— asynchronous audiovisuals, noises, affective rhythms, what he collectively terms “network aurality”—trouble traditional aesthetic theory. Stay Tuned takes up critiques of television sound and repurposes them as evidence of a deeper philosophical discomfort: namely, that television sound does something to aesthetic categories that they weren’t built to handle. From the laugh track to the cartoon “boinks,” from noises to the jingle, Sullivan reads television sounds not as cultural detritus but as formal interventions—forcing a redefinition of what aesthetics means when form is mass-produced, commercial, and built for syndication. What emerges is not just a new theory and history of television sound but a reimagined account of aesthetic experience itself—expanded, recalibrated, and a little wacky.

PATRICK SULLIVAN is an assistant professor of performance and visual studies at Texas A&M University.

March 10, 2026

204 Pages • 6 x 9 • 20 B-W images

9781978844117 • Paperback • $29.95

Rutgers Short

Media Studies • African American Studies

Additional print format

9781978844124 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

Black and Blue TV

Industry Responses to the Black Lives

Matter Movement Laurena Bernabo

"Black and Blue TV is a compelling and timely work that sheds new light on television's relationship to a particularly fraught moment in recent U.S. history. Stretching far beyond the boundaries of genre analysis, Bernabo’s research engages deeply with the on-the-ground tensions within the television industry that enable and constrain meaningful calls for change. This is a terrific book that promises to be a touchstone for further research in television production studies."

—Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, author of TV Cops: The Contemporary American Television Police Drama

"Urgent and illuminating, Black and Blue TV offers a nuanced look at how television has responded to era-defining racial justice activism. Built on rare access to media professionals, Bernabo’s production studies approach delivers incisive takes on how TV creators are grappling with their role shaping understandings of crime, justice, and race."

—Lori Kido Lopez, author of Race and Digital Media: An Introduction

Black and Blue TV explores the ways television productions have responded to the Black Lives Matter movement. Television programs’ engagement with BLM was common before George Floyd’s murder sparked international protests in the summer of 2020, at which point it became nearly unavoidable for many series. Images of police using violence against Black Americans fueled criticisms of the role of television—especially cop shows—in perpetuating “copaganda,” highlighting the fact that television’s cops are nearly always the good guys, even when they break the law and use excessive force. Black and Blue TV identifies trends and anomalies in television’s engagement with BLM but also investigates the people who influence what those representations look like. Pairing textual criticism with interviews with television creatives, executives, and media activists, author Laurena Bernabo traces shifts in how these individuals understand their role in televisual culture and the cultural forum of narratives that are produced and distributed as a result

LAURENA BERNABO is an assistant professor of entertainment and media studies in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

Boundaries That Divide

How Journalists in Turkey Surrendered Their Power over Politics

Defne Över

“Över offers a detailed account of Turkey’s political and journalistic transformations between 2007 and 2016. Drawing on interviews with journalists and analysis of pivotal political events, the book examines the erosion of journalistic autonomy through the lens of professional relationships, group identities, and emotional dynamics. A useful guide for anyone interested in the sociology of journalism.”

—Bilge Yesil, author of Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order

“A key part of the erosion of democracy is the collapse of media independence, something we should all worry about. Boundaries That Divide is a focused, chilling examination of how this happened in Turkey, a leader in the process.”

—James M. Jasper, author of The Art of Moral Protest

Turkey presents a striking example of the most recent wave of global authoritarian turns. The two-decade-long transition in the country’s political system also transformed its media environment. As mainstream journalists gradually yielded their places to sycophants, much more willing to praise the government in their news, the mainstream media that once oversaw —however imperfectly—political decisions started devoting its full service to cheerleading the government.

Simultaneously, a new sphere of critical journalism began to emerge, with mainstream media journalists joining their fellows in the peripheries of the media. Considering the transformation of Turkey’s news media as the decay of a democratic institution, this book asks, How does the media break down under the rule of an elected government?

Drawing on fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the book traces the ruling AKP’s manipulation of social divides to consolidate power and journalists’ navigation of the resulting climate of fear, hope, doubt, and anger. The book shows how Turkey’s news media surrendered its power over politics as some journalists embraced disinformation as a path to heightened status, others turned to self-censorship for protection, and still others resisted capture through continuous but fragmented efforts.

DEFNE ÖVER is an assistant professor of sociology at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Television Is Where You Find It A History of Feature Filmmakers in TV

Craig S. Simpson

“Thoroughly researched and written with flair, this study of legendary movie directors who worked in TV is a rare joy— informative, critically important, and pleasurable.”

—James Naremore, author of More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

“This lively and engaging book captures the vibrancy and eclecticism of early American TV, and offers a crucial counterperspective to those who think great television only began in the twenty-first century. Balancing passion for early TV with critical reflectiveness, Simpson makes a welcome and timely contribution to TV’s art history and television aesthetics.”

—Sarah Cardwell, Honorary Fellow at the University of Kent and writer on television aesthetics and adaptation.

Television Is Where You Find It is a revelatory journey into the overlooked world of feature filmmakers who brought their cinematic vision to the small screen between 1955 and 1990—long before directing for television became trendy in the age of “Prestige TV.” With ten compelling case studies—from legends like Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Orson Welles to trailblazers like Ida Lupino, Melvin Van Peebles, and Martin Scorsese—author Craig S. Simpson uncovers how these directors reshaped the language of television with style and imagination.

Far from simply dabbling in a “lesser” medium, these filmmakers pushed the boundaries of what TV could do, crafting bold, innovative work that challenges the old notion that television belongs solely to writers and producers. In this fresh, critical study, Television Is Where You Find It makes a case for rediscovering and reevaluating a rich chapter of television history—one in which cinematic artistry quietly flourished, often hidden in plain sight.

CRAIG S. SIMPSON is the director of Special Collections and Archives at San José State University. He is the coauthor of Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings, with Gregory S. Wilson, and Cinema Then and Now: James Naremore—Conversations with Craig S. Simpson.

June 9, 2026

190 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 20 B-W images

9781978844841 • Paperback • $29.95

Rutgers Short

Media Studies • Television

Additional print format

Rutgers Super Short

July 14, 2026

222 Pages • 6 x 9

9781978846289 • Paperback • $32.95

Rutgers Short Media Studies • Cultural Studies

Additional print format

9781978846296 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

Nostalgic Futures

The Reactionary Fantasies of Speculative Fiction Fandoms

Max Dosser

Speculative fiction imagines impossible futures and alternative pasts, alien species and angelic monsters, technological marvels and magical solutions. In recent years, however, many in its fandoms have protested the inclusion of nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual characters as betrayals of their beloved media for the sake of “wokeness.” Nostalgic Futures: The Reactionary Fantasies of Speculative Fiction Fandoms examines how contemporary fan controversies— particularly those surrounding gender, race, and sexuality in speculative fiction media—intersect with reactionary movements within and beyond fandom. This book explores how the nostalgic fantasies of fans and far-right movements contribute to broader reactionary discourses, shaping not only the past they long for but the future they fear. From the Hugo Awards and PuppyGate to Star Wars’ #NotMyJedi to Mass Effect and The Last of Us boycotts, Nostalgic Futures reveals how speculative fiction fandom has become a site of contestation over our visions of the past, present, and future.

MAX DOSSER is a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University.

July 14, 2026

208 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 6 B-W figures

9781978816985 • Paperback • $37.95

Rutgers Short Television Studies

Additional print format

9781978816992 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

Over and Over

Performance, Time, and Resonance in Serial Television Drama

Elliott Logan

How does serial drama earn, keep, and reward our attention for so long—over episodes, seasons, months, and years?

While we know that characters are the focus of story and viewer interest in television fiction, scholars have for decades overlooked the way those characters are performed on-screen and the lure of performance as a key formal and thematic aspect of long-form television storytelling. In Over and Over, Elliott Logan offers close readings of performance in some of the most celebrated television dramas of the century, casting new light on the attractions and significance of the medium’s seriality. The book shows how the patterning and expressive resonance of performers on-screen binds together otherwise unconnected episodes of shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men. In doing so, it highlights the provisionality of identity and meaning as crucial to their interest in the sustenance of human relationships over long periods of time. In accounting for the resonance of performance over time in serial drama, this book shows, we find the terms of our own attachment to its compelling depictions of human life

ELLIOTT LOGAN is a lecturer in film and screen studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Breaking Bad and Dignity Techniques of the Moving Image

We Are Not South African Mediating National Identity in a Postcolonial and Postapartheid State

Rachel Lara van der Merwe

“This remarkable study reframes the nation as a colonial medium, forging an original synthesis between South African political economy and decolonial ecopolitics. By analyzing the twin exploitations of emigration and ecology, it persuasively dismantles the nation-state and offers the relational ontology of ubuntu as a vital, actionable roadmap for post-national liberation and socioecological justice.”

—Francis B. Nyamnjoh, author of #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa

"From the toppling of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes to the Cape Town Water Crisis, social media, and more, van der Merwe expertly shows what it means to ‘stay with the trouble’ as post-apartheid South Africans audition new repertoires of belonging, within and beyond the theater of the nation."

—Ted Striphas, author of Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet

We Are Not South African explores how national identity functions as a colonial tool of communication, control, and power.

Author Rachel Lara van der Merwe examines how humans and the planet are integrally shaped by the idea of the nation, and speculates on how different sociopolitical imaginaries, instead of the nation could inform ways of being-together in the world.

Linking national identity to colonialism, the book broadens the idea of the nation to include its impact on all forms of life, human and more-than-human. Van der Merwe builds her argument on three central observations: that nations are made up of conflicting and fractured imaginaries, not unified, cohesive ones; the nation is divisive by nature, tracing back to its colonial origins; and the nation, along with the state, exploits both humans and more-than-humans. In order to build a more just and sustainable planetary society, she argues, liberation from such colonial formations is vital. In response, the book asks, How could we reimagine how we organize our societies through values of relationality and mutual care rather than rigid borders? What sociopolitical imaginaries do we need, or already possess, that might inform new configurations of community?

RACHEL LARA VAN DER MERWE is an assistant professor in the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State.

Liberation and Education Perspectives on Black Educational Thought

Edited by Ronald E. Chennault and Derrick P. Alridge

"Liberation and Education embodies the Sankofa spirit, illuminating the past, present, and future of Black intellectual thought. From African ancestors to contemporary voices across the diaspora, this volume affirms that Black communities have always engaged—and will continue to engage—in transformative educational strategies that nurture our collective well-being.”

—Gloria Swindler Boutte, coeditor of We Be Lovin’ Black Children: Learning to Be Literate About the African Diaspora

“Ronald Chennault and Derrick Alridge have taken it upon themselves to gather a group of truth-tellers to shed light in troubling times. I hope readers understand the immediacy of their message. If we don't, then we must accept that we are complicit with the goals of white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism and fascism.”

—David Stovall, professor of Black studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago

Liberation and Education brings together a collection of essays about Black educators' and organizations' quests to cultivate and employ educational strategies for the liberation of Black people.

RONALD E. CHENNAULT is an associate professor and former associate dean of the College of Education of DePaul University. He is a coeditor of White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America (1998) and is the author of Hollywood Films About Schools: Where Race, Politics, and Education Intersect (2006) and of Anti-Public: How Elite Discourse Harms Public Education (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).

DERRICK P. ALRIDGE is the Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Educational Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History (2008) and a coeditor of The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century (2021) and Message in the Music: Hip-Hop History and Pedagogy (2010). He has also served as president of the History of Education Society.

New Directions in the History of Education May 12, 2026

Dictators and the Higher Education Dilemma

State

Power and the University in Modern Iran

Saeid Golkar

Dictators and the Higher Education Dilemma explores a powerful contradiction at the heart of modern authoritarian regimes: While universities are essential for producing skilled labor and projecting national progress, they also cultivate critical thinkers who can challenge state power. Drawing on Iran’s modern history, from the Pahlavi monarchy to the Islamic Republic, Saeid Golkar shows how dictators use universities not only to train technocrats and showcase development but also as tools for shaping ideology, suppressing dissent, and co-opting academics. In authoritarian systems, education becomes a double-edged sword, essential for growth yet dangerous when it empowers independent thought. Golkar reveals how regimes manipulate admissions, censor curricula, and reward loyalty to create compliant intellectuals and loyal elites. Blending personal experience with rich historical and political analysis, this book exposes the tactics used to turn universities into instruments of social control. It speaks to a growing trend worldwide, offering vital insights into the clash between authoritarian power and academic freedom from Iran to China, Russia, and beyond.

SAEID GOLKAR is the UC Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga and a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He is the author of Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Iran.

Hardcover

$120.00

Rutgers Super Short

One Semester Away from a Crisis

An Economist's Perspective on Leading Small Colleges William T. Bogart

"One Semester Away from a Crisis is smart and thought-provoking. Bogart's approach, based on years of experience, is both sympathetic to the challenges facing institutions of higher education and generous with examples that are instructive for today's leaders. An important addition to any sitting (or aspiring) president's bookshelf."

—Suzanne M. Rivera, president of Macalester College

"A member of the dismal science, Bogart brings surprising flair to economic insights for the operation of small colleges. The writing is engaging, and the author never loses sight of his serious purpose: to support the sustainability of institutions living on the existential edge."

—Nathan D. Grawe, author of The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Changes

"Bogart adeptly describes the opportunities and challenges impacting leadership at America's small colleges while offering insights and remedies that only an economist-turned-chief-executive could bring to the table. A smart read for anyone who wants to understand how the complexities and peculiarities of small colleges are placing their essential role in our system of higher education at risk."

—Jeff Arnold, executive director of the Association of Presbyterian Colleges and Universities

Small colleges are a vital component of the United States higher education system. However, their unique characteristics are often overlooked in analyses that incorporate all colleges and universities. Many concepts familiar to economics professors but less familiar to more general audiences are helpful in understanding small colleges. These concepts include sophisticated ideas not typically covered in basic economics courses, such as regulatory capture, decision-making under uncertainty, and the logic of collective action. By combining economic theories with his own experiences leading small colleges, William T. Bogart provides a way for presidents, trustees, and other leaders of small colleges to more effectively help their institutions achieve their full potential.

WILLIAM T. BOGART served as president of Maryville College, Maryville, Tennessee, and Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina. He is the author of The Economics of Cities and Suburbs and Don’t Call It Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the Twenty-First Century.

Firsts Abroad

First-Generation Students' Journeys Outward and Upward

Jeremy Townley

“Firsts Abroad is a beautifully written book that provides a compelling account of U.S. students’ experiences studying overseas. It shows how such mobility can significantly benefit those who are the first in their family to attend higher education and reveals the important attributes and insights such students can bring with them which enable them to thrive. This is an uplifting book that should be read widely by all those with an interest in student mobility, whether from an academic or practice-based perspective.”

—Rachel Brooks, coauthor of Student Migrants and Contemporary Educational Mobilities

“This is a wonderful book, full of deep insights. Its arguments draw upon rich interview data, which have been gathered sensitively and with empathy. The book gives a voice to students often marginalized in debates around international mobilities.”

—Johanna L. Waters, codirector of the Migration Research Unit at University College London

Across the country, flagship universities and liberal arts colleges, regional state campuses and Ivy League institutions continue to adapt to a globalized economy. One key internationalization strategy is study abroad. But who gets to have an overseas experience? In Firsts Abroad, Jeremy Townley explores the stories of first-generation college students who participated in study abroad. Because of their multicultural, multilingual backgrounds, nontraditional paths to and through college, and hard-won life experiences, first-generation students possess knowledge, skills, and savvy developed in their families that help them take advantage of their time overseas. While abroad, these students also experience significant gains in social networks and cultural knowledge, as well as important transformations in worldview, that allow for the possibility of upward social mobility. This powerfully argued book reveals that study abroad, so important in a globalized world, may be most essential for students historically underserved by higher education.

JEREMY TOWNLEY directs the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies program at Oregon State University. He has published in Harvard Review, The New York Review of Books, Slate, and elsewhere.

Campus Whisper Networks

Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors

Janet Hinson Shope and Richard Pringle

"Campus Whisper Networks differs from other books on the market in its emphasis on the roles of peers and community as sites for disclosures and action. Rather than focusing on the survivors themselves or calling for action from a largely faceless university 'administration,' this book uses multiple methods to establish different ways of knowing on campus. The content is challenging and charged emotionally, but the authors' language is precise and empathetic."

—Lauren J. Germain, author of Campus Sexual Assault: College Women Respond

"The focus of Campus Whisper Networks on relational knowledge offers a distinct and important new perspective. The authors challenge notions of survivor silence in response to violence by showing how and why such silence is not pervasive. Effectively organized, well-written, and highly readable, Campus Whisper Networks treats a critically important subject in higher education with important policy and political implications."

—Debra L. DeLaet, author of The Global Struggle for Human Rights: Universal Principles in World Politics

College students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone, almost always a friend, and most students know someone who has been assaulted. These survivors and confidants are part of a campus whisper network. We examine the whisper networks, and how formal and informal structures channel tellings. Knowledge gaps among students and between students and administrators create an uneven knowing field, which affects knowers, their college perceptions, and thwart possibilities of change.

Formal and informal communication rules ensure that awareness of sexual assaults within one’s community is uneven, mostly confined to whisper networks where survivors tell friends who keep their secrets. The pockets of whispering, secret-keeping, silence-holding, and avoidance constitute a fractured community unable to see its wounds, let alone address them.

JANET HINSON SHOPE is a professor of sociology at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a coauthor of Paid to Party: Working Time and Emotion in Direct Home Sales (Rutgers University Press).

RICHARD PRINGLE is an emeritus professor of psychology at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

March 10, 2026

166 Pages • 6 x 9 • 7 B-W images, 7 tables 9781978845022 • Paperback • $24.95

Rutgers Short Sociology • Education

August 11, 2026

184 Pages • 6 x 9

9781978844582 • Paperback

Rutgers Short Asian Studies • Education • Childhood Studies

Additional print format

9781978844599 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

Betting on Education

The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth

Jennifer Estes

Educational credentials are one of the most reliable tickets to a middle-class livelihood across the globe today. But as the costs of schooling rise, young people increasingly wonder whether their investment will pay off. Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth follows the experiences of rural secondary school students navigating Cambodia’s semiprivatized state education system. It reveals that when students are compelled to speculate about the value of their education, the “winners” of this gamble are the ones already most securely part of the middle class. The rest are left behind. In the process, the very meaning of education is transformed, as schooling becomes less about learning and more about its potential financial returns. By situating these stories in the wider global logics of neoliberal capitalism, Betting on Education challenges readers to consider what is at stake when young people must wager so much on the promise of schooling.

JENNIFER ESTES is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her work has appeared in journals including Anthropology and Education Quarterly (2025), Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (2023), and Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2022).

Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies

April 14, 2026

218 Pages • 6 x 9 • 7 B-W images

9781978843585 • Paperback • $32.95

Rutgers Short Gender Studies • Communications

Additional print format

9781978843592 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

Stop Saying Snip!

The Rhetoric of Vasectomy

Jenna Vinson

In the US the most common contraceptive methods rely on women’s time, labor, and vulnerability to risk. Comparatively few people rely on vasectomies as a means of preventing pregnancies. Something is happening rhetorically—through meaning-making symbols and the material practices they manifest—that sustains a collective disinterest in vasectomies. Jenna Vinson draws from her feminist rhetorical study of thirty-seven television and film representations, health insurance policies, and interviews with seventeen people who have experienced vasectomy, surfacing barriers to vasectomy uptake, including problematic tropes and practices that keep vasectomy unappealing, out of mind, and inaccessible. Stop Saying Snip! also illustrates tactics and circumstances that lead people to get a vasectomy, sharing real vasectomy stories and showing that women often play an important (and until now unheeded or pathologized) role in this communication process. This book intervenes in the misogynistic cultural expectation that it is women’s responsibility to endure the pain, labor, and risks of managing fertility by identifying the rhetorics that make men’s reproductive bodies seem unnatural sites for pregnancy prevention work. Fostering a persuasive vision of vasectomy is an urgent project that contributes to the movement toward reproductive justice.

JENNA VINSON is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is the author of Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother

New Jersey's Natures

Environmental Histories of the Garden State

Edited by Raechel Lutz

Foreword by

Neil M. Maher

“The essays in New Jersey’s Natures are eye-opening and engagingly written; taken together, they feel very timely. Lutz has gathered a committed set of environmental historians working at the leading edge of the field, and this book should be of interest to environmental historians as a whole, not just scholars of New Jersey.”

—Jack Bouchard, author of Terra Nova: Food, Water, and Work in an Early Atlantic World

“New Jersey’s Natures is an exciting and interesting collection. It represents a good mix of authors and historical sub-fields, including essays that engage public history and environmental justice work.”

—Elaine Lafay, Rutgers University

New Jersey’s Natures takes up the challenge of expanding academic and popular conceptions of New Jersey and its landscapes through the lens of environmental history. Scholars’ essays showcase the ways in which nature is integral to understandings of the state and its past as well as its future. These essays show that New Jersey should no longer solely be known as a place where pollution and suburbanization run amok but rather a place where history happens.

The contributors investigate how nature and history are intertwined within this small but mighty state, covering topics from the colonial period to the present across North, South, and Central Jersey. They investigate natural features like the Delaware River and Bay, the Pinelands, and the unforgettable Jersey Shore. In this book you will find Indigenous Americans making meaning as settlers threaten their ways of life, Governor William Livingston considering Central Jersey’s features as he fights in the American Revolution, farmers building the state’s industrial agriculture, a foreign diplomat planting an arboretum, squatters in the swampy Meadowlands subverting social and economic norms, activists fighting for parks, forests, and beaches across two centuries, and much more.

RAECHEL LUTZ is an environmental historian and high school social studies teacher based in Northern New Jersey. Her academic work investigates the intersections of environmental history, the history of technology, energy history, and visual culture. She is a coeditor of American Energy Cinema. Her 2018 Rutgers University history PhD dissertation, "Crude Conservation: Nature, Pollution, and Technology at Standard Oil’s New Jersey Refineries, 1870–1980s” was awarded The Governor Alfred E. Driscoll Dissertation Prize by the New Jersey Historical Commission.

CERES: Rutgers Studies in History

May 12, 2026

266 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 18 color and 39 B-W images

9781978836426 • Paperback • $29.95

Rutgers Short Natural History • Environmental Studies

New Jersey

Additional print format:

9781978836433 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

Table of Contents

Foreword - Neil M. Maher

Introduction - Raechel Lutz

Part 1: North Jersey

Chapter 1 - Sevin Yildiz

Chapter 2 - Erin Becker-Boris

Chapter 3 - Charlotte Leib

Part II: Central Jersey

Chapter 4 - James J. Gigantino II

Chapter 5 - Daniel L. Druckenbrod

Part III: South Jersey

Chapter 6 - Christine Woodside

Chapter 7 - Andy Urban

Chapter 8 - Tina Peabody

Part IV: Delaware Water Gap

Chapter 9 - Chad Anderson

Chapter 10 - Christopher J. Slaby

Chapter 11 - Michael Chiarappa

Part V: The Pinelands

Chapter 12 - Robert Hoberman

Chapter 13 - Jordan P. Howell and Zachary Rouhas

Part VI: The Shore

Chapter 14 - Aris Damadian Lindemans

Chapter 15 - Melissa Ziobro

Notes on Contributors Index

Bucknell University Press

Bucknell University Press has been publishing books in the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences since 1968 and today curates internationally distinguished lists in Iberian studies, Latin American studies, and interdisciplinary eighteenth-century studies. Our subject areas extend to philosophy, French theater, Africana studies, and cultural and intellectual history. With authors from around the globe, Bucknell University Press extends the reach and influence of its home institution nationally and internationally and is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Bucknell University Press titles published since July 2018 are distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. The ISBN prefix for Bucknell University Press is 978-1-68448. All books bearing this prefix are available from Rutgers. Orders may be combined with any Rutgers titles. See the full list at: www.bucknelluniversitypress.org.

Please note that titles published by Bucknell University Press before July 2018 are still available from Rowman and Littlefield (now part of Bloomsbury). In the US, order by phone at 1-888-330-8477, ext. 7527, email weborders@mpsvirginia.com, or visit https://www.bloomsbury.com. This applies to thirteen-digit ISBNs bearing the prefixes 978-0-83875 and 978-1-61148.

Recently Published

Confidences

Adela Zamudio

Translated by Laura Nagle

Introduction by Giovanna Rivero

A lost feminist classic of Bolivian modernism, available in English for the first time.

Juan is a Bolivian poet at the turn of the century, visiting the city of Cochabamba and writing letters to his friend Armando about the masked sensuality and hostility he feels seething beneath the placid face of this insular mining town. Antonia is a married woman living in Cochabamba, writing to her friend Gracia about the local gossip—which soon erupts into a scandal that threatens to destroy a family. Contrasting Juan’s letters home with Antonia’s private correspondence to her friend, Confidences tells a story of tragic love and explosive passions, showing how the intimacies that begin behind closed doors spill out into the public sphere.

The only novel written by acclaimed feminist poet Adela Zamudio, Confidences was harshly criticized for not following the conventions of realist literature, but it has since been hailed as a lost classic of Bolivian modernism. Now available in English for the first time, this translation captures the lyrical qualities of Zamudio’s prose as it vividly depicts how sexism, religious dogma, and prejudice prevented women from shaping their own destinies.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

ADELA ZAMUDIO (1854–1928) composed poetry in Spanish and Quechua and published numerous short stories and articles, often using the pen name Soledad. She is remembered today as a pioneer in the Bolivian feminist movement, a fierce advocate for girls’ education, and one of her country’s finest poets.

LAURA NAGLE translates prose and poetry from French, Spanish, and Irish. Her work includes the first complete English translation of Prosper Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, Songs for the Gusle, and her translations of contemporary short fiction have appeared in The Southern Review, Southword, and Latin American Literature Today. She resides in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Sally Rooney Perspectives and Approaches

Edited by Ellen Scheible and Barry Devine

Foreword by Claire Bracken

Bestselling Irish novelist Sally Rooney has emerged as the defining voice of a generation, a cultural phenomenon whose spare, intelligent prose and sharp social insight have reshaped contemporary fiction and sparked a global conversation about intimacy, politics, and the millennial condition. This new collection brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to offer fresh critical readings of Rooney’s influential novels, alongside adaptable strategies for teaching her work in today’s undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The essays situate Rooney within literary traditions from Romantic poetry to the bildungsroman and the contemporary campus novel, while engaging with contemporary topics such as gender politics, late capitalism, and media adaptation. Providing accessible yet rigorous frameworks for exploring Rooney’s fiction, this volume affirms her significance not only within contemporary literary studies but also as a cultural force whose work reaffirms the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first-century classroom.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

ELLEN SCHEIBLE is a professor of English and director of honors at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. She is the author of Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland and coeditor of Rethinking Joyce’s “Dubliners.”

BARRY DEVINE is an associate professor of English at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio. His recent work appears in The Cambridge Centenary “Ulysses” and The Irish Bildungsroman

Contemporary Irish Writers June 9, 2026

March 10, 2026

Reading with Jane Austen

Elaine Bander

“Reading with Jane Austen sets out to help us re-see the great novelist’s aims and achievements by carefully, clearly, and productively describing them alongside the significant writings of her best-loved contemporaries. Elaine Bander’s fine book will have you rereading Austen in engaging, surprising, and powerful new ways.”

—Devoney Looser, author of Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane

“Reading with Elaine Bander is a delicious and rewarding experience. She introduces us to the authors and the books that Jane Austen and her readers loved and admired, tracing the ways Austen both subverts conventions and clichés and reimagines what the novel can be. Reading with Jane Austen is a gift.”

—Susan Allen Ford, author of What Jane Austen’s Characters Read (and Why)

Jane Austen has more readers today than at any time in history. Many of Austen’s legions of fans, however, came to her novels after first seeing films or other adaptations made for twenty-first century audiences. Austen herself conversely spent her literary career undermining romantic clichés and rethinking novel conventions. Confident that she and her contemporaries shared a common reading culture, Austen deliberately constructed her novels to set readerly expectations, only to disrupt or confound those expectations by challenging her readers’ assumptions and values. In Reading with Jane Austen, Elaine Bander carefully rereads the great author’s novels—beginning with her late work of juvenilia, “Catharine, or The Bower,” and ending with her final fragment, “Sanditon”—against the rich context of late Georgian literary and intellectual culture. In doing so, Bander invites us into the transformative experience that Austen intentionally designed for her earliest readers, adding new layers of appreciation for those who love her work.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

ELAINE BANDER is retired from Dawson College in Montreal, Canada, where she taught English for three decades. She is the author of dozens of essays and several book chapters on Austen and other writers and served as president of the Jane Austen Society of North America (Canada) as well as of the Burney Society (North America).

July 14, 2026

260 Pages • 6 x 9

9781684485932 • Paperback • $39.95

Rutgers Short Literary Studies • Latin American Studies

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9781684485949 • Hardcover • $160.00

Rutgers Super Short

The Savage Library of Roberto Bolaño Radical Readings Benjamin Loy

Translated by Jordan Lee Schnee

Visionary Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was known for his darkly poetic prose and postmodern narratives, exemplified in his novel The Savage Detectives. His work is also deeply infused with references to the Western literary canon—from French and Spanish baroque texts to American and German modernism, as well as postmodern literature from Latin America and France. Taking Bolaño’s notion of “savage” reading as a point of departure, this study explores the key authors and literary traditions that underpin his oeuvre. Blending close textual analysis with insights from the history of literature and ideas, Loy offers fresh perspectives on some of Bolaño’s most significant works, including Distant Star, By Night in Chile, and 2666. The intertextual dialogues Loy traces—with figures such as Blaise Pascal, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Charles Baudelaire, William Carlos Williams, Ernst Jünger, Nicanor Parra, and Georges Perec—illuminate the aesthetic universe of an author now regarded as a central figure in twenty-first-century world literature.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

BENJAMIN LOY is a professor of romance philology at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in Germany. He is the editor of twelve books and more than fifty articles on modern and contemporary Latin American, Spanish, and French literature and cinema.

JORDAN LEE SCHNEE works in—and between—English, German, Yiddish, Spanish, and French. He teaches English literature at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany.

Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Groundless Noir Ontology and Latin American Crime Fiction

Erik Larson

This philosophical study of Latin American noir fiction poses the question, What if precarity and uncertainty aren’t just themes of the genre but ways of being in the world? Emerging from a region immersed in violence, trauma, and political instability, the novela negra reveals not just disillusionment but a desire to adapt to, even dwell within, chaos. In the hands of writers like Ricardo Piglia, Roberto Bolaño, and Patricia Melo, savvy detectives and antiheroes navigate a world in which meaning constantly shifts and certainty is elusive. Blending literary analysis with philosophical inquiry, Larson draws on Heideggerian ontology to demonstrate how the noir novel becomes a mode of existence—grounded in its very groundlessness. Rather than offering resolution, these novels embody a paradoxical desire: to engage crisis while also adapting to it. In doing so, they become both ideological and pedagogical—existential fiction for an uncertain world.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

ERIK LARSON is an associate professor of Spanish at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where he teaches courses on Latin American literature and culture. His research focuses on noir literature from Latin America at the intersection of philosophy and theory.

Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Globalizing Chocolate and Tobacco Medical Exchange in the Early Modern World

Susan G. Polansky

This groundbreaking volume explores two early and opposing Spanish medical perspectives on chocolate and other New World substances. In the early 1600s, doctors Bartolomé Marradón and Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma returned from travels to the Americas with starkly different views: Marradón cautioned against tobacco and offered only limited approval of chocolate, while Colmenero vigorously defended chocolate’s health benefits. Their writings, translated and circulated across Europe, helped transform chocolate from a medicinal drink into a global commodity. Featuring the first bilingual edition of Marradón’s Dialogue (1618)—in full Spanish and English—and a new bilingual presentation of Colmenero’s influential Curious Treatise (1631), this book provides rare insight into early modern medical thought, cultural exchange, and the globalization of taste. Essential for readers of food history, early modern medicine, and transatlantic interchange, it uniquely reveals how debates over health, culture, and commerce brewed in a cup of chocolate.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

SUSAN G. POLANSKY is a teaching professor emerita of Hispanic studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Campos Ibéricos: Bucknell Studies in Iberian Literatures and Cultures

July 14, 2026

June 9, 2026

238 Pages

6¼ x 9¼

9781684485963

Rutgers Short Literary Studies

Additional print format

11 color images

$44.95

Chateaubriand Across Empires

Fabienne Moore

What happens when the liberty of ancient nobility collides with the revolutionary ideals of equality? This groundbreaking study explores how the American, French, Haitian, and Greek Revolutions redefined freedom—and how French Romantic figure Chateaubriand grappled with that transformation. Tracing his travels across England, North America, and the Mediterranean, this book uncovers Chateaubriand’s seductive visions of “paradises lost,” which were taken up, challenged, and reimagined by Anglophone and Hispanic writers.

From Charlotte Brontë to Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Byron to Bolaño, authors found in Chateaubriand a conflicted but powerful voice at the crossroads of liberty, race, religion, and empire. This is the first comprehensive study to situate Chateaubriand within the histories of colonialism and global revolution, revealing a literary legacy that remains startlingly relevant in today’s struggles over equality.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

9781684485970 • Hardcover • $160.00

Rutgers Super Short

May 12, 2026

314 Pages • 6 x 9 • 51 B-W images, 1 table 9781684485888 • Hardcover • $160.00 Rutgers Short Literary Studies • Eighteenth-Century Studies • Art and Aesthetics

1650–1850

Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 31)

Edited by Kevin L. Cope and Samara Anne Cahill

Exploratory, investigative, and energetically analytical, 1650–1850 covers the full expanse of long eighteenth-century thought, writing, and art while delivering abundant revelatory detail. Essays on well-known cultural figures combine with studies of emerging topics to unveil a vivid rendering of a dynamic period, simultaneously committed to singular genius and universal improvement. Welcoming research on all nations and language traditions, 1650–1850 invites readers into a truly global Enlightenment.

The contributors to volume 31 join with Enlightenment thinkers in charting the outposts of long eighteenth-century culture while discovering new features in seemingly familiar terrain. Essays explore outlandish but often observed activities such as medical quackery, Rosicrucian hermeticism, and the oral antics associated with the twisted “Malaprop” tradition. In happy contrast, the volume offers the second half of a sparkling special feature on the most familiar of all substances, water. Contributors lead us through an astounding assortment of aqueous topics, from the heritage of The Compleat Angler to the sanctified sprinklings of holy water. As always, 1650–1850 culminates in a bevy of full-length book reviews that robustly address the latest scholarship on long-established specialties, unusual subjects, and broad reevaluations of the period.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

ISSN: 1065-3112

EDITOR: KEVIN L COPE is the Adams Professor of English Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. The author of Criteria of Certainty, John Locke Revisited, and In and After the Beginning, Cope has prepared numerous essay collections, most recently Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment (Bucknell University Press). Cope is a frequent guest on radio and television programming concerning higher education policy and governance.

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR: SAMARA ANNE CAHILL taught literature, rhetoric, and grant writing at Blinn College, Nanyang Technological University, and the University of Notre Dame before joining the University of North Texas as a grant manager. She is the editor of Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment and author of Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Bucknell University Press).

1650-1850

University of Delaware Press

Founded in 1922, the University of Delaware Press supports the mission of the University of Delaware through the worldwide dissemination of outstanding, peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, including literary studies, art history, French studies, and material culture, with a particular focus on the early modern period. The Press also publishes works on the history, culture, and environment of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of interest to the general public, enhancing the university’s community outreach. Our prestigious series invite works that are interdisciplinary, transnational, and/or temporal in nature, supporting the Press’s commitment to publishing innovative and inclusive scholarship.

As of March 2021, all University of Delaware Press titles published in 2019 and thereafter, including a select number of backlist titles, are distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. These books bear an ISBN prefix of 978-1-64453 and can be ordered in combination with any Rutgers titles.

University of Delaware Press titles published before 2019 are distributed by Rowman and Littlefield (now part of Bloomsbury). In the US, order by phone at 1-888-330-8477, ext. 7527, email weborders@mpsvirginia.com, or visit https://www.bloomsbury.com. See the full list at udpress.udel.edu.

Recently Published

August 11, 2026

166 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 64 color images

9781644534229 • Paperback • $29.95

Rutgers Academic Trade Cultural Studies • Photography

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9781644534236 • Hardcover • $130.00

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Plates and Figures

Introduction: A Road Map to Junk Drawers, Photographs and Meaning

Artist's Statement

Reading the Junk Drawer Photographs

1. Mary Bergstein, “What We Leave Behind”

2. Daniel Cavicchi, “Estate Curiosities”

3. John P. Jacob, “Ghost Stories”

Thinking About Junk

4. Margaret Olin, “From ‘Junk’ to ‘Junked’”

5. Sander L. Gilman, "From ‘Junk to Junque’”

6. Laura Levitt and Ruth Ost, “Ordinary and Extraordinary Objects and Their Afterlives”

7. Rhoda Rosen and Amanda Leigh Davis, “Artifacts and Access”

Contributors

Index

Junk Drawer

What We Leave Behind

Edited by Sander L. Gilman and Barbara Von Eckardt

Barbara Von Eckardt, Photographer

“With Junk Drawer: What We Leave Behind, Sander Gilman and Barbara Von Eckardt have done a wide array of academic fields and interdisciplinarity an immense service. They demonstrate, creatively, with a focus on photography, how one can turn the (supposedly) normal and unexceptional into an exemplary scholarly project. Oh what we take for granted! Such things—such as the pictures and ‘ephemera’ in the “junk drawer”—just might be uncut intellectual gems. Gilman and Von Eckhardt have assembled a sparking team in illuminating their rich questions, observations and discussions.”

—Michael Berkowitz, University College London

An interdisciplinary exploration of personal artifacts once deemed worthless, revealing the hidden narratives and cultural significance of objects labeled as “junk.”

Junk Drawer: What We Leave Behind explores the personal objects that were once treasured by their owners yet were ultimately consigned to online “junk drawer” sales. Photographer and coeditor Barbara Von Eckardt acquired these random assortments from estate remnants on eBay and has documented their contents through evocative, sepia-toned images. In doing so, she has breathed new life into items that the world had deemed valueless but that hint at the stories and identities of those who once owned them.

In addition to the photographs, Von Eckardt and coeditor Sander L. Gilman have gathered essays by scholars across disciplines, each offering a unique perspective on how such everyday objects can carry profound meaning. The result is a “junk drawer” of reflections, as varied and thought-provoking as the artifacts themselves. It is a moving testament to the emotional and cultural resonance of ordinary things—and an invitation to look more deeply at the objects surrounding us.

SANDER L. GILMAN is an emeritus professor of liberal arts and sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

BARBARA VON ECKHARDT is an emeritus professor of history, philosophy, and the social sciences at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

Material Culture Perspectives

Undercut

Cut Glass in Working-Class Life During the Long Gilded Age Joseph Larnerd

“Joseph Larnerd’s Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age offers an innovative and imaginative account of the subjecthood of American cut glass. Eschewing traditional celebratory accounts of the medium, Larnerd pursues a form of human, lived-experience design history in which the main protagonists are the unknown makers, maintainers, and lower-class viewers who experienced mixed feelings about the luxury good. His is an emotional history of material culture."

—Edward S. Cooke, Jr., department of the history of art, Yale University

How did workers experience cut glass during its cultural heyday? Rather than privilege the stories of factory owners or wealthy consumers, Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life During the Long Gilded Age refracts the medium’s history through the labors required to make and maintain these dazzling artifacts as well as popular representations of this work, from demonstrations at world's fairs to images of domestic workers with finished pieces in their charge. Cut glass and the many manifestations of public interest in its labors offered working people, too, occasions for self-reflection and, perhaps, self-realization. Foregrounding their lives, Undercut offers a multifaceted social art history of a once-popular genre of decorative art that cuts across class, gender, and race.

JOSEPH LARNERD is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art and Art History at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Material Culture Perspectives

Interiority in German Women's Writing

Edited by Beate Allert and Amy Emm

Interiority in German Women’s Writing for the first time systematically gathers and engages with contributions of German women authors to the discourse on interiority (Innerlichkeit) from 1750 to 1850. This volume shifts the recent focus on abstract theoretical and medical discourses on inwardness to the origins of interiority in literature and philosophy as written and experienced by women from the Age of Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) to the Romantic era. At the same time, it makes a claim for and explores the ramifications of understanding interiority as a feminine discourse. Contributors investigate the works of women authors who searched to find rescue from their cultural and personal entrapment via creative spaces and various modes of interiority in theatrical performances, poetic writings, letters, biographical narratives, prose, and fairy tales. From the case studies and literary analyses in the volume, interiority emerges as a spectrum of approaches to defining, resisting, and transforming the innermost self.

BEATE ALLERT is a professor of German and comparative literature at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. AMY EMM is an associate professor and the director of the German program at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.

EARLY MODERN FEMINISMS

14, 2026

July 14, 2026 • 202

Pages • 6¼ x 9¼

9781644534281

Additional print format

9781644534298 • Hardcover • $130.00 Rutgers Super Short

Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany

Christopher Hutchinson

Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany examines how doctors, writers, and printers in sixteenth-century Germany responded to the rapid expansion of print and its implications for medical knowledge. The spread of printed texts generated widespread suspicion about print’s reliability as a conduit of information and led writers to reflect on questions of audience, vernacularity, and medical authority in their responses to disease. The book investigates literary texts alongside popular vernacular medical pamphlets on the major epidemic diseases of the period––plague, syphilis, and the English sweating sickness––to reveal a widespread concern with the impact of printed texts on public health. During the 1529 outbreak of the English sweating sickness, this concern culminated in writers’ use of a “rhetoric of virality,” explicitly comparing the circulation of texts to the spread of disease, as they confronted the parallel contagions of disease and information.

CHRISTOPHER HUTCHINSON is an assistant professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Mississippi. His research interests include book history, the history of disease, and the popularization of scientific discourses in literature. He has published articles in The German Quarterly and Seminar

The Early Modern Exchange

August 11, 2026 • 214

Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 12 B-W images

9781644534311 • Paperback • $39.95

Rutgers Short Literary Criticism • Biography

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9781644534328 • Hardcover • $125.00

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The Enduring Work of Biography

James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791–2020

Edited by Greg Clingham

The Enduring Work of Biography seeks to revitalize appreciation of Boswell’s great biography for a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers. Engaging accessibly and informatively with biographical, historical, critical, and textual matters and drawing on the Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell, Enduring Work discusses Boswell’s collaboration with others (both alive and dead) in researching, writing, revising, proofing, publishing, and promoting his biography of Johnson. Central to Boswell’s concept of life writing is memory, and Enduring Work highlights both its dynamic and collaborative force in the Life of Johnson. This collection is book-ended by an introduction that considers the critical reception of the Life of Johnson and an epilogue that suggests its continuing critical insight and relevance. A closing chapter and two appendixes survey the history of the Life of Johnson as a best-selling book for over two centuries, an extraordinary collaboration between readers and publishers and between Boswell and Johnson themselves that is still evolving.

GREG CLINGHAM is a British literary scholar and publisher. He was Professor of English at Bucknell University, where he held the NEH Chair in the Humanities and the John P. Crozer Chair of English Literature, and was, for twenty-three years, the director of Bucknell University Press.

Elizabeth Detention Center

A Social History of Immigration Detention in New Jersey and the United States

Edited by Ulla D. Berg and Carolina Sanchez Boe

Afterword by Silky Shah

Foreword by Nina Bernstein

“Where immigration scholarship often focuses on legal frameworks and systems, this collection of essays and reflections reminds us of the people caught in the machinery and those working collectively to stop the system from running as intended. The intimate focus brings us into the New Jersey immigrant rights ecosystem, and we feel in community with lawyers, faith leaders, teachers, visitors, students, and immigrants. There is so much to learn from them.”

—Elissa C. Steglich, coauthor of The Unending Floods: Disaster Recovery and Immigration Policy

The United States detains and deports several hundred thousand migrants every year. Many spend significant amounts of time in immigration detention as they await adjudication of their immigration cases. The Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey is located in a converted warehouse, managed by a private, for-profit prison company. Over three decades, migrants and asylum seekers have been brought to EDC directly from Newark Airport or have been transferred to the site from elsewhere in the United States, including from the US-Mexico border region.

Through a longitudinal, site-specific study unique in its kind, this volume unites the voices and perspectives of formerly detained migrants, scholars, journalists, lawyers, and social and faith movement leaders, who share their experiences of Elizabeth Detention Center and reconstruct its social history and its location in New Jersey's political economy and in the changing legal landscapes of immigration detention in the USA.

ULLA D. BERG is an associate professor of anthropology and Latino and Caribbean studies at Rutgers University. She is a socio-cultural and visual anthropologist by training and her research focuses on migration, (im)mobility, detention, and deportation in Latin America and among US Latinx populations. She is the author of Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (2015).

CAROLINA SÁNCHEZ BOE is an adjunct lecturer at Brown University in Paris. She is a sociologist and anthropologist and her research focuses on confinement, deportation, and illegalization in the United States and France. She has worked in the non-profit sector for over a decade. She has directed the documentary Digital Detention (2025).

Rivers on Fire and Corporate Liars

The Monitoring and Sanctioning of U.S. Water Pollution Crimes Joshua Ozymy and Melissa Jarrell Ozymy

“This is, to my knowledge, the first book to offer a substantial, in-depth analysis of the use of the federal criminal environmental enforcement mechanisms available in the US. Relevant laws, policies, and history are reviewed in separate chapters that take up the enforcement of several major environmental regulations. The book provides an excellent overview of water pollution regulations and their enforcement at the federal level.”

—Michael J. Lynch, co-editor of The Handbook on Inequality and the Environment (2023)

“Joshua and Melissa Ozymy have taken a substantial body of EPA prosecutorial data and organized it in a logical and easily understandable manner. Rivers on Fire and Corporate Liars addresses an important topic, violations of laws designed to protect the foremost ingredient for life after air—water.”

—Raymond Michalowski Jr.

For over four decades, the US federal government has undertaken efforts to police and prosecute environmental crimes to protect public health and the natural environment. Yet, we still know very little about how US federal agencies have monitored and sanctioned water pollution violations and if these actions actually deter crime. In Rivers on Fire and Corporate Liars, Joshua Ozymy and Melissa Jarrell Ozymy examined over one thousand federal water pollution investigations and prosecutions undertaken by the US EPA and Department of Justice from 1983 to 2023 to answer these questions. Their analysis provides the most comprehensive empirical examination to date of how the criminal enforcement of water pollution has evolved over time, patterns in prosecutions, and how criminals were sanctioned.

JOSHUA OZYMY is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nevada, Reno. His books include The U.S. Administrative State and the Protection of Environmental Crime Victims and Toxic Intent: Environmental Harm, Corporate Crime, and the Criminal Enforcement of Federal Environmental Laws in the United States, both coauthored with Melissa Jarrell Ozymy.

MELISSA JARRELL OZYMY is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her books include The U.S. Administrative State and the Protection of Environmental Crime Victims and Toxic Intent: Environmental Harm, Corporate Crime, and the Criminal Enforcement of Federal Environmental Laws in the United States, both coauthored with Joshua Ozymy. She is also a coeditor of Palgrave Macmillan's Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology series. Critical Issues in Crime and Society

April 14, 2026

202 Pages • 6 x 9 • 25 B-W images and 29 tables 9781978845985 • Paperback • $34.95

Rutgers Short Environmental Studies

Additional print format 9781978845992 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

COVID Diagnosed the System

Lessons from the Pandemic in Massachusetts Prisons Bridget Conley

“A valuable contribution to scholarship on prisons, abolition, and the methodological importance of lived expertise. Conley effectively demonstrates how the very reality of the virus, along with the forms of community organization that aimed to support those held within the confines of carceral institutions, reveals the limits of the ‘total institution’ fiction. Instead, COVID revealed the porous nature of prisons, exposing frictions and sites for contestation.”

—Jessica Evans, assistant professor of criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University

“Conley makes a powerful statement of how a crisis serves to expose deep seated systemic problems. A crucial part of the book is the question:Why listen to directly impacted people?”

—Susan Sered, author of Diminished Citizenship in the Era of Mass Criminalization

The American criminal justice system was in flux in 2020, a clash of possibilities for reform, retrenchment, and radical change—nowhere more so than in Massachusetts, which had just passed major criminal justice reform. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the moment with life-threatening force, ravaging people held in prisons and jails across the country. However, it did not so much create new deprivations and suffering as it exposed prisons as sites of physical, institutional, and psychological violence that do not make communities safer. At the same time, advocates for people in prisons— including many incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people—seized on the pandemic’s disruptions to demand change. Detailing the first year of the pandemic inside the Massachusetts state prison system, this book argues that the history of the pandemic inside prisons exposed both the cruelties of incarceration and the power of change when it is led by directly affected people.

BRIDGET CONLEY is the research director of the World Peace Foundation and an associate research professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. She is the coeditor of Accountability for Starvation Critical Issues in Crime and Society

August 11, 2026

224 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 3 color and 3 B-

W images

9781978847675 • Paperback • $44.95

Rutgers Short

Anthropology • Sociology

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9781978847682 • Hardcover • $120.00

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Love Apocalypse

New Intimacies and the Decline of Marriage and Fertility

Edited

by Alex J. Nelson, Victor De Munck, and William Jankowiak

Marriage and fertility rates are falling around the world, upending social security planning and threatening economic growth. In Love Apocalypse, anthropologists present their insights into this society-altering demographic shift, drawing on their research into the ways love, romantic relationships, and family are being transformed by cultural, social, and economic forces. Each case study in this volume examines a unique cultural context from Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, India), Europe (Germany, Lithuania), or Latin America (Cuba, Peru), grounded in years of ethnographic research into how communities’ experiences and perceptions of love, marriage and family are changing in response to economic precarity, shifting gender relations, status competition, and diversifying cultural norms. It is increasingly clear that marriage, and two-parent nuclear families will not be the universal norm of the twenty-first century even if this arrangement was largely idealized a mere generation ago. However, this does not mean the end of love, intimacy, or family but rather its transformation and the emergence of new intimate relationships and adaptations to the challenges and opportunities of life in the twenty-first century.

ALEX J. NELSON is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Indianapolis. His research explores the ethnology of romantic love, erotic entrepreneurship in commercial sexual economies, and the transformation of love, marriage, and gender relations in South Korea, where he has been conducting ethnographic field research since 2013.

VICTOR DE MUNCK is a professor of anthropology at Vilnius University in the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies. He has conducted field work in Sri Lanka, Macedonia, Lithuania, Russia, and the US. He is the author of Romantic Love in America (2019) and coauthor of Cultural Models (2014).

WILLIAM JANKOWIAK is a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has authored more than 124 articles/book chapters and nine books (five edited). His research is conducted primarily in Northern China and in the US. His most recent book is Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community (2023).

Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

Divine Meets Digital Tech Workers and Religion in the U.S. and China

Di Di

"Di Di has brought real empirical data to the question of how religion and new technologies might intersect in a global world. Divine Meets Digital is the book that we have been waiting for. Anyone who cares about the future impact of technology and the ways it shapes the religious lives of technology workers—really all of us—should read this work."

—Elaine Howard Ecklund, Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, Rice University

"With incisive analysis, Di Di debunks simple myths that tech and religion are incompatible. Through her robust data, she demonstrates the complex and nuanced ways that tech workers embody a sense of “nonreligious religiosity” differently in China and the United States. Divine Meets Digital should be at the top of the reading list for anyone interested in religion, technology, and science."

—Carolyn Chen, author of Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley

What role does religion play in the tech industry? Based on nearly one hundred interviews, Divine Meets Digital uncovers the ways tech workers engage with religion and make sense of their work through religious and spiritual worldviews. While most identify as nonreligious, they are far from antireligious. Instead, they navigate competing religious and nonreligious views, often distinguishing between what they see as the controversial elements of religion—such as belief in the supernatural in China and its politicized and dogmatic aspects in the United States—and its more noncontroversial aspects. In doing so, they justify their religious engagement by embracing religion's noncontroversial elements while distancing themselves from its controversial features. This book offers a powerful new lens for understanding one of the most influential industries of our time, inviting readers to better understand the people who live and work at the intersection between science, religion, and technology.

DI DI is an associate professor of sociology at Santa Clara University in California. She is the coauthor of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion.

Caste, Country, and Creed

Struggles for Social Justice in the Contemporary Indian Diaspora

Edited by Nisha Thapliyal

What happens when ancient systems of oppression travel across oceans? How do Indian diaspora communities across five nations challenge centuries-old systems of oppression while building new forms of solidarity? Caste, Country, and Creed: Struggles for Social Justice in the Contemporary Indian Diaspora takes readers inside the dynamic world of contemporary social justice activism spanning Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

This groundbreaking collection brings together the voices of artists, activists, and scholar-activists who are reshaping conversations about caste discrimination, Islamophobia, and Hindu nationalism beyond India's borders. Through intimate first-person accounts and critical reflections, contributors reveal how diaspora activists are creating powerful counternarratives and mobilizing collective resistance across local and transnational networks.

The book documents the lived realities of organizing—the values, knowledge traditions, and pivotal moments that spark political protest. Caste, Country, and Creed shows how activists construct alternative knowledge to dissent, build solidarity, and inspire political participation. Contributors offer nuanced insights into the complex relationships and power dynamics that sustain collective action for social justice in the Indian diaspora.

For copyright reasons, this edition is not for sale in India.

NISHA THAPLIYAL is a senior lecturer in comparative education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research explores contemporary sites of social justice activism in the Anglophone Indian diaspora.

August 11, 2026

July 14, 2026

192 Pages

Naming Racism, Confronting Anti-Blackness

Mexican American Transnational Racialization and Coalition Building Bianca Sofia Rubalcava

What happens when we move beyond a Black-and-white understanding of racism? This provocative book challenges conventional narratives by exploring how Mexican Americans navigate the US. racial hierarchy—not simply as victims of white supremacy but as complex participants in systems of racial oppression. Tracing the construction of race from colonial regimes to the present, author Bianca Sofia Rubalcava argues that non-Black people of color, particularly Mexican Americans, often negotiate their racial position by distancing themselves from Blackness. Through legal history, social movement archives, and survey data, this work reveals how anti-Blackness has persisted across borders and generations, from the pursuit of legal whiteness to enduring family biases around interracial relationships. Ultimately, the book offers a powerful critique of how anti-Black ideologies hinder cross-racial solidarity and perpetuate marginalization. A bold and necessary intervention, this study pushes the Latinx community—and all readers—to confront complicity and reimagine racial justice in more inclusive and transformative ways.

BIANCA SOFIA RUBALCAVA is an assistant professor of political science at the University of the Pacific, Stockton, California.

Additional print format

March 10, 2026

256 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 16 B-W images

9781978844513 • Paperback • $36.95

Rutgers Short

Latin American Studies • Caribbean Studies

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9781978844520 • Hardcover • $125.00

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Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America

Edited by Patsy Lewis, Kristen A. Kolenz, and Alexandria R. Miller

“The moral panic engendered by immigration, globally, is critically and compellingly analyzed and demonstrated to be the product of colonial legacies of white supremacy, racialized hierarchies, and class exploitation (i.e., coloniality), all along the axis of gender. This makes the volume a needed, necessary, and imperative intervention in ‘migration studies.’”

—Percy C. Hintzen, professor emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

"In this groundbreaking volume, Lewis, Kolenz, and Miller take scholarship beyond the accepted binaries and bordercentered research structured by U.S. hegemony, offering a collection of insightful analyses of the interplay between mobility, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and the environment across the Americas. This 'de-centering' and 'unbordering' of migration studies is an urgently needed intellectual intervention."

—Noelle Kateri Brigden, author of The Migrant Passage: Clandestine Journeys from Central America

Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America brings together scholars and artists across regions, generations, disciplines, and modes of expression to decenter the US-Mexico border as both a site and a concept. Calling for renewed attention to the spaces, identities, and conflicts that remain understudied and excluded from our hemispheric knowledge of forced movement, the volume reveals a wider diversity of migratory realities and considers race, ethnicity, and class beyond the hegemonic formations that eclipse non-US histories. Through multidisciplinary and geographically expansive essays that draw from history, social anthropology, environmental studies, feminist studies, and lived experience, the volume examines diverse migratory flows from Chile and Argentina in the South to Georgia and New York in the North. Individually and collectively, the essays remap migratory movements other than through the most studied South-to-North trajectories and remove the US and US-based racial formations from the center of analysis. By tracking East-West flows, intraregional mobilities, and changing conceptions of racial identity, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America complicates the concepts of forced mobility and border crossing by highlighting alternative liminalities in sites of transit, destination, and return. Demanding engagement with the submerged histories of racism and the production of ethnoracial categories beyond the Black/white binary, the collection brings into focus identities, sites, and forces that have not yet occupied the foreground of global migration study.

PATSY LEWIS is a professor of Africana studies at Brown University. Her publications include Regional Integration in the Caribbean: A Critical Development Approach (2022) and Caribbean Integration: Uncertainty in a Time of Global Fragmentation (coedited with Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts and Jessica Byron (2022).

KRISTEN A. KOLENZ is an assistant professor of international studies at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. She has published several journal articles, but this will be her first book.

El Monte's New Itineraries

Afrodiasporic Spirituality in the

Edited by Alberto Sosa-Cabanas

Contemporary Caribbean

“Guide, manual, labyrinth, intricate thicket of reality and fantasy, a work of high literary modernism, scholarly treatise, or an example of the ”marvelous real"? Lydia Cabrera's El Monte is a magical, poetic and idiosyncratic rendering of Afro-Cuban religious beliefs and practices. We are fortunate to have a collection of essays that approach this baffling and charming book from different perspectives and disciplines: anthropology, ethnobotany, the visual arts, literature, history, queerness and ecology. These essays reveal that El Monte is more than a text, it is a journey filled with new beginnings."

—Alan West-Durán, author of Afro-Cuban Religions and the Arts: A Dog Has Four Legs But Takes One Path

“Vibrant, daring, and deeply grounded, El Monte’s New Itineraries: Afrodiasporic Spirituality in the Contemporary Caribbean reimagines Lydia Cabrera’s work for our time. Moving across literature, ethnography, and visual culture, the essays uncover how Cabrera’s El Monte continues to breathe through the Caribbean’s art, spirituality, and politics. This collection proves that Cabrera’s forest of symbols is still very much alive and more relevant than ever."

—Mabel Cuesta, associate professor, University of Houston

El Monte's New Itineraries is the first book fully devoted to the study of Cuban author and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954), one of the most influential books in Caribbean cultural history. Highly referenced, if understudied, El Monte is a comprehensive work that intertwines ethnobotany, popular orality, and Afro-Cuban traditions. Its pages have enjoyed a transnational influence, enriching domains such as ethnography, politics, theater, and even science fiction literature in the Caribbean, and the knowledge contained in it lies at the heart of Afrodiasporic spirituality and ethnomedicinal practices across Hispanic Caribbean cultures and beyond.

ALBERTO SOSA-CABANAS is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Hampton University. His academic work on the intersections between racism and cultural production has received numerous awards and recognitions, including fellowship support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ), the Tinker Foundation, and the Cuban Research Institute (FIU). His essays can be found in the journals Revista Iberoamericana, Cuban Studies, and Decimonónica. He is the editor of the volume Reading Cuba, Discurso Literario y Geografía Transcultural (2018).

Critical Caribbean Studies

Free Up Yuhself

Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque

Edited by Nikoli A. Attai and Sue Ann Barratt

Free Up Yuhself explores and theorizes what it means to embody and be empowered by the chaos of transgression, evaluating the implications for people who destabilize the Caribbean region’s dominant gender and sexuality politics within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. This book examines how people actively utilize the carnivalesque—spaces of festivity and places of excitement, the extraordinary, the ritualistic—to confront, negotiate, disrupt, and transgress normative trends, boundaries, and perspectives in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. This book is particularly concerned with the ways that Caribbean people contest sexual and gendered expectations through their bodily performances across regional and diasporic festival spaces. Through illustrative, analytical, evaluative, and reflective chapters, the collection contemplates the themes of freedom, belonging, acceptance, and recognition as these affect the experience of people’s sense of being. The authors reflect on “freeing up” as a contentious politics, understanding that people have the capacity to enact their freedom through transgressive movements and performances that persistently grapple with notions of respectability, agency, empowerment, disruption, and the meanings and consequences of their varied social and political locations.

NIKOLI A. ATTAI is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2023).

SUE ANN BARRATT is a lecturer in the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. She is the author of Dougla in the 21st Century: Adding to the Mix (2021).

Critical Caribbean Studies

May 12, 2026

192 Pages • 6 x 9 • 7 B-W images

9781978846609 • Paperback • $34.95

Rutgers Short

Caribbean Studies • Cultural Studies

Additional print format

9781978846616 • Hardcover • $120.00

Rutgers Super Short

June 9, 2026

Called to Care?

Health Care Work, Burnout, and the

Cindy L. Cain

Search for Meaningful Work

“The central tension in Called to Care? is that many of the things that healthcare workers find meaningful on the job are often at odds with what is mandated and rewarded at the organizational level. Cain’s research is timely, engaging, and sociologically rich.”

—Clare L. Stacey, author of The Caring Self: The Work Experiences of Home Care Aides

“Called to Care? is empirically and analytically unique in its investigation of burnout and its relationship to meaningful work in health care. In being attentive to care workers in a variety of occupational locations, Cain adds both breadth and depth to our understanding of burnout.”

—LaTonya J. Trotter, author of More Than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems They Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State

Health care workers are burned out. Health care leaders know that workers are burned out but do not yet have the right tools to fix the problem. Called to Care? argues that we can mitigate burnout by examining what is most meaningful about health care work. Using interviews and observation of a wide range of health care workers, Cain shows that workers who care for our most vulnerable adults find their work to be meaningful when they are able to connect to the work and make progress on something that matters. In most cases, these meaningful experiences are also consistent with better care for patients. And yet organizational practices, policy environments, and cultural meanings get in the way of meaningful work, creating burnout. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Called to Care? illustrates that workplaces can and should align meaningful work experiences with quality care for patients.

CINDY L. CAIN is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She contributed to From Crisis to Catastrophe: Care, COVID-19, and Pathways to Change (Rutgers University Press, 2023) and Caring on the Clock (Rutgers University Press, 2015). In addition to her scholarly work, Cain has experience as a care worker for children, adults at the end of life, and people with developmental disabilities.

Carework in a Changing World

Rutgers Super Short

April 14, 2026

238 Pages • 6¼ x 9¼ • 2 B-W images 9781978845893 • Paperback • $39.95 Rutgers Short Anthropology • Medicine

Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, Junko Kitanaka, and Eugene Raikhel

Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century provides readers with a comprehensive survey of topics, methodologies, and theories in the discipline, drawing on contributions from leading anthropologists around the world. As a discipline, medical anthropology provides situational analysis of health, disease, and disability to show how the experiences of medical experts, patients, and their broader communities are informed by their social and cultural contexts. Adopting a keywords-driven approach, Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century provides readers with an introduction to the concepts and approaches that have animated medical anthropology over the course of the twentieth century. Authors put these keywords into dialogue with their ethnographic and archival research to demonstrate how these concepts can be expanded to address contemporary phenomena related to health, disease, and disability. Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century provides newcomers to medical anthropology with a robust introduction to the discipline, while providing experienced readers a set of chapters that explore the discipline in novel and exciting ways.

MATTEW J. WOLF-MEYER is a professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He is the author of American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony, Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age, and The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Machine, and Modern American Life

JUNKO KITANAKA is a professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Human Sciences at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. Her book Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress won the American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize, among other awards.

EUGENE RAIKHEL is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development and director of the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic

Reproductive Boundaries

Psychosocial Care and Pregnancy in Switzerland

Edmée Ballif

Foreword by Lenore Manderson

"Beautifully written and provocative, Reproductive Boundaries offers a powerful new understanding of reproductive governance. It presents the first authoritative social critique of psychosocial prenatal care, showing how its promise of holistic support can also deepen surveillance over women’s lives. Through rich ethnographic detail, Ballif illuminates a striking paradox of care, challenging the boundaries of empathy, authority, and control in reproductive health."

—Lucy van de Wiel, author of Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging

"This book brings careful attention to the frequently overlooked topic of talk in reproduction. The focus is on how pregnant people’s experiences are shaped by talk about pregnancy—not only as it is, but also expectations about what it ought to be, at least according to the professionals charged with offering psychosocial pregnancy care and support. The practices and ideas presented here are both congruent with what has been observed and documented elsewhere and distinctive to the contemporary Swiss context, making this book another important contribution to the anthropology of pregnancy."

—Sallie Han, coauthor of Anthropology of Reproduction: The Basics

Reproductive Boundaries examines the shifting boundaries of prenatal care in Switzerland, focusing on the Pregnancy Support Center's innovative psychosocial model. By redefining the territory of care, the Center extends its reach beyond the medical domain, exemplifying the reproductivization of life, the increasing organization of various life aspects through a reproductive lens. The book explores how this approach challenges traditional borders between medical and psychosocial care, offering an alternative to Switzerland's heavily medicalized reproductive care. Through ethnographic insights into reproductive talk, it reveals how psychosocial advisors shift the boundaries of reproductive care, balancing support with broader state goals of reproductive governance. Set against Switzerland's history of stratified reproductive policies, the study critically examines how psychosocial care reshapes the landscape of pregnancy, raising questions about surveillance and evolving gender roles. This thought-provoking work invites readers to reconsider the limits and possibilities of care in a fragmented society.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.

EDMÉE BALLIF is a medical anthropologist and sociologist with a focus on public health domains. She is currently serving as a Swiss National Science Foundation senior postdoctoral researcher at the Department for Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich, as an honorary research fellow in the Social Research Institute, University College London, and in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University.

Medical Anthropology

March 10, 2026

186 Pages • 6 x 9 • 6 B-W figures 9781978840522 • Paperback • $29.95 Rutgers Short Anthropology

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Berg, Ulla D. 43

Bernabo, Laurena 22

Bishop, Ron 21

Blockett, Kimberly D. 40

Bogart, William T. 26

Cain, Cindy L. 48

Chakkalakal, Tess 40

Chennault, Ronald E. 25

Clingham, Greg 38

Cole, Jean Lee 39

Conley, Bridget 44

Cope, Kevin L 34 Di, Di

Sander

Saeid 26

Joel 13 Greenwald, Marilyn S. 1 Grisham, Therese 20 Gruesser, John Cullen 40

Christopher 38 Jelen, Sheila E. 10

Eric D. 39 LaPlaca, Laura 2

Joseph

SUBJECT

African American Studies 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 39, 40

American Studies 46

Anthology 16

Anthropology 44, 48, 49

Art 4, 19

Art and Aeshetics 34

Asian Studies 28, 45

Biography 1, 4, 7, 9, 13, 20, 38

Carribbean Studies 46, 47

Childhood Studies 28

Civil Rights 6

Comedy 2 Communications 28

Criminal Justice 44

Cultural Studies 24, 25, 36, 47

Current Affairs 6, 43

Current Events 12

Decorative Arts 37

MONTHS

FEBRUARY

Bassard • Sketches of Slave Life and From Slave Cabin to Pulpit 40

Blockett • Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels, and Labours of Mrs. Elaw 40

Chakkalakal • Imperium in Imperio 40

Cole • Freedom’s Witness 39

Ellis • Colonel’s Dream, The 39

Ernest • Hearts of Gold 39

Gardner • Appointed 39

Gruesser • Hindered Hand, The 40

Lamore • Abigail Field Mott’s The Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano 39

Moody • Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge 40

Thomas • Nickel and a Prayer, A 40

MARCH

Ballif • Reproductive Boundaries 49

Bander • Reading with Jane Austen 32

Bernabo • Black and Blue TV 22

Bogart • One Semester Away from a Crisis 26

Grisham • Ida Lupino, Director, 2nd edition 20

Lewis • Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America, 46

Prestia • Farewell to Russia 17

Scheidt • Inheritance 14

Shope • Campus Whisper Networks 27

Vine • Liu Shiming 4

Loy, Benjamin 32

Lutz, Raechel 29

Moody, Joycelyn K. 40 Moore, Fabienne 34

Naiden, Fred S. 15 Nelson, Alex 44 Över, Defne 23

Ozymy, Joshua 43

Parascandola, Louis J. 16

Polansky, Susan G. 33

Prestia, Nikolai 17

Rubalcava, Bianca Sofia 46

Scheible, Ellen 31

Scheidt, Charlie 14

Scott, La-Toya L. 12

APRIL

Ozymy • Rivers on Fire and Corporate Liars 43 Sosa-Cabanas • El Monte’s New Itineraries 47 van der Merwe • We Are Not South African 25 Vena • No More Chainsaws 21 Vinson • Stop Saying

Studies 31, 32, 33, 34

16, 17

Studies 22, 23, 24, 25, 39, 40

JUNE

Attai • Free Up Yuhself 47

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Celebrating Ninety Years 1936-2026

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“Inheritance is a heartfelt, urgent message about how the atrocities of the past continue to reverberate in the present...eloquently capturing the cost of survival and the ache of what’s left behind.”

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—Alexi Zentner, author of Copperhead: A Novel

Drawing from archival material and Jane Fonda’s own personal papers, journalist Marilyn Greenwald tells the story of Fonda’s devotion to movement politics, charting the evolution of her activism and the merging of her acting and producing with her advocacy.

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Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture

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This series is devoted to reprinting editions of important African American texts that either have fallen out of print or have failed to receive the attention they deserve.

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A century after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre decimated a thriving Black community, nine city council members are grappling with the Greenwood community’s ongoing fight for racial justice and repair. Zook shows how these elected officials have struggled to talk to one another, and to work together, in an effort to attain justice.