Bold Ideas, Essential Reading since 1936.

Rutgers University Press is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge for a wide range of readers. The Press reflects and extends the University’s core mission of research, instruction, and service. They enhance the work of their authors through exceptional publications that shape critical issues, spark debate, and enrich teaching. Core subjects include: film and media studies, sociology, anthropology, education, history, health, history of medicine, human rights, urban studies, criminal justice, Jewish studies, American studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, LGBTQ, Latino/a, Asian and African studies, as well as books about New York, New Jersey, and the region.

Rutgers also distributes books published by Bucknell University Press.

Showing 401-450 of 2,556 items.

Fourth of July, Asbury Park

A History of the Promised Land

Rutgers University Press

This revised and expanded edition of Daniel Wolff’s classic study of Asbury Park, New Jersey tells the tale of the city’s first 150 years, guiding us through the development of its lavish amusement parks and bandstands, the decay of its working-class neighborhoods, the spread of its racially-segregated ghettos, and the effects of recent gentrification.

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Love, Sex, Gender, and Superheroes

Rutgers University Press

With examples taken from both the Golden Ages of DC and Marvel comics, as well as more recent superhero comics, films, television, and merchandising, this study provides a comprehensive look at the contradictory messages the superhero genre sends about love, sexuality, and gender.

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Artificial Generation

Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity

Rutgers University Press

Artificial Generation: Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity looks at nineteenth-century literary representation and film theory, arguing that the depth of amalgamation that occurred within literary representation during this era is a key aesthetic tradition that continues to inform movies and contemporary culture today.
 

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Whither College Sports

Amateurism, Athlete Safety, and Academic Integrity

Rutgers University Press

This book lays out the starkly different paths that college sports reform can follow and what the ramifications will be on the athletes and on the institutions in which they are enrolled.
 

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Village Ties

Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh

Rutgers University Press

Village Ties argues that grassroots women’s mobilization programs can empower poor women to challenge oppressive informal institutions – the rules of the game – that govern relationships between actors in the rural global South. By exploring the activities of women who belong to Polli Shomaj, an initiative of the development organization BRAC, Village Ties challenges stereotypes of poor Muslim women as backward, subservient, oppressed, and in need of saving.

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Soccer in Mind

A Thinking Fan's Guide to the Global Game

Rutgers University Press

Soccer in Mind provides a thinking fan’s guide to the world’s most popular game, viewing it from sociological, psychological, anthropological, and economic angles. While it considers soccer cultures across the globe, this book also analyzes what makes U.S. soccer culture special, including its embrace of the women’s game.

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Near Human

Border Zones of Species, Life, and Belonging

Rutgers University Press

Near Human is an ethnography of research piglets in biomedical experiments and premature human infants in clinical care in Denmark. Drawing on fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based science labs, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen redirects the question of "what it means" to be human to "what it takes" to be human and to forge a nation.

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Comics and the Origins of Manga

A Revisionist History

Rutgers University Press

Comics and the Origins of Manga challenges the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from traditional Japanese art, and reveals how Japanese cartoonists in the 1920s and 1930s instead developed modern manga out of translations of foreign comic strips like Bringing Up Father, Happy Hooligan, and Felix the Cat.

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Neo-Burlesque

Striptease as Transformation

Rutgers University Press

Lynn Sally offers an inside look at the history, culture, and philosophy of New York’s neo-burlesque scene. Through detailed profiles of iconic neo-burlesque performers. this book makes the case for understanding neo-burlesque as a new sexual revolution. Raising important questions about what feminism looks like, Neo-Burlesque celebrates a revolutionary performing art and participatory culture whose acts have political reverberations, both onstage and off.

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Whitewashing the Movies

Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture

Rutgers University Press

Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular attention of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Including movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Aloha, media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian Americans. The purpose of this book is to theorize the popularly used concept of “whitewashing” in stories that subjectify White identities at the expense of Asian/American stories and characters.

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Triumph over Containment

American Film in the 1950s

Rutgers University Press

Triumph Over Containment offers an uncompromising look at some of the greatest films and directors of the 1950s, from household names like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick to lesser-known iconoclasts like Samuel Fuller and Ida Lupino. It scours a variety of different genres to find pockets of resistance to the repressive and oppressive norms of Cold War culture.

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Nothing Is Impossible

America's Reconciliation with Vietnam

By Ted Osius; Foreword by John Kerry
Rutgers University Press

Ted Osius, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam from 2014-17, offers a vivid first-hand account of the various forms of diplomacy that brought about the reconciliation between two former enemies and helped bring new prosperity to Vietnam. With a foreword by former Secretary of State John Kerry, Nothing is Impossible tells an inspiring story of how international diplomacy can create a better world.

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No Real Choice

How Culture and Politics Matter for Reproductive Autonomy

Rutgers University Press

Based on candid, in-depth interviews with women who considered but did not obtain an abortion, No Real Choice analyzes the structural obstacles to abortion and the cultural ideologies that try to persuade women not to choose abortion. It illustrates how real reproductive choice is denied, for whom, and at what cost.

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King of Hearts

Drag Kings in the American South

Rutgers University Press

King of Hearts shows how drag king performers are thriving in an unlikely location: Southern Bible Belt states like Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. It offers a groundbreaking look at a subculture that presents a subversion of gender norms while also providing a vital lifeline for non-gender-conforming Southerners.

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Global Dynamics of Shi'a Marriages

Religion, Gender, and Belonging

Rutgers University Press

This edited volume brings together contributions of authors who engage with the marriages of Twelver Shi'a Muslims in Iran, Pakistan, Oman, Indonesia, Norway, and the Netherlands. With the wide geographical spread, the book offers the first comparative study of the diverse ways in which Shi'a Muslims enter into marriage.

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Global Dynamics of Shi'a Marriages

Religion, Gender, and Belonging

Rutgers University Press

This edited volume brings together contributions of authors who engage with the marriages of Twelver Shi'a Muslims in Iran, Pakistan, Oman, Indonesia, Norway, and the Netherlands. With the wide geographical spread, the book offers the first comparative study of the diverse ways in which Shi'a Muslims enter into marriage.

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Creolized Sexualities

Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean

Rutgers University Press

By showing how a wide, and surprising, range of Caribbean writers have contributed to the crafting of a supple and inclusive erotic repertoire across the second half of the twentieth century, the readings in this book aim to demonstrate that a recognition of creolized and pluralized sexualities already exists within the literary imagination.

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Changes in Care

Aging, Migration, and Social Class in West Africa

Rutgers University Press

As Africa’s population ages, the inadequacy of kin care becomes more visible. In Ghana, older people and their allies are developing fragile initiatives and programs beyond the norm of kin care. Changes in Care examines aging in Ghana as a way of understanding the unevenness of social change more widely.
 

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Aging in a Changing World

Older New Zealanders and Contemporary Multiculturalism

Rutgers University Press

Aging in a Changing World challenges simplified images of old people as racist, nostalgic, and resistant to change – stereotypes that have only grown more prevalent with the Brexit vote and the 2016 election of Donald Trump. This book takes a deep, nuanced look at the experiences of older people who, while “aging in place,” have been profoundly impacted by global population movement and the dramatic development of modern multiculturalism around them.

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The First Fifteen

How Asian American Women Became Federal Judges

Rutgers University Press

This book tells the stories of the first fifteen Asian women appointed to federal judgeships. In a candid series of interviews, these descendants of a Chinese garment worker, Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, Vietnamese refugees, and penniless Indian immigrants reflect on both the personal and professional experiences that culminated in this distinguished position.

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Unleaded

How Changing Our Gasoline Changed Everything

Rutgers University Press

Combining environmental history, sociology, and neuroscience, Carrie Nielsen tells the story of how crusading scientists and activists convinced the U.S. government to ban lead additives in leaded gasoline, explores how lead exposure affects the developing brains of children, and reveals how many poor communities and minority communities of color still have face dangerously high lead levels of exposure to lead.

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The Audacity of a Kiss

Love, Art, and Liberation

Rutgers University Press

Leslie Cohen and her partner Beth Suskin served as models for the iconic sculpture “Gay Liberation.” In this evocative memoir, Cohen tells the story of a love that has lasted for over fifty years and recounts her quest to build gay and feminist oases in New York, including the groundbreaking women’s nightclub Sahara.

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Rape by the Numbers

Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence

Rutgers University Press

Rape by the Numbers explores scientists’ approaches to studying rape over more than forty years in the United States and Canada. In addition to investigating how scientists come to know the scope, causes, and consequences of rape, this book delves into the politics of rape research. Scholars who study rape often face a range of social pressures and resource constraints, including some that are unique to feminized and politicized fields of inquiry. Collectively, these matters have far-reaching consequences.

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Precarious Democracy

Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil

Rutgers University Press

Precarious Democracy collects powerful and intimate political ethnographic writing on Brazil’s pivotal years, 2013-19, from the nation’s megacities to rural Amazonia. The volume demonstrates the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provides crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history.
 

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Movie-Made Jews

An American Tradition

Rutgers University Press

Movie-Made Jews focuses on American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation, and through unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book demonstrates how movies make Jews. 
 

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Junctures in Women's Leadership: Health Care and Public Health

Rutgers University Press

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Health Care and Public Health offers an eclectic compilation of case studies of women leaders in public health and health care over nearly 150 years. Extraordinarily relevant to current public discourse, topics include: the COVID-19 pandemic, health disparities, disease prevention and the Affordable Care Act. Their leadership lessons can be applied to a broad array of disciplines.

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Junctures in Women's Leadership: Health Care and Public Health

Rutgers University Press

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Health Care and Public Health offers an eclectic compilation of case studies of women leaders in public health and health care over nearly 150 years. Extraordinarily relevant to current public discourse, topics include: the COVID-19 pandemic, health disparities, disease prevention and the Affordable Care Act. Their leadership lessons can be applied to a broad array of disciplines.

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Jewish Childhood in Kraków

A Microhistory of the Holocaust

Rutgers University Press

Jewish Childhood in Kraków plumbs the decisions and behaviors of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Author Joanna Sliwa illuminates the complex relations between Jews and non-Jews in response to the Holocaust in Kraków to understand the past and to reflect on the experiences of young people during humanitarian crises.

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Free Spirit

A Biography of Mason Welch Gross

Rutgers University Press

This biography explores how Mason Welch Gross helped reshape Rutgers University from a sleepy college into a world-renowned public research university, while steering it through the tumult of the Red Scare, civil rights era, and the Vietnam War by taking principled stands in favor of both racial equality and academic freedom.

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Everyday Violence

The Public Harassment of Women and LGBTQ People

Rutgers University Press

In Everyday Violence, Simone Kolysh analyzes interviews with initiators and recipients of catcalling and LGBTQ-directed aggression and recasts public harassment as everyday violence. They argue that gender and sexuality, shaped by race, class, and space, are violent processes reproduced through these interactions and demand an end to this pervasive social problem.

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Broadcasting Hollywood

The Struggle over Feature Films on Early TV

Rutgers University Press

Broadcasting Hollywood uses extensive archival research to analyze the tensions and synergies between the film and television industries in the early years of television. It draws parallels to today and the introduction of digital media to highlight how history can play a key role in helping media industry scholars and practitioners understand and navigate contemporary industrial phenomena.
 

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Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time

Rutgers University Press

This book demonstrates the material, political, and aesthetic dimensions of Pan-Caribbean literary discourse in magazine texts by Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, George Lamming, Derek Walcott and their contemporaries. Thus far, the canonical centrality of literary magazines to Caribbean literature, politics, and social theory has been obscured. Up against the global book industry, Caribbean literary magazines have waged a guerrilla pursuit for the terms of Caribbean representation.

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Very Special Episodes

Televising Industrial and Social Change

Rutgers University Press

Very Special Episodes explores various examples of the “very special episode” to chart the history of American television and its self-identified status as an arbiter of culture. Through the study of this unique television format, this anthology traces the history of television’s engagement with many of the most important political, aesthetic, economic, and social movements that continue to challenge our society today.

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Very Special Episodes

Televising Industrial and Social Change

Rutgers University Press

Very Special Episodes explores various examples of the “very special episode” to chart the history of American television and its self-identified status as an arbiter of culture. Through the study of this unique television format, this anthology traces the history of television’s engagement with many of the most important political, aesthetic, economic, and social movements that continue to challenge our society today.

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Ties That Enable

Community Solidarity for People Living with Serious Mental Health Problems

Rutgers University Press

Communities are the primary source of social solidarity, and given the diversity of communities, solutions to the problems faced by individuals living with severe mental health problems must start with community level initiatives. “Ties that Enable” examines the role of a faith-based community group in providing a sense of place and belonging as well as reinforcing a valued social identity.

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The Reimagined PhD

Navigating 21st Century Humanities Education

Rutgers University Press

Long seen as proving grounds for professors, PhD programs have begun to shed this singular sense of mission. The Reimagined PhD normalizes the multiple career paths open to PhD students, while providing practical advice geared to help students, faculty, and administrators incorporate professional skills into graduate training, build career networks, and prepare PhDs for a range of careers.

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Star Wars Multiverse

Rutgers University Press

Drawing from a full range of Star Wars media, including comics, television, children’s books, and fan films, Carmelo Esterrich explores how these stories set in a galaxy far far away reflect issues that hit closer to home on such topics as authoritarianism, colonialism, xenophobia, sexuality, and gender norms.

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Special Admission

How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes

Rutgers University Press

Special Admission contradicts the national belief that college sports provide an avenue for upward mobility. Kirsten Hextrum reveals the dynamic relationship between the state, elite groups, private entities, educational institutions, and athletic organizations that concentrate opportunities in white suburban communities. Thus, college sports allow white, middle-class athletes to accelerate their advantages through admission to elite universities.

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Robin and the Making of American Adolescence

Rutgers University Press

Holy adolescence, Batman! This book offers the first character history and analysis of the most famous superhero sidekick, Robin. It partners up comics studies and adolescent studies as a new Dynamic Duo, revealing the Boy (and sometimes Girl!) Wonder as a complex figure through whom mainstream culture has addressed anxieties about American teens.
 

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Movie Minorities

Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema

Rutgers University Press

Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea’s increasingly transnational motion picture output, and today films about political prisoners, undocumented workers, and people with disabilities attract mainstream attention. Movie Minorities offers the first English-language study of Korean cinema’s role in helping to galvanize activist social movements across these and other identity-based categories.

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Micro Media Industries

Hmong American Media Innovation in the Diaspora

Rutgers University Press

Micro Media Industries explores the media of Hmong Americans, showing how an extremely small population can maintain a robust and thriving media ecology in spite of resource limitations and an inability to scale up. It argues that micro media industries provide models of media innovation that can counter the increasing power of mainstream media.
 
 
 

 
 

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Memories before the State

Postwar Peru and the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion

Rutgers University Press

Memories before the State examines the discussions and debates surrounding the creation of the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion, a national museum in Peru that memorializes the country’s internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. Joseph P. Feldman analyzes forms of authority that emerge as an official institution seeks to incorporate and manage diverse perspectives on recent violence.

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Indigenous Peoples Rise Up

The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism

Rutgers University Press

Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism illustrates the impact of social media in expanding the nature of Indigenous communities and social movements. Social media has bridged distance, time, and nation states to mobilize Indigenous peoples to build coalitions across the globe and to stand in solidarity with one another. Including examples like Idle No More in Canada, Australian Recognise!, and social media campaigns to maintain Maori language, Indigenous Peoples Rise Up serves as one of the first studies of Indigenous social media use and activism. 
 

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Embracing Age

How Catholic Nuns Became Models of Aging Well

Rutgers University Press

Embracing Age reveals that aging is not only a biological process, but is also shaped by what the process of growing older means to us. By examining Catholic nuns, a group that experiences positive health outcomes in older age, Anna I. Corwin reveals the connections between culture, language, and the experience of aging.

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U.S. Power in International Higher Education

Edited by Jenny J. Lee
Rutgers University Press

U.S. Power in International Higher Education demonstrates the advantage that the United States has in international higher education by presenting broad trends as well as in-depth accounts about how power is evident across a range of international activities.

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U.S. Power in International Higher Education

Edited by Jenny J. Lee
Rutgers University Press

U.S. Power in International Higher Education demonstrates the advantage that the United States has in international higher education by presenting broad trends as well as in-depth accounts about how power is evident across a range of international activities.

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The Red Thread

The Passaic Textile Strike

Rutgers University Press

This book tells the story of how the Passaic textile strike, the first time that the Communist Party led a mass workers’ struggle in the United States, captured the nation’s imagination, and came to symbolize the struggle of workers throughout the country when the labor movement as a whole was in decline during the conservative, pro-business 1920s. Although the strike was defeated, many of the methods and tactics of the Passaic strike presaged the struggles for industrial unions a decade later during the Great Depression.

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The Philadelphia Irish

Nation, Culture, and the Rise of a Gaelic Public Sphere

Rutgers University Press

This monograph describes the flowering of the Irish American community and the 1890s growth of a Gaelic public sphere in Philadelphia, a movement inspired by the cultural awakening in native Ireland, transplanted in Philadelphia’s robust Irish community. The Philadelphia Irish embraced this export of cultural nationalism, reveled in Gaelic symbols, and endorsed the Gaelic language, political nationalism, Celtic paramilitarism, Gaelic sport and a broad ethnic culture.

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The Cinema of Rithy Panh

Everything Has a Soul

Rutgers University Press

The essays in this groundbreaking collection examine how celebrated Cambodian director Rithy Panh counters the abstraction of mass violence with a  cinema anchored in the body, the physical trace, the direct testimony, and the living landscape. They explore his unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.”

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The Cinema of Rithy Panh

Everything Has a Soul

Rutgers University Press

The essays in this groundbreaking collection examine how celebrated Cambodian director Rithy Panh counters the abstraction of mass violence with a  cinema anchored in the body, the physical trace, the direct testimony, and the living landscape. They explore his unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.”

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