University of Pittsburgh Press
The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 308
ISBN: 9780822947141
Pub Date: 28 May 2022
Description:
Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet, it also happens at the grassroots level where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty.
Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and forced displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822966814
Pub Date: 28 May 2022
Description:
Calling from the Scaffold is a collection of poems about connecting and not connecting – or approaching the brink of connecting. It’s about paying tribute and salvaging and gratitude. The voices vary in their longings: we hear from men and women, the young and no longer young.
Nature often is there to help them out.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 292
ISBN: 9780822947103
Pub Date: 28 May 2022
Description:
Powerful narratives often describe Latin American nations as fundamentally mestizo. These narratives have hampered the acknowledgement of racism in the region, but recent multiculturalist reforms have increased recognition of Black and Indigenous identities and cultures. Multiculturalism may focus on identity and visibility and address more casual and social forms of racism, but can also distract attention from structural racism and racialized inequality, and constrain larger anti-racist initiatives.
Additionally, multiple understandings of how racism and anti-racism fit into projects of social transformation make racism a complex and multi-faceted issue. The essays in Against Racism examine actors in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico that move beyond recognition politics to address structural inequalities and material conflicts and build common ground with other marginalized groups. The organizations in this study advocate an approach to deep social structural transformation that is inclusive, fosters alliances, and is inspired by a radical imagination. "By approaching race through anti-racism, this exemplar of teamwork in social research charts a major innovation in thinking about race in Latin America and beyond. Interweaving themes, cases, and countries, race appears in social activism even when it is not named, and even when it is named it may not be the only factor building support and strategy." --David Lehmann, author of The Prism of Race: the Ideology and Politics of Affirmative Action in Brazil "This far-ranging volume, the product of a deep and expansive collaboration among scholars based in Latin America and the global North, with different racial identifications, and belonging to different generations . . . forces us to confront complex questions with no easy answers and will have a significant impact on how race, racism, and anti-racist movements are studied, not only in Latin America but also in other parts of the world." --Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University "With great prescience and precision, this book captures the emerging moment in Latin America, when multifaceted anti-racist organizing has come to the fore. The project's ambitious scope and collective character--four countries, more than a dozen researchers--uncovers a central analytical challenge, which opens onto the book's central contribution. . . . The authors offer a salutary reminder of the topic's immense complexity, yet always guided by the drive to imagine and work toward societies--to evoke Stuart Hall's memorable phrase--no longer structured in racial dominance." --Charles R. Hale, University of California, Santa Barbara
Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
ISBN: 9780822966807
Pub Date: 28 May 2022
Description:
Hello I Must Be Going, David Hernandez's fifth collection of poems, offers a unique take on poetry informed by works of art. With narrative and lyrical brushstrokes, Hernandez crafts vibrant landscapes that depict the chaos of the modern world and the beauty entwined within it.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822946373
Pub Date: 19 Apr 2022
Description:
Beyond the Lab and the Field analyzes infrastructures as intense sites of knowledge production in the Americas, Europe, and Asia since the late nineteenth century. Moving beyond classical places known for yielding scientific knowledge, chapters in this volume explore how the construction and maintenance of canals, highways, dams, irrigation schemes, the oil industry, and logistic networks intersected with the creation of know-how and expertise. Referred to by the authors as "scientific bonanzas," such intersections reveal opportunities for great wealth, but also distress and misfortune.
This volume explores how innovative technologies provided research opportunities for scientists and engineers, as they relied on expertise to operate, which resulted in enormous profits for some. But, like the history of any gold rush, the history of infrastructure also reveals how technologies of modernity transformed nature, disrupting communities and destroying the local environment. Focusing not on the victory march of science and technology but on ambivalent change, contributors consider the role of infrastructures for ecology, geology, archaeology, soil science, engineering, ethnography, heritage, and polar exploration. Together, they also examine largely overlooked perspectives on modernity: the reliance of infrastructure on knowledge, and infrastructures as places and occasions that inspired a greater understanding of the natural world and the technologically made environment.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 392
ISBN: 9780822966777
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2022
Description:
This is the story of a man who tried to resurrect the spirit of democratic life. He was born into a time of chaos and absurdity, and he took it as his fate to carry a candle into the night. This is his story and the story of many others, the writers, artists, actors, and philosophers who took it upon themselves to remember a tradition that had failed so miserably it had almost been forgotten.
Václav Havel (1936-2011), the famous Czech dissident, intellectual, and playwright, was there when a half million people came to Wenceslas Square to demand an end to Communism in 1989. Many came to hear him call for a free Czechoslovakia, for democratic elections, and a return to Europe. The demonstrators roared when he spoke. "Havel to the castle," they chanted - meaning Havel for president. And a few weeks later, Havel became a most unusual president. He was sometimes misunderstood and not always popular, but by the time of his death in 2011, the world recognized Havel as one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. Born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in Prague, Havel was the constant subject of attention and an artistic eccentric in a family of businessmen. A young Havel and his family were cast by the Communist takeover as class enemies. Havel traveled a dark road that, ironically, provided the experiences he needed to reconnect not only to his own "ground of being" but to the traditions of civic society. This biography is the story of Havel's inward journey in his underground years and thus the story of how Havel, the outsider, became the ultimate insider as president of the nation. In this intimate and sweeping portrayal of Havel, David Barton reveals the eccentricities of the last president of Czechoslovakia, and the first president of the Czech Republic.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780822946533
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2021
Illustrations: 85 b&w
Description:
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection, deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science - and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world.
Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media, from photography to oil painting. This volume reminds us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences, but rather fields that shared forms - manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries - and invest in the idea of the evolution of form.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780822946540
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2021
Illustrations: 40 b&w
Description:
From the beginning of the space age, scientists and engineers have worked on systems to help humans survive for the astounding 28,500 days (78 years) needed to reach another planet. They've imagined and tried to create a little piece of Earth in a bubble travelling through space, inside of which people could live for decades, centuries, or even millennia. Far Beyond the Moon tells the dramatic story of engineering efforts by astronauts and scientists to create artificial habitats for humans in orbiting space stations, as well as on journeys to Mars and beyond.
Along the way, David P. D. Munns and Kärin Nickelsen explore the often unglamorous but very real problem posed by long-term life support: How can we recycle biological wastes to create air, water, and even food in meticulously controlled artificial environments? Together, they draw attention to the unsung participants of the space program - the sanitary engineers, nutritionists, plant physiologists, bacteriologists, and algologists who created and tested artificial environments for space based on chemical technologies of life support - as well as the bioregenerative algae systems developed to reuse waste, water, and nutrients, so that we might cope with a space journey of not just a few days, but months, or more likely, years.
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780822946991
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2021
Series: Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize
Pages: 214
ISBN: 9780822967118
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Series: Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize
Description:
Winner of the Drue Heinz for Literature. Poised on the precipice of mystery and longing, each character in Now You Know It All is on the brink of discovery - and decision. Set in small-town North Carolina, or featuring eager Southerners venturing afar, these stories capture that crucial moment when someone’s path changes irrevocably.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780822946571
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2021
Illustrations: 50 b&w - 10 color plates
Description:
A room’s acoustic character seems at once the most technical and the most mystical of concerns. Since the early Enlightenment, European architects have systematically endeavored to represent and control the propagation of sound in large interior spaces. Their work has been informed by the science of sound but has also been entangled with debates on style, visualization techniques, performance practices, and the expansion of the listening public.
Echo’s Chambers explores how architectural experimentation from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for concepts of acoustic space that are widely embraced in contemporary culture. It focuses on the role of echo and reverberation in the architecture of Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and Le Corbusier, as well as the influential acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher, Richard Wagner, and Marshall McLuhan. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of media and auditory culture, Joseph L. Clarke reveals how architecture has impacted the ways we continue to listen to, talk about, and creatively manipulate sound in the physical environment.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822946236
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Series: Latinx and Latin American Profiles
Illustrations: 57 b&w
Description:
The City as Photographic Text offers the first comprehensive presentation of photography on São Paulo. But more than just a study of one city’s photographic legacy, this book is a manual for how to understand and talk about Latin American photography in general. Focusing on major figures and referencing widely available books of their work, David William Foster offers a unique analysis of how photographers have contributed to our understanding of the megalopolis São Paulo has become.
Eschewing a conventional historical approach, Foster explores how best to interpret visual urban life. In turn, by focusing interest on the photographic text and the ways in which it creates an interpretive meaning for the city, rather than rehearsing the circumstances under which the photographs were taken, this study provides a model for productive comment on urban photography as a project of visual meaning with important artistic attributes. As a unique entry in the inventory of scholarly writing on São Paulo, The City as Photographic Text adds to our understanding of the enormous cultural significance this city holds as a world-class urban center.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9780822947004
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Description:
Made Free and Thrown Open to the Public charts the history of public libraries and librarianship in Pennsylvania. Based on archival research at more than fifty libraries and historical societies, it describes a long progression from private, subscription-based associations to publicly-funded institutions, highlighting the dramatic period during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when libraries were “thrown open” to women, children, and the poor. Made Free explains how Pennsylvania’s physical and cultural geography, legal codes, and other unique features influenced the spread and development of libraries across the state.
It also highlights Pennsylvania libraries’ many contributions to the social fabric, especially during World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Most importantly of all, Made Free convincingly argues that Pennsylvania libraries have made their greatest strides when community activists and librarians, supported with state and local resources, have worked collaboratively.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780822966630
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Description:
The poems of My Wilderness often take place on the wooded hillside in Oregon where Maxine Scates has lived since the mid-1970s. They chronicle how the woods, which were once a refuge, have turned into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. These poems also engage her partner's threatening illness, the death of her closest friend, and the death, at age one hundred, of her mother, an indomitable figure who led Scates through a working-class childhood in Los Angeles fraught with domestic violence.
Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 206
ISBN: 9780822946984
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Description:
Between 1890 and 1893, Ignaty Potapenko published a number of works (including Not a Hero) in which he presented the Russian intelligentsia with a new role model, the “mediocre but commonsensical man” whose diligence and steady devotion to the improvement of society are depicted as being more productive than the reckless heroism of the regime’s most outspoken, and often violent, opponents. Not a Hero introduces the twenty-first-century reader to an important debate of the pre-revolutionary period, a debate that is still relevant today: how to bring about social change within an oppressive and ossified political system without resorting to violence.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 126
ISBN: 9780822966692
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Description:
Other Worlds is true to its title, from a look at our everyday joys and griefs as interpreted by the Mars of classic science fiction and the crazy domain of quantum physics; to studies of the many conflicting realities that America uneasily accommodates in time of pandemic and protests; to elegiac poems informed by the realms of memory, ghosts, and imagined afterlives. From a poem of one line to a sequence of twelve sections, from comic hijinks to despair, and from private revelation to public declaiming, this is a bravura performance by the only poet to have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award and who, at age seventy-three, is writing at the height of his powers.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822946694
Pub Date: 28 Dec 2021
Series: Pitt Illuminations
Description:
Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño's fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent these topics, Ryan F.
Long demonstrates that, when considered in tandem, they form the basis for a new innovative and critical approach. Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending Bolaño's constellation of texts. With close readings of a broad range of texts, from poetry written just after his arrival in Spain in the late 1970s to his posthumously published novels, Queer Exposures concludes that an emphasis on sexuality and photography is essential for understanding how Bolaño's texts function in dialogue with one another to elucidate and critique the interrelations of writing, visual representation, and power.
