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.

The Pope in Poland Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 344
ISBN: 9780822945987
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Illustrations: 25 b&w
Description:
John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in over 500 years, and the first Slavic pontiff in history. Shortly after his election to the papacy in 1978, he launched a series of visits to his native Poland, then in the midst of dramatic social changes that heralded the end of Communism. In this groundbreaking book, James Ramon Felak carefully examines the Pope’s first four visits to his homeland in June of 1979, 1983, 1987, and 1991 in the late Communist and immediate post-Communist period.
The Islands Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
ISBN: 9780822966265
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Series: Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Description:
In this collection of interconnected stories, the beautiful and ravaging forces of sea and land collide with the forces of human nature, through isolation and family, love and loss, madness and revelation. The stories follow the lives of two sisters and the people who come and go in their lives, much like the tides. Dominated by the tragic loss of a third sister at a young age, their family spirals out of control.
The Body Wars Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822966241
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Description:
What would it take to be home in one’s body, to walk around the world as oneself, knowing the pain within and without us? Jan Beatty boldly answers that question by making a fire map of the body. These roiling poems smack into walls of meditation, only to slide down the smooth concrete into the flatline of joy.
American Dinosaur Abroad Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822966524
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Illustrations: 56 b&w
Description:
In early July 1899, an excavation team of paleontologists sponsored by Andrew Carnegie discovered the fossil remains in Wyoming of what was then the longest and largest dinosaur on record. Named after its benefactor, the Diplodocus carnegii—or Dippy, as it’s known today—was shipped to Pittsburgh and later mounted and unveiled at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1907. Carnegie’s pursuit of dinosaurs in the American West and the ensuing dinomania of the late nineteenth century coincided with his broader political ambitions to establish a lasting world peace and avoid further international conflict.
Poemas del Amor/Love Poems Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780822966258
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Description:
Eight years before Sylvia Plath published Ariel, the Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño released Poemas del Amor, a collection of confessional, passionate poetry dedicated to the novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. Both of her own merit and as part of the Uruguayan writers group the Generation of ’45—which included Onetti, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, and Ida Vitale - Vilariño is an essential South American poet, and part of a long tradition of Uruguayan women poets. Vilariño and Onetti’s love affair is one of the most famous in South American literature.
Neoliberalism on the Ground Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 448
ISBN: 9780822946014
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Illustrations: 90 b&w
Description:
Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant paradigm in politics but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of architecture and urbanism in geographically variable yet interconnected processes of neoliberal transformation across scales—from China, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia.
Identity in a Secular Age Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822946281
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Series: Science, Values, and the Public
Illustrations: 21 b&w
Description:
Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually think about evolutionary science, let alone the many and varied ways in which it might relate to individual belief?
Germany's Urban Frontiers Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822946410
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Illustrations: 18 b&w
Description:
In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany’s many growing cities. Germany’s Urban Frontiers is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared.
Earnest, Earnest? Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 62
ISBN: 9780822966302
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Description:
In Earnest, Earnest?, the speaker, Eleanor, writes postcards to her on-again-off-again lover, Earnest. The fact that her lover’s name is Earnest and that their relationship is fraught, raises questions of sincerity and irony, and whether both can be present at the same time.
Be Holding Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780822966234
Pub Date: 28 Mar 2021
Description:
Winner of PEN America Jean Stein Award Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Be Holding connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other.
Science and Eccentricity Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822966333
Pub Date: 09 Mar 2021
Description:
The concept of eccentricity was central to how people in the nineteenth century understood their world. This monograph is the first scholarly history of eccentricity. Carroll explores how discourses of eccentricity were established to make sense of individuals who did not seem to fit within an increasingly organized social and economic order.

Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840-1910

Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822966395
Pub Date: 02 Mar 2021
Description:
Victorian culture was characterized by a proliferation of shows and exhibitions. These were encouraged by the development of new sciences and technologies, together with changes in transportation, education and leisure patterns. The essays in this collection look at exhibitions and their influence in terms of location, technology and ideology.
City of Lake and Prairie Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822966739
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2021
Series: Pittsburgh Hist Urban Environment
Description:
Known as the Windy City and the Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago has earned a more apt sobriquet - City of Lake and Prairie - with this compelling, innovative, and deeply researched environmental history. Sitting at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, and on the eastern edge of the tallgrass prairies that fill much of the North American interior, early residents in the land that Chicago now occupies enjoyed natural advantages, economic opportunities, and global connections over centuries, from the Native Americans who first inhabited the region to the urban dwellers who built a metropolis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one millennium ended and a new one began, these same features sparked a distinctive Midwestern environmentalism aimed at preserving local ecosystems.
Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770-1830 Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780822966678
Pub Date: 28 Feb 2021
Description:
Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770-1830 is a historical study examining the religious culture of Irish immigrants in the early years of America. Despite fractious relations among competing sects, many immigrants shared a vision of a renewed Ireland in which their versions of Presbyterianism could flourish free from the domination of landlords and established church. In the process, they created the institutional foundations for western Pennsylvanian Presbyterian churches.
The Extraction State Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
ISBN: 9780822966760
Pub Date: 02 Feb 2021
Illustrations: 57 b&w illustrations
Description:
The history of the United States of America is also the history of the energy sector. Natural gas provides the fuel that allows us to heat our homes in winter and cool them in summer with the touch of a button or turn of a dial - when the industry runs smoothly. From the oil crisis of the 1970s to the fall of Enron and the California electricity crisis at the turn of the century to contemporary issues of hydraulic fracking, poorly conceived government policies have sometimes left us shivering, stranded, or with significantly lighter wallets.
Fearful Vassals Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9780822946199
Pub Date: 05 Jan 2021
Illustrations: 1 b&w
Description:
Following the creation of the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in 1776, the elites of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Montevideo turned time and again to the Spanish crown for intercession, mediation, and support to maintain their privileged position during the tumultuous years before the May Revolution of 1810. Their loyalty was in part a result of the social status, political opportunities, and economic benefits that produced their privileged style of life. But of greater importance were the various internal and external factors that threatened their privileges, including inter-group rivalries, the presence of subversive ideas linked to the French Revolution, growing numbers of black slaves who engaged in various forms of resistance, indigenous groups who blocked the exploitation of the viceroyalty’s resources, Portuguese interlopers, and British imperial ambitions that culminated with the invasions of the viceroyalty in 1806 and 1807.