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: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822966012
Pub Date: 24 Sep 2019
Series: Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Description:
The 14 stories of The Dogs of Detroit each focus on grief and its many strange permutations. This grief alternately devolves into violence, silence, solitude, and utter isolation. In some cases, grief drives the stories as a strong, reactionary force, and yet in other stories, that grief evolves quietly over long stretches of time.
Many of the stories also use grief as a prism to explore the beguiling bonds within families. The stories span a variety of geographies, both urban and rural, often considering collisions between the two.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780822945789
Pub Date: 24 Sep 2019
Illustrations: 30 b&w illustrations, 11 color plates in a gallery
Description:
The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. From the 1940s to the 1980s, expositions in the United States and around the world, from Brussels to Osaka to Brisbane, mirrored Cold War culture in a variety of ways, and also played an active role in shaping it.
This volume illustrates the cultural change and strain spurred by the Cold War, a disruptive period of scientific and technological progress that ignited growing concern over the impact of such progress on the environment and humanistic and spiritual values. Through the lens of world’s fairs, contributors across disciplines offer an integrated exploration of the US–USSR rivalry from a global perspective and in the context of broader social and cultural phenomena—faith and religion, gender and family relations, urbanization and urban planning, fashion, modernization, and national identity—all of which were fundamentally reshaped by tensions and anxieties of the Atomic Age.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 246
ISBN: 9780822945796
Pub Date: 24 Sep 2019
Description:
The commodification of science—often identified with commercialization, or the selling of expertise and research results and the “capitalization of knowledge” in academia and beyond—has been investigated as a threat to the autonomy of science and academic culture and criticized for undermining the social responsibility of modern science. In From Commodification to the Common Good, Hans Radder revisits the commodification of the sciences from a philosophical perspective to focus instead on a potential alternative, the notion of public-interest science. Scientific knowledge, he argues, constitutes a common good only if it serves those affected by the issues at stake, irrespective of commercial gain.
Scrutinizing the theory and practices of scientific and technological patenting, Radder challenges the legitimacy of commercial monopolies and the private appropriation and exploitation of research results. His book invites us to reevaluate established laws and to question doctrines and practices that may impede or even prohibit scientific research and social progress so that we might achieve real and significant transformations in service of the common good.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 70
ISBN: 9780822965954
Pub Date: 24 Sep 2019
Description:
Ringer approaches womanhood from two directions: an examination of ways that women’s identities are tied to domestic spaces, like homes, cars, grocery stores, and daycare centers; and a consideration of physical, sexual, and political violence against women, both historically and in the present day. Lehmann’s poems look outward, and go beyond cataloguing trespasses against women by biting back against patriarchal systems of oppression, and against perpetrators of violence against women. Many poems in Ringer are ecopoetical, functioning in a “junk” or “sad” pastoral mode, inhabiting abandoned, forgotten, and sometimes impoverished landscapes of rural America.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822945529
Pub Date: 17 Sep 2019
Illustrations: 21 b&w illustrations
Description:
Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked to marshal allies and sway public opinion—through newspapers, periodicals, popular books, exhibitions, and encyclopaedias—they exposed disagreements over how the discipline of astronomy should be organized and how it should establish acceptable conventions of discourse.
News from Mars provides a new account of this extraordinary episode in the history of astronomy, revealing how major transformations in astronomical practice across Britain and America were inextricably tied up with popular scientific culture and a transatlantic news economy that enabled knowledge to travel. As Joshua Nall argues, astronomers were journalists, too, eliding practice with communication in consequential ways. As writers and editors, they played a pivotal role in the emergence of a “new astronomy” dedicated to the study of the physical constitution and life history of celestial objects, blurring harsh distinctions between those who produced esoteric knowledge and those who disseminated it.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780822945826
Pub Date: 17 Sep 2019
Description:
Crime and insecurity are top public policy concerns in Latin America. Political leaders offer tough-on-crime solutions that include increased policing and punishments, and decreased civilian oversight. These solutions, while apparently supported by public opinion, sit in opposition to both criminological research on crime control and human rights commitments.
Moreover, many political and civil society actors disagree with such rhetoric and policies. In Tough on Crime, Bonner explores why some voices and some constructions of public opinion come to dominate public debate. Drawing on a comparative analysis of Argentina and Chile, based on over 190 in-depth interviews, and engaging the Euro-American literature on punitive populism, this book argues that a neoliberal media system and the resulting everyday practices used by journalists, state, and civil actors are central to explaining the dominance of tough-on-crime discourse.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 176
ISBN: 9780822945833
Pub Date: 17 Sep 2019
Series: Illuminations
Description:
Gabriela Polit Dueñas analyzes the work of five narrative journalists from three countries. Marcela Turati, Daniela Rea, and Sandra Rodriguez from Mexico, Patricia Nieto from Colombia, and María Eugenia Ludueña from Argentina produce compelling literary works, but also work under dangerous, intense conditions. What drives and shapes their stories are their affective responses to the events and people they cover.
The book offers an insightful analysis of the emotional challenges, the stress and traumatic conditions journalists face when reporting on the region’s most pressing problems. It combines ethnographic observations of the journalists’ work, textual analysis, and a theoretical reflection on the ethical dilemmas journalists confront on a daily basis. Unwanted Witnesses puts forward a necessary discussion about the place contemporary journalists occupy in the field of production, and how the risks they run speak directly about the limits of our democracies.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9780822945888
Pub Date: 17 Sep 2019
Illustrations: 15 b/w halftones
Description:
Women at Work presents the field of rhetorical studies with fifteen chapters that center on gender, rhetoric, and work in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Feminist scholars explore women’s labor evangelism in the textile industry, the rhetorical constructions of leadership within women’s trade unions, the rhetorical branding of a twentieth-century female athlete, the labor activism of an African American blues singer, and the romantic, same-sex collaborations that supported pedagogical labor. Women at Work also introduces readers to rhetorical methods and approaches possible for the study of gender and work.
Contributors name and explore a specific rhetorical concern that animates their study and in so doing, readers learn about such concepts as professional proof, rhetorical failure, epideictic embodiment, rhetorics of care, and cross-racial coalition building.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 85
ISBN: 9780822965909
Pub Date: 10 Sep 2019
Description:
The Tenant of Fire is about Queens, NY—its history, public and personal, real and imagined. Many of the people who populate this book—Irish Catholics, Italian-Americans—were once considered ethnic but now fall wholly under the banner of white. And from their anxieties a man like Donald Trump emerges.
Born and raised in Queens, Trump is both the product and purveyor of a localized nativist politic.The young white speaker of these poems works to record his parents’ and neighbors’, both white and of color, and his own attempts at navigating a shifting landscape. In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, or the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or the firebombing of Malcolm X’s house, The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens, where now nearly two hundred languages are spoken, is viewed as a threat to national security.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822966005
Pub Date: 10 Sep 2019
Description:
In 1936, life on the road means sleeping on the bus or in hotels for blacks only. After finishing her tour with Nobel Sissel’s orchestra, nineteen-year-old Lena Horne is walking the last few blocks to her father’s hotel in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. She stops at a lemonade stand and meets a Lebanese American girl, Marie David.
Marie loves movies and adores Lena, and their chance meeting sparks a relationship that will intertwine their lives forever. Lena also meets Josiah Conner, a charismatic teenager who helps out at her father Teddy’s hotel. Josiah often skips school, dreams of being a Hollywood director, and has a crush on Lena. Although the three are linked by a determination to be somebody, issues of race, class, family, and education threaten to disrupt their lives and the bonds between them. Lena’s father wants her to settle down and give up show business, but she’s entranced by the music and culture of the Hill. It’s a mecca for jazz singers and musicians, and nightspots like the Crawford Grill attract crowds of blacks and whites. Lena table-hops with local jazzmen as her father chaperones her through the clubs where she‘ll later perform. Singing makes her feel alive, and to her father’s dismay, reviewers can’t get enough of her. Duke Ellington adores her, Billy Strayhorn can’t wait to meet her, and she becomes “all the rage” in clubs and Hollywood for her beauty and almost-whiteness. Her signature version of “Stormy Weather” makes her a legend. But after sitting around for years at MGM as the studio heads try to figure out what to do with her, she isn’t quite sure what she’s worth. Marie and Josiah follow Lena’s career in Hollywood and New York through movie magazines and the Pittsburgh Courier. Years pass until their lives are brought together again when Josiah is arrested for the murder of a white man. Marie and Lena decide they must get Josiah out of prison—whatever the personal cost.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822966036
Pub Date: 27 Aug 2019
Description:
Solid state physics, the study of the physical properties of solid matter, was the most populous subfield of Cold War American physics. Despite prolific contributions to consumer and medical technology, such as the transistor and magnetic resonance imaging, it garnered less professional prestige and public attention than nuclear and particle physics.Solid State Insurrection argues that solid state physics was essential to securing the vast social, political, and financial capital Cold War physics enjoyed in the twentieth century.
Solid state’s technological bent, and its challenge to the “pure science” ideal many physicists cherished, helped physics as a whole respond more readily to Cold War social, political, and economic pressures. Its research kept physics economically and technologically relevant, sustaining its cultural standing and policy influence long after the sheen of the Manhattan Project had faded. With this book, Joseph D. Martin brings a new perspective to some of the most enduring questions about the role of physics in American history.
Cuban Studies 48
Format: Hardback
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9780822945611
Pub Date: 02 Jul 2019
Illustrations: 28 b&w photos
Description:
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 376
ISBN: 9780822945598
Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019
Illustrations: 27 b&w illustrations, 19 color plates in a gallery
Description:
Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations covering Europe and North America and spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century, this volume breaks new ground by examining material histories of paper and the gendered worlds that made them. Contributors explore diverse uses of paper—from healing to phrenological analysis to model making to data processing—which often occurred in highly gendered, yet seemingly divergent spaces, such as laboratories and kitchens, court rooms and boutiques, ladies’ chambers and artisanal workshops, foundling houses and colonial hospitals, and college gymnasiums and state office buildings.
Together, they reveal how notions of masculinity and femininity became embedded in and expressed through the materials of daily life. Working with Paper uncovers the intricate negotiations of power and difference underlying epistemic practices, forging a material history of knowledge in which quotidian and scholarly practices are intimately linked.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822966081
Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019
Description:
Adolphe Quetelet was an influential astronomer and statistician whose controversial work inspired heated debate in European and American intellectual circles. In creating a science designed to explain the “average man,” he helped contribute to the idea of normal, most enduringly in his creation of the Quetelet Index, which came to be known as the Body Mass Index. Kevin Donnelly presents the first scholarly biography of Quetelet, exploring his contribution to quantitative reasoning, his place in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and his profound influence on the modern idea of average.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 536
ISBN: 9780822966111
Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019
Description:
The Life and Legend of James Wattoffers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting his inventions and ideas, and determined in pursuit of money and fame. A skilled and creative engineer, Watt was also a compulsive experimentalist drawn to natural philosophical inquiry, and a chemistry of heat underlay much of his work, including his steam engineering.
But Watt pursued the business of natural philosophy in a way characteristic of his roots in the Scottish “improving” tradition that was in tension with Enlightenment sensibilities. As Miller demonstrates, Watt’s accomplishments relied heavily on collaborations, not always acknowledged, with business partners, employees, philosophical friends, and, not least, his wives, children, and wider family. The legend created in his later years and “afterlife” claimed too much of nineteenth-century technology for Watt, but that legend was, and remains, a powerful cultural force.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822965800
Pub Date: 25 Jun 2019
Description:
Constellated When the atoms in my body return to stars They will not remember this five am out my window, neither the moor asleep on the horizon, nor, across her darkened hips, the scatters of bright yellow gorse.
