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.

Defiant Geographies Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 238
ISBN: 9780822946007
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Series: Illuminations
Illustrations: 37 b&w
Description:
Defiant Geographies examines the destruction of a poor community in the center of Rio de Janeiro to make way for Brazil’s first international mega-event. As the country celebrated the centenary of its independence, its postabolition whitening ideology took on material form in the urban development project that staged Latin America’s first World’s Fair. The book explores official efforts to reorganize space that equated modernization with racial progress.
Conscript Nation Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822946021
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Illustrations: 10 b&w
Description:
Military service in Bolivia has long been compulsory for young men. This service plays an important role in defining identity, citizenship, masculinity, state formation, and civil-military relations in twentieth-century Bolivia. The project of obligatory military service originated as part of an attempt to restrict the power of indigenous communities after the 1899 civil war.
Architecture of Good Behavior Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822945734
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Illustrations: 85 b&w
Description:
Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.” Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion - which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing - architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs.
A Pioneer of Connection Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822945956
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Illustrations: 9 b&w
Description:
Sir Oliver Lodge was a polymathic scientific figure who linked the Victorian Age with the Second World War, a reassuring figure of continuity across his long life and career. A physicist and spiritualist, inventor and educator, author and authority, he was one of the most famous public figures of British science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A pioneer in the invention of wireless communication and later of radio broadcasting, he was foundational for twentieth-century media technology and a tireless communicator who wrote upon and debated many of the pressing interests of the day in the sciences and far beyond.
A Mighty Capital Under Threat Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822946106
Pub Date: 30 Sep 2020
Illustrations: 10 maps
Description:
Demographically, nineteenth-century London, or what Victorians called the “new Rome,” first equaled, then superseded its ancient ancestor. By the mid-eighteenth century, the British capital had already developed into a global city. Sustained by its enormous empire, between 1800 and the First World War London ballooned in population and land area.
Race and Modern Architecture Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 448
ISBN: 9780822966593
Pub Date: 28 Jul 2020
Description:
Although race - a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination - has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism.
The Bukharan Crisis Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9780822945970
Pub Date: 02 Jun 2020
Illustrations: 28 b&w
Description:
In the first half of the eighteenth century, Central Asia’s Bukharan Khanate descended into a crisis from which it would not recover. Bukharans suffered failed harvests and famine, a severe fiscal downturn, invasions from the north and the south, rebellion, and then revolution. To date, efforts to identify the cause of this crisis have focused on the assumption that the region became isolated from early modern globalizing trends.
Rising Subjects Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822946120
Pub Date: 26 May 2020
Description:
Rising Subjects explores the change of the public sphere in Russian Poland during the 1905 Revolution. The 1905 Revolution was one of the few bottom-up political transformations and general democratizations in Polish history. It was a popular rebellion fostering political participation of the working class.
Environment and Urbanization in Modern Italy Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 246
ISBN: 9780822945932
Pub Date: 12 May 2020
Illustrations: 64 b&w
Description:
From the second half of the 1940s, when postwar reconstruction began in Italy, there were three notable driving forces of environmental change: the uncontrollable process of urban drift, fueled by considerable migratory flows from the countryside and southern regions toward the cities where large-scale productive activities were beginning to amass; unruly industrial development, which was tolerated since it was seen as the necessary tribute to be paid to progress and modernization; and mass consumption. In his fourth book, Federico Paolini presents a series of essays ranging from the uses of natural resources, to environmental problems caused by means of transport, to issues concerning environmental politics and the dynamics of the environment movement. Paolini concludes the book with a forecast about the environmental problems that will emerge in the public debate of the twenty-first century.
Bring Now the Angels Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822966074
Pub Date: 14 Apr 2020
Description:
This collection juxtaposes text from Google Search autocomplete with the intimate language of prayer. Corporate jargon co-exists with the incantatory and ancient ghazal form. Ahmed’s second book of poetry explores the terrain of loss - of a beloved family member, of human dignity & potential, of the earth as it stands, of hope.
Itineraries of Expertise Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 366
ISBN: 9780822945963
Pub Date: 17 Mar 2020
Illustrations: 22 b&w
Description:
Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day.
Cuban Studies 49 Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9780822945871
Pub Date: 03 Mar 2020
Series: Cuban Studies
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. Cuban Studies 49 includes dossiers on gender and feminism, economy, and history of education.
Motor City Green Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 246
ISBN: 9780822945727
Pub Date: 03 Mar 2020
Illustrations: 43 b&w
Description:
Motor City Green is a history of green spaces in metropolitan Detroit from the late nineteenth- to early twenty-first century. The book focuses primarily on the history of gardens and parks in the city of Detroit and its suburbs in southeast Michigan. Cialdella argues Detroit residents used green space to address problems created by the city’s industrial rise and decline, and racial segregation and economic inequality.
Bonfire Opera Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
ISBN: 9780822966050
Pub Date: 25 Feb 2020
Description:
Sometimes the most compelling landscapes are the ones where worlds collide: where a desert meets the sea, a civilization, no-man’s land. Here in Bonfire Opera, grief and Eros grapple in the same domain. A bullet-hole through the heart, a house full of ripe persimmons, a ghost in a garden.
Imperial Liquor Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822966067
Pub Date: 25 Feb 2020
Description:
Imperial Liquor is a chronicle of melancholy, a reaction to the monotony of racism. These poems concern loneliness, fear, fatigue, rage, and love; they hold fatherhood held against the vulnerability of the black male body, aging, and urban decay. Part remembrance, part swan song for the Compton, California of the 1980s, Johnson examines the limitations of romance to heal broken relationships or rebuild a broken city.
In My Unknowing Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 60
ISBN: 9780822966159
Pub Date: 25 Feb 2020
Description:
In his new poetry collection, Chard deNiord explores the paradoxical nature of unknowing.