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.

Nature and the Iron Curtain Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780822945451
Pub Date: 28 May 2019
Illustrations: 2 b&w line art
Description:
In Nature and the Iron Curtain, the authors contrast communist and capitalist countries with respect to their environmental politics in the context of the Cold War. Its chapters draw from archives across Europe and the U.S.
Open Invitation, The Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780822965749
Pub Date: 28 May 2019
Series: Illuminations
Illustrations: 28 b&w interspersed
Description:
The Open Invitation explores the relationship between prefigurative politics and activist video. Schiwy analyzes activist videos from the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca, the Zapatista’s Other Campaign, as well as collaborative and community video from the Yucatán. Schiwy argues that transnational activist videos and community videos in indigenous languages reveal collaborations and that their political impact cannot be grasped through the concept of the public sphere.
Regenerating Dixie Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822945642
Pub Date: 21 May 2019
Illustrations: 16 b&w photos, 2 line art
Description:
Regenerating Dixie is the first book that traces the electrification of the US South from the 1880s to the 1970s. It emphasizes that electricity was not solely the result of technological innovation or federal intervention. Instead, it was a multifaceted process that influenced, and was influenced by, environmental alterations, political machinations, business practices, and social matters.
Pale Horse Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 152
ISBN: 9780822965701
Pub Date: 15 May 2019
Description:
Translation of a Russian novel, providing a fictionalized account of the assassination of grand duke Sergei Alexandrovich, written by the leader of the terrorist cell who actually organized the real murder.
Unintended Affinities Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822965718
Pub Date: 14 May 2019
Illustrations: 2 maps
Description:
Unintended Affinities examines the ways in which German and Polish historians of the nineteenth-century regarded the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The book parallels how historians approached the old Reich and the Commonwealth within the framework of their national history. Kożuchowski analyzes how German and Polish nationalistic historians, who played central roles in propagandizing a glorious past that justified a centralized modern state, struggled with how to portray the very decentralized and multi-ethnic empires that preceded their time.
Drugs on the Page Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822945628
Pub Date: 14 May 2019
Illustrations: 15
Description:
In the early modern Atlantic World, pharmacopoeias—official lists of medicaments and medicinal preparations published by municipal, national, or imperial governments—organized the world of healing goods, giving rise to new and valuable medical commodities such as cinchona bark, guaiacum, and ipecac. Pharmacopoeias and related texts, developed by governments and official medical bodies as a means to standardize therapeutic practice, were particularly important to scientific and colonial enterprises. They served, in part, as tools for making sense of encounters with a diversity of peoples, places, and things provoked by the commercial and colonial expansion of early modern Europe.
Making an Urban Public Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 416
ISBN: 9780822945505
Pub Date: 14 May 2019
Description:
Written as a social history of urbanization and popular politics, this book reinserts “the public” and “the city” into current debates about citizenship, urban development, state regulation, and modernity in the turn of the century Mexico. Rooted in thousands of pages of written correspondence between city residents and local authorities, mostly with the city council of Morelia, the rhetoric and arguments of resident and city council dialogues often highlighted a person’s or group’s contributions to the public good, effectively positioning petitioners as deserving and contributing members of the urban public. Making an Urban Public tells the story of how Morelia’s residents—particular those from popular groups and poor circumstances—claimed (and often gained) basic rights to the city, including the right to both participate in and benefit from the city’s public spaces; its consumer and popular cultures; its modernized infrastructure and services; its rhetorical promises around good government and effective policing; its dense networks of community; and its countless opportunities for negotiating to forward one’s agenda, and its urban promise for a better life.
Book in Movement, The Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780822965879
Pub Date: 07 May 2019
Series: Illuminations
Description:
Over the past two decades, Latin America has seen an explosion of experiments with autonomy, as people across the continent express their refusal to be absorbed by the logic and order of neoliberalism. The autonomous movements of the twenty-first century are marked by an unprecedented degree of interconnection, through their use of digital tools and their insistence on the importance of producing knowledge about their practices through strategies of self-representation and grassroots theorization. The Book in Movement explores the reinvention of a specific form of media: the print book.
Dictator Dilemma, The Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822965732
Pub Date: 07 May 2019
Description:
The Dictator Dilemma tells the story of US bilateral relations with the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989). Tyvela focuses on how and why that diplomatic relationship changed during the Cold War from cooperation, based on mutual opposition to communism, to conflict, based on clashing expectations concerning democratic reforms and human rights. The policy debates by officials in Washington and in Asunción brought out a tension that has defined US diplomacy for more than a century: how can the United States partner with tyrants while credibly proclaiming to advance a democratic mission in the world?
Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822945659
Pub Date: 07 May 2019
Series: Illuminations
Description:
Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism explores the central role of narrative journalism in the formation of national identities in Latin America, and the concomitant role the genre had in the consolidation of the idea of Latin America as a supra-national entity. This work discusses the impact that the form had in the creation of an original Latin American literature during six historical moments. Beginning in the 1840s and ending in the 1970s, Calvi connects the evolution of literary journalism with the consolidation of Latin America’s literary sphere, the professional practice of journalism, the development of the modern mass media, and the establishment of nation-states in the region.
American Dinosaur Abroad Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822945574
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2019
Illustrations: 56
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.
Correspondence of John Tyndall, Volume 6, The Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 600
ISBN: 9780822945338
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2019
Series: The Correspondence of John Tyndall
Description:
This sixth volume of Tyndall's correspondence contains 302 letters covering a period of twenty-eight months (1856-1859). It begins shortly after Tyndall returned from his first glacier research in the Alps and follows him as he experimented and lectured on physics in central London at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI), visited friends, joined London’s fashionable social circles, published and reviewed scientific articles, corresponded with fellow men of science on a wide range of topics, and developed his theories about the structure and movement of glaciers. Importantly, volume 6 includes Tyndall’s major expeditions to the Alps and also documents some of his most dangerous mountaineering exploits.
Daughter of the Cold War Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 292
ISBN: 9780822965893
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2019
Illustrations: 38 b&w Illustrations
Description:
Grace Kennan Warnecke's memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball team, Grace eventually found her way out from under the shadows of others to forge a dynamic career of her own.Born in Latvia, Grace lived in seven countries and spoke five languages before the age of eleven.
Dictator's Dreamscape Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 408
ISBN: 9780822945468
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2019
Illustrations: 112 b&w photos
Description:
Joseph Hartman focuses on the public works campaign of Cuban president, and later dictator, Gerardo Machado. Political histories often condemn Machado as a US-puppet dictator, overthrown in a labor revolt and popular revolution in 1933. Architectural histories tend to catalogue his regime’s public works as derivatives of US and European models.
Spilled and Gone Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822965725
Pub Date: 16 Apr 2019
Description:
Spilled and Gone, Jessica Greenbaum's third collection marries the world through metaphor so that a serrated knife on its back is as harmless as "the ocean on a shiny day," and two crossed daisies in Emily Dickinson's herbarium "might double as the logo /for a roving band of pacifists."At heart, the poems themselves seek peace through close observation's associative power to reveal cohering relationships and meaning within the 21st century-and during its dark turn. In the everyday tally of "the good against the violence" the speaker asks, "why can't the line around the block on the free night/ at the museum stand for everything, why can't the shriek /of the girls in summer waves .
Restless Ilan Stavans, The Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 128
ISBN: 9780822965855
Pub Date: 16 Apr 2019
Series: Latinx and Latin American Profiles
Description:
This is the first book-length study of one of the most prominent and prolific Latino academics, Ilan Stavans. He has written extensively on Latino culture, Jewish culture, dictionaries, immigration, language, Spanglish, soccer, translation, travel, selfies, and God. The Restless Ilan Stavans surveys his interests, achievements, and flaws while he is still in the midst of an extraordinarily productive career.